It has been a while since I posted one of these potpourri posts. This late lazy wintery hunkered down at home Saturday seems like a perfect day to do just that.
Evernote is an app I use often, almost daily. Like Microsoft’s OneNote, it is a cloud-based storage for organizing and managing notes, tasks, and archiving any variety of digital items. I use it mostly for archiving. I love to clip and save articles for use in my online class discussions. I also clip and save articles of general interest. As you might expect, you can create folders, called Notebooks in Evernote, and tags to better organize things.
I also use Evernote for clipping finances. I store images of checks (yes, I still write checks on occasion), screen shots of e-banking transactions, and keeping track of tax-deductible donations. I have another Notebook, Obituaries, where I save the death notices and obituaries of family and friends. I tried using for notetaking but I really prefer the Leuchttrum 1917 and handwriting my notes using my favorite pens.
This version of potpourri features two articles I have clipped in a Notebook I have titled, Blog Ideas and Research. As I run across articles, blogs, new stories on topics that interest or intrigue me, I clip them into this notebook. Here is a taste of some of the items in that notebook that never became a theme of a post on their own.
Breast Milk Jewelry: I was thumbing through the Sunday New York Times on December 27, 2021. There was an article, ‘People Want Jewelry With Meaning’: How Breast Milk Became a Gem. It caught my eye and after a short read, I clipped it. The article highlighted a company in New Jersy, mammasliquidlove.com. Momma’s Liquid Love takes a mother’s breast milk and creates an opal-like stone that is set in a ring or pendant as a lasting memory of breast feeding their children. The jewelry looks very nice and might be a thoughtful memento for some women.
This article caught my eye because in my February 2005 letter, I wrote about novel new options for a final resting place for deceased family members which included: Have their ashes launched into space and having their ashes pressed into synthetic diamonds. Somehow, I related the two cremation ash examples to this idea of turning breast milk into jewelry. I was not alone, the article on making jewelry from breast milk referred to the option of turning cremation ashes into synthetic diamonds as well.
What is the demand for breast milk pendants or cremation ash solitaires? The only thing I could find was that 800-900 cremation ash diamonds were created by a Swiss company Algordanza. Algordanza not only presses ashes but as it turns out hair into diamonds. They require half a kilogram of ashes and charge ~$3,500 for a .3 kt rough cut diamond. The price varies with size and cut. Let’s assume the average transaction is $5,000. They reported in 2014 that they were making 800-900 of these diamonds a year. Rounding that up to 1,000 diamonds a year selling at $5,000 per diamond, a conservative guesstimate on their revenues from this business would be $5 million per year. Not bad at all.
Inventors who Regret their Inventions: In November of 2020, I clipped a bloggy bit from Mental Floss but offered up on Pocket Worthy titled 10 Inventors Who Came to Regret Their Creations. Of the ten, only two of them are noteworthy and both related to weapons.
With regard to the development of the atom bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Labs, said these words after the first test:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed... A few people cried... Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form, and says, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
The atom bomb was based on the theoretical research of Albert Einstein. He was a signatory on a letter of physicists to President Roosevelt at the onset of WWII encouraging him to fund research to develop the bomb. The pshysicists believed Germany was already working on it. Later Einstein said, “"Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would have never lifted a finger."
Mikhail Kalishnikov designed the AK-47 assault rifle for the Soviet Union. This simple relatively cheap weapon became the most popular assault rifle ever and thus responsible for more deaths than any other assault rifle. In a letter to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, he wrote, “I keep coming back to the same questions. If my rifle claimed people’s lives, can it be that I…, an Orthodox believer, am to blame for their deaths, even if they are my enemies?"
There are a lot more of examples of articles I have clipped that were interesting but did not become full blog post on their own. They are, however, perfect for this Potpourri category.
I shall have to do this again.
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