[Sca-cooks] OT OOP tedious process (was flax processing (was Bread labor))

Georgia Foster jo_foster81 at hotmail.com
Sun Nov 11 07:26:03 PST 2007


Bear stated : "One of his neighbors turned him into the cops for manufacturing drugs",

Any labor-intensive multi-day project can take on the appearance of drug manufacture to those unfamiliar with the intensity.

I once received a grant from the National Science Foundation under the EPSCoR program to research the concentrations of chromium diopside and pyrope garnets in a location suspected to contain diamonds.  The process involved taking a specified weight  quantity of ant hill, washing it to remove any organics, drying it to remove the water and then using a light table, sorting the little clear red and green rocks from the rest of the rocks, weighing the little red and little green rocks using a grain scale and converting grains to grams to determine percent by weight of the desired material from the spoil.  We processed one sample from each quarter mile of an eight mile by eight mile grid for 64 square miles.  That is 254 samples.

Here is the picture ... you have scattered a portion of ant hill sized rocks over a sheet of translucent white plexiglass that is lit from the underside.  Two of your research team lean over the improvised light table with tweezers picking out all the clear red and green ones.  You are sitting at a near by table with a double beam grain scale pouring something from a small glass vial into the man of the scale and entering the number in a little green book.  It is summer, so all the doors and windows are open.  The police show up.  One of the elderly neighbors reported suspicious activity, probably drug manufacture.  The first check came with all the attendant "please step away from the equipment and keep your hands where I can see them" festivities. The next few calls, they would just come bang on the screen and look through the door.  After the fourth or fifth call they just drove by and waved, so that they could say they checked.  I have no idea how many of the suspicious activity calls they actually received.  One of the police later asked to see what we were researching and we cheerfully showed him the map of where the samples were taken from and the percentages found at those locations.  He still smiles and waves every time I see him on patrol.

Cheers

Malkin
Otherhill
Artemisia




Jo (Georgia L.) Foster

Never knock on Death's door. Ring the doorbell and run ... he hates that.



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