In keeping with the policy of this blog, I’m going to wait until tomorrow to post the Robert Redford obits. By then, any corrections and additions should be in place and the final versions should be up.
Patricia Crowley, actress. Other credits include “Today’s F.B.I.”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “The Rockford Files”, “Columbo”, and the good “Hawaii Five-O”.
Patrick McGovern. His obit is relevant to my interests:
Bespectacled, bearded and more professorial in appearance than the Indiana Jones character that Harrison Ford played onscreen, Dr. McGovern used modern scientific methods, including multiple forms of spectrometry, to identify biomarkers in the residue in primitive drinking vessels.
“When analyzing something, I work from a minuscule amount of chemical, botanical and archaeological data,” he told National Geographic magazine in 2016. “I look for principal ingredients: Does it have a grain? A fruit? An herb?”
One of his discoveries, found in shards of pottery dating back 9,000 years to a Neolithic village in China, was believed to be the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world — a mix of fermented rice, honey and hawthorn fruit, a red berry.
Another was the world’s oldest grape wine, dating to 6,000-5,800 B.C. in Georgia’s South Caucasus region.
And from 157 bronze vessels left behind in the tomb of King Midas in Turkey, Dr. McGovern identified a beverage made of barley beer, grape wine and honey mead. Given the proximity of the drinkware to the king’s body, the concoction was probably passed around during his funerary feast, as at an Irish wake.
…
Dr. McGovern was sometimes asked which came first: bread or beer?
“You need food to exist,” he said. “But if you want to have a good time,” he added, “if you want social lubrication, if you want to up your sexual relations and so produce more children, then alcoholic beverages help.”
During my time at my long time employer making steel, I also worked in the lab. I did carbon/sulfur testing, O2 and N2 testing, and X-Ray analysis. One other thing that I did for a few months was running a Mass Spectrometer. We would dissolve samples in acid and then aspirate them into the flame of the machine, and using the computers, etc. would get a reading.
We only did this for trace elements and the results were in ppm.
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Just so you know, I ♥️ mass spectrometers.