I am now coming out of a short teaching experience in an international school in Italy. For a year I taught science and geography in their middle school. Today is my last day and while the kids are relaxing in their own way I am reflecting on a few things that this short experience has brought to my mind. Starting with the last one: all the kids, indiscriminately, relax using their mobile phones. One of my generation is immediately reminded of how we would have done, 45 years ago in middle school, to relax in an hour left free for leisure. I used to draw. Nobody had computers at home. Very rarely there were the first, now ridiculous, electronic games. I never had a game console in my entire life.
Author: Pasquale Robustini
The Irony in the Moving Iron
In 2005 I bought a wonderful Grado Prestige Gold moving iron cartridge, which I used for years on my turntable of the time, a Thorens TD165. I didn’t care much about alignment (maybe I used the TNT protractor at one point), I just screwed the cart on the headshell with no worries whatsoever about positioning the stylus tip, let alone VTA. I couldn’t wait to listen to the new cartridge that was replacing a Goldring Elan. I even scratched the gold-colored cartridge’s case with the knife I was using to tighten the screws, because I had just moved in with my girlfriend (now my wife) in our first house and I didn’t have any tools there yet. I could not imagine that that cartridge hid a secret gift…
Being who we really are
Not many of us are lucky enough to be who they really ar
e. The luckiest ones at least “know” who they really are even if they actually aren’t that. I’ve always admired people who made a life out of their passions. It takes a lot to achieve it, unless your passion is working for a bank or being a government employee: you study and work in order to get a job and you’re set. But what if you want to be, say, a painter? The entire world will tell you not to do it, you will be starving, you need at least a plan B. But the ones who keep on and succeed in doing this are the ones who did not listen…
Death bed
Many are aware that dinosaurs disappeared nearly 66 million years ago, after a major climate change that made their environments inhospitable. Most people know about the dinosaurs disappearance, but few know that what happened at the end of the Mesozoic era was actually a mass extinction. Well, maybe even fewer people know that some clues of what happened in that period have been first found in central Italy, close to Saint Francis’ hometown, near a small city in the Apennines called Gubbio. The story is about father and son, Louis Alvarez, a Nobel prize physicist, and Walter Alvarez, a renown American geologist at Berkeley with a love for Italy.
A guitar player in an old men’s band
We wanted to call ourselves the Colesterock, the Old Timers, the High Pressure, the Arythmics. But we are just the “Music Box”. And me, former geologist of an oil company, family man, now over half a century old, what am I doing here? I didn’t even dream about this anymore. Me in a rock band? That’s for teenagers! My guitar would have always been with me even if I rarely played it, so to remember the passion of my youth. But nothing more. I have other things to do now.
Famous last words…
The geology of Rome’s sampietrini
What’s so special about the “sampietrini”, those little square bricks typical of Rome’s old roads? The sampietrini have been used since the times of pope Sixtus V in the late 1500s but the name was invented later in 1725 after the new paving project of St. Peter’s square. “Hard as a sampietrino” is a common expression in Rome. Sampietrini are made of a hard and heavy volcanic rock. It is very interesting to a geologist: at first sight, you might confuse it with basalt; well, maybe a special kind of basalt. Actually, it is not correct to call it basalt. It is a rather rare rock around the world, although not in the Mediterranean area. But everything would be clearer if we knew more about the basalts themselves…