Culture

Prediction of the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar in December 2012 is considered a mistake of interpreters or a clever Indian joke. However, it is from this time point physicists find, for example, the change in the constant characteristics of the proton. It is easy to write off the inexplicable phenomenon to imperfect measurement technology, but one wants mystery. Especially since an amazing coincidence opened up - it was in the final year of the Mayan calendar that the world finally unraveled the secret of the unclouded azure of their religious artifacts.

In September 1819, the St. Petersburg Mineralogical Society received as a gift from the literary genius and universalist scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a part of his personal collection of minerals. Two batches, of 105 and 153 pieces, i.e., individual pieces of geological bodies, have been recorded as having been received. Among them are amethyst, rock crystal, chalcedony, augite, various kinds of granite, quartz rock, feldspars, and mica.

The Greek word άσβεστος [ásvestos] translates as ”unquenchable.” In this case, the main useful property of asbestos, a mineral of the silicate class, is its incombustibility. The exact explanation of the paradox is probably hidden in the asbestos papyruses of the priests of ancient Egypt, which have not yet been found, but there is a hint to the solution.

One of Gogol’s most bitter and brilliant jokes is in the name and patronymic of the classic ”little man,” the protagonist of his story The Overcoat. Akakia, as we know, was called by the Byzantines as the attribute of the ceremonial royal vestment - a silk roll of ashes. It was supposed to remind the first persons of the Orthodox Empire and other participants of the ceremonies of the perishable nature of the earthly blessings, the fatality of fate and the transience of life.

Mikhail Shvydkoy, a professor at Russia’s oldest technical university, said that today the fate of our country for centuries to come is being decided

The beginning of the end for the Invincible Armada and the harbinger of the end of Spain’s golden age was a sudden, violent storm in the Atlantic. At the end of May 1588 130 ships left Lisbon in the direction of the Channel to destroy the English fleet, but were forced to stand for a long repair in La Coruña in the north-west of the Pirine Peninsula.

The attempt to preserve an ”oasis” of pre-revolutionary monarchal life in the oldest building on Nevsky Prospect was doomed to failure. The Anichkov Palace is a less prestigious building than the Winter Palace. However, some pieces of furniture from the private apartments of Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III and mother of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II, were salvaged from the pawnshop and sold abroad in 1928. Their connection with mineralogy and mining helped.

The pre-revolutionary history of the Ural emeralds is a classic detective story. The stone itself encourages fraud and forgery. As for diamonds, there is a standard technique of evaluation with 10x magnification, but the quality of an emerald is defined by eye judging by its color hue and transparency. Sometimes it is not so easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. That is why there is such a wide price range: from $3 to $650 per gram.

One of the most desirable gifts for March 8 is jewelry, because as the song goes, ”diamonds are a girl’s best friend”. However, there are a lot of stones that are not inferior to them in beauty, and a few of them are even superior. One example is tourmaline, which at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was the most popular ”women’s” gemstone in China.

In August 1941 in Yelabuga, Russia; the life of Marina Tsvetaeva was cut short. Her biography and poems are well known to her admirers, but few know about the poet’s talisman, which became fatal for her… I wear his ring with a challenge. - Yes, in Eternity - wife, not on paper. - His excessively narrow face Like a sword. His mouth is silent, corners down, His eyebrows are painfully great. In his face tragically mingle Two ancient bloods.