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Aug 2020Re: German-English Mineralogical-Geological Dictionary?Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.While we're necromancing this old thread:"Federspalt" in this context is an old variant of "Fiederspalte" - tension gash (a kind of tectonic cleft or vein in a shear zone), usually appearing in arrays somewhat reminiscent of the plumage ("Gefieder") on a bird's wing.Trawling Wikimedia starting from ...
Dec 2019Re: Crossed eye steropicturesReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Mineral Photography.Beautiful!Inclusions in transparent crystals definitely benefit from being viewed in 3D.There's a bit of a brightness gradient in the background from left to right in this image - it's not yet distracting for me, but it should not be any stronger. Having a brightness jump and thus a visible edge in ...
Dec 2019Re: Crossed eye steropicturesReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Mineral Photography.Both pictures work fine for me regardless of arrangement - but then I've been dabbling in stereo photography for more than three decades and can fuse any reasonably well-aligned pair in an instant, whether crossed-eyes or parallel.Crossed-eye pairs like Volker's and Pavel's, as the name implies, ...
Aug 2019Re: Spelling and Grammar Errors on MindatReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.Use ... around formulas in mindat HTML-text fields, and then the ^ and #1-# type codes inside these f tags will do the right thing.
See the manual.
Cheers, Gerhard
Apr 2018Re: New Mindat PageReply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.Congratulations on a job well done!
Everything I've clicked on so far just... works as expected. That's impressive. If every major software upgrade everywhere was done this carefully, troubleshooting folks like me would be out of their day jobs. :-)
(OK, just spotting two small glitches after ...
Feb 2018Re: Why are there 2 "(Nieder)Mendigs" and 2 "Nickenichs" in the locality database?Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.As to why, this is explained on both of the Niedermendig pages: Because each of the three municipalities straddles the boundary of the Laach lake volcanic complex, and specimens from (say) Niedermendig may or may not come from within the complex, depending on the exact sublocality.
Of course, ...
Feb 2018Re: Tourmaline crystal chemistryReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Mineralogical Classification.Alfredo Petrov Wrote:
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> Uh oh, sounds like some specimens will need
> renaming ;))
tourmaline becomes tourmaline! Again! ;-)
...Just noticing that on the bosiite page in the free-form comment near the top, the parenthetical "(Y-site ...
Jan 2018Re: Hashemite main pageReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.While we're at it: In the first free-form comment on the page, after "One of three minerals with essential Ba and Cr," the word "by" should be replaced with "along with".
Cheers, Gerhard
Oct 2017Re: Dravite - Power's Farm, Pierrepont, St. Lawrence Co., New York, USAReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Photos.This may be a case where our species distinctions do not reflect that much of a real difference, and hinder understanding more than they help...
Summarizing several earlier threads:
It started with some 19th century specimens having been labelled (if not as Schorl) as Dravite simply because ...
Jun 2017Re: Strange behavior when opening a link to discussion topicReply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.You need to be logged in to view the individual talk page threads. (I understand this had been changed some months ago to plug a hole that used to be merrily exploited by spammers / spamware ...)
Cheers, Gerhard
Jun 2017Re: Blue Cu-mineral with possible heulandite?Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in Identity Help.To expand a little: The crystal shapes fit pentagonite but look wrong for cavansite, and the matrix - good thing Joel that you provided pictures of both! - is typical for one pentagonite paragenesis from the Wagholi Quarries.
Cheers, Gerhard
(who many years ago discovered mindat by googling ...
Jun 2017Re: Blue Cu-mineral with possible heulandite?Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in Identity Help.Pentagonite.
And it's been a while since the Indian subcontinent separated from Africa... :-)
Enjoy,
Gerhard
Jun 2017Re: 'Photos' entries on recent messagesReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.The Talk Pages still work fine for me... provided that I've logged in first.
After logging out or before logging in, I get redirected in circles like you do.
(Probably a feature to make spammers' lives a little harder...)
Hoping this helps,
Gerhard
Feb 2017Re: Help with old German label for Russian specimenReply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.I can't quite make out enough of the beginning of the second line to make the grammar fit together... not that it was quite right to begin with; the writer then goes on to treat Юговской завод as if it were a town name and to use the strange form "Permien" (which would become "Permia" ...
Mar 2017Exploring Crystal Lattices - 7: The Mother of all SilicatesPosted by Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Article
Feb 2017Exploring Crystal Lattices - 6: Holes for GiantsPosted by Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Article
Feb 2017Exploring Crystal Lattices - 5: A Skeleton with CleavagePosted by Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Article
Jan 2017Exploring Crystal Lattices - 4: Glides and ScrewsPosted by Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Article
Jan 2017Re: Exploring Crystal Lattices - 3: Taking Three as the Subject...Reply from Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Thank you Giuliano!
Yes, the fcc lattice and its higher-dimensional analogues crop up in a number of contexts - not always involving the three-dimensional space surrounding us.
Crystallography in eight or in 24 dimensions, now that would be something. Whether the chemistry would still work is ...
