Fear Factory

I could look at these all day. View the Whole Gallery of Fear Factory Photos

Moqui Marbles

The iron oxide concretions found in the Navajo Sandstone exhibit a wide variety of sizes and shapes. Their shape ranges from spheres to discs; buttons; spiked balls; cylindrical hollow pipe-like forms; and other odd shapes. Although many of these concretions are fused together like soap bubbles, many more also occur as isolated concretions, which range in diameter from the size of peas to baseballs. The surface of these spherical concretions can range from being very rough to quite smooth. Some of the concretions are grooved spheres with ridges around their circumference.^[4][5]

The abundant concretions found in the Navajo Sandstone consist of sandstone cemented together by hematite (Fe₂O₃), and goethite (FeOOH). The iron forming these concretions came from the breakdown of iron-bearing silicate mineralsby weathering to form iron oxide coatings on other grains. During later diagenesis of the Navajo Sandstone while deeply buried,reducing fluids, likely hydrocarbons, dissolved these coatings. When the reducing fluids containing dissolved iron mixed with oxidizing groundwater, they and the dissolved iron were oxidized. This caused the iron to precipitate out as hematite and goethite to form the innumerable concretions found in the Navajo Sandstone. Evidence suggests that microbial metabolism may have contributed to the formation of some of these concretions.^[12] These concretions are regarded as terrestrial analogues of the hematite spherules, called alternately Martian "blueberries" or more technicallyMartian spherules, which the Opportunity rover found at Meridiani Planum onMars.^[4][5]

Apache Rewrites to hide variables

I've been absolutely fighting with rewrites over the past week. Why do you want to know about rewrites? You can easily hide variables with it.

Example

 Let's say you want to hide a variable in a clean url. I want http://www.store.com/catfood.html instead of http://www.store.com/product.html?p=1234233

If you are dealing with apache servers then you'll be dealing with the .htaccess file. Here are the steps required to make that example happen.
Step 1: open .htaccesss. If you are on a linux server running Apache you should have one. If it isn't showing then it might be a hidden file. If you don't have an .htaccess file then you need to make one. It should be in the root of your public_html folder on your server.
Step 2: RewriteEngine On   #you need this bit of code to turn on Rewrites
Step 3: RewriteRule PATTERN SUBSTITUTION FLAG and example would look like this RewriteRule ^(.*)?\.html product.php?p=%1$1 [QSA] 

The Pattern is "^(.*)?\.html" which uses a regular expression to say Any characters before .html. So if someone types in toyota-camry.html it will take "toyota-camry" from the url - what it does with it is explained in the next part

The Substitution says "okay you have toyota-camry as a variable - we'll place that variable in your substitution and on the server we'll run product.php?p=toyota-camry. That means you with this rewrite we can obstruct the variable from view and the end user will just see the clean url. Pretty cool.
So this little .htaccess rewrite handles hiding the variable and give your site a clean looking URL. What this doesn't do is actually process the variable. If you are using PHP you'd need some $_GET methods to process the product id that is being passed to it. That is another lesson all together.

The Flag is [QSA].  There are lots of different flags, but what that flag means is "append query string from request to substituted URL".  This way you can add on additional query items to the newly formed URL.  Basically it means you could have catfood.html?t=wet and it would pass the varible properly without ignoring the variable.

Some other cool things you can do with rewrites:

• You are trying to create dynamic subdomains. Otherwise you'd have to setup each instance in the DNS record. (This one requires adding a wildcard A record on the DNS record)
•  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)\.exampleDomain\.com
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://exampleDomain.com/%1/$1 [L]
• You want to hide directories and file structure. http://www.domain.com/gallery.html instead of http://www.domain.com/pictures/gallery1/index.php
•  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule gallery.html$ pictures/gallery1/index.php [L]

Additional resources:

This is an absolutely fantastic resource by addedbytes Url rewriting for Beginners

Robert Berger 460 train watercolor

My newest watercolor. A fantastic watercolor if the steam engine 460 of the Pennsylvania line. Bob had some very realistic originals for sale at the Berea Craft festival July13,2013

Berea craft festival 2013

Prehistoric Indian Gorget - Brookville IN

Meteorite sliver. Sweden 800,000 YO

This fine specimen is an Octahedrite meteorite. It gets its' classification due to the crystal patterning of the iron in the meteorite. "Octahedrites are the most common structural class of iron meteorites. The structures occur because the meteoric iron has a certain Nickel concentration that leads to the exsolution of kamacite out of taenite while cooling." --view wikipedia This specific meteorite is probably a sliver from the Muonionalusta meteorite that struck northern Sweden around 800,000 years ago. Here is an awesome link about meteorites in the region, along with pictures of pieces being excavated.

Clay pipe conglomeration 1880s

Purchased in Metamora Indiana Fall 2012 - The pipe is originally from Point Pleasant Ohio. It was discovered in a creek in Clermont County Ohio. Here is a paper over the pipes from that region

Trilobite

Purchased in San Antonio May 2013.