- The Giddiness of Time (streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com)
Although deep time manifests itself in many ways, it resonates more strongly in some locations. One such place is in downtown Seattle at the southwest corner of 2nd Avenue and Marion Street. There you will find a rather lovely art deco structure, the Exchange Building, originally built to house the city’s commodity exchanges. Alas, it opened in 1930 and the Depression prevented the building from meeting the owners’ great expectations. (Talk about bad timing!) But they did choose wisely with their building stone, the Morton Gneiss of Minnesota.
- Rubidium (Wikipedia)
Rubidium is a chemical element; it has symbol Rb and atomic number 37. It is a very soft, whitish-grey solid in the alkali metal group, similar to potassium and caesium. Rubidium is the first alkali metal in the group to have a density higher than water. On Earth, natural rubidium comprises two isotopes: 72% is a stable isotope 85Rb, and 28% is slightly radioactive 87Rb, with a half-life of 48.8 billion years – more than three times as long as the estimated age of the universe.