Jan 2017Exploring Crystal Lattices - 3: Taking Three as the Subject...Posted by Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Article
Jan 2017Exploring Crystal Lattices - 2: Enter the Model UniversePosted by Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Article
Jan 2017Exploring Crystal Lattices - 1: Starting SmallPosted by Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Article
Jan 2017Exploring Crystal Lattices: Introduction, Contents, and GlossaryPosted by Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Article
Jan 2017BARYTEPosted by Gerhard Niklasch in Photos.Wow!
That's a nice one, and a difficult one. Built by yourself? Well done.
Looking forward to a future mindat article about this and the other models!
Cheers, Gerhard
Jan 2017Formulas in articles break footnotesPosted by Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.I just spent an hour isolating what seems to be an obscure buglet in the mindat stylesheets...
Footnotes in articles work. Formulas in articles work. But footnotes break (and some other formatting gets messed up, notably end-of-sentence periods) as soon as there is even a single formula after a ...
Jan 2017Re: São Miguel Island, AzoresReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Localities.Wikipedia seems to agree that "São Miguel Island" is the proper English form of the name, whereas San Miguel Island would refer to an island in California.
Does the mindat locality hierarchy interlinkage handle non-ASCII characters gracefully?
If so, do managers have a way of bulk-adjusting ...
Jan 2017⚠654 imagesRe: The Nature ThreadReply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.Happy 2017 everyone!
...Lumpers and splitters trying to shift the terminology in one direction or the other; traditional species names beloved by collectors and vendors alike falling victim to modern high-tech lab analysis methods... sound familiar? Well, it all applies to the Cactaceae, ...
Dec 2016Re: Unobtainium definedReply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.(tu) :)-D :-D
Nov 2016Re: Label Help # 36Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in Identity Help.I'm leaning towards "Hamm, Westphalen" now, with the p pulled apart into two pieces as Tõnu Pani says (this possible reading hadn't occurred to me at first).
Which doesn't narrow it down any further geographically than already noted. Strontianite had been found in quite a number of quarries in ...
Nov 2016Re: Label Help # 36Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in Identity Help.Strontianite for the species, and then the second word is "Hamm" (name of a city), and I can't quite read the third which seems to start with "West-" (and then does not go on to say "-falen").
In terms of modern localities, this would put us more or less into Münsterland , where you'll find at ...
Sep 2016Re: Alternative Optical Strategy for observing mineral fluorescenceReply from Gerhard Niklasch in UV Minerals.The fluorescent response may be polarized for reasons of its own, quite independent of any polarization of the exciting UV radiation:
* It may come from a transition between electronic states / orbitals which are oriented in a particular way relative to the host crystal (and in general this is ...
Jan 2016Re: Baryte-BariteReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.I spell it with a Y, others don't - vive la différence, here's to variety, and to a Happy New Year 2016!
Cheers, Gerhard
Oct 2015Re: Mindat.org 15th Birthday Party at the Munich ShowReply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.I'll bring a bottle and something to nibble. :)-D
Cheers, Gerhard
Tomasz Praszkier wrote:
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> If someone would like to bring some food/snacks/drinks you are more than welcome!
Oct 2015Re: Bower Powers Black TourmalineReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.The particular sample studied by RRUFF mentioned by Rob is F-dominant at the on-axis site (55 atom %, see the caption of that photo), but these tourmalines are near the midpoint in this regard, too - so they may lie on either side, and this may even vary from one zone to another.
Enjoy,
Gerhard
Nov 2015Re: New section under development.Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.Cool! (tu)
After a first random walk through half a dozen entries: found that every question I could spontaneously think of is already answered.
Cheers, Gerhard
Sep 2015Re: New minerals approved by IMA CNMNC in June and July 2015Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in Mineralogical Classification.:)-D :)-D :)-D (tu)
Sep 2015Re: Epidote GroupReply from Gerhard Niklasch to an article.Hi Olav,
Excellent job! :)-D
Here are a few typos and other little things that caught my eye:
+ Zoisite section, last paragraph, delete extra full stop from ""uploaded to Mindat.."
+ Clinozoisite group, first paragraph, use charge superscripts consistently
(and some of these superscripts ...
Aug 2015Re: Caracoles districtReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.What about the list of minerals at the old Ag mine? What species are really known to have occurred there?
(For starters, I would rather doubt the 19th-century Herbertsmithite … :-S )
Cheers, Gerhard
Sep 2018Re: Olympus OM-D Em5 Mark II: High resolution shot modeReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Mineral Photography.For the benefit of English speakers who may be puzzled, Stephan is talking about motion of the sample / specimen.
(@Stephan, for your information, this is a "false friend": the English word "probe" means either "Sonde" or "Untersuchung" in German.)
Cheers, Gerhard
Jul 2015Re: Font size on messagesReply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.Seems something has changed in the forum (or phorum) stylesheets.
For those of us whose eyesight is past its best-before date, the new default is very hard to read. :-(
Cheers, Gerhard (off to look for a spare hand lens…)
Jul 2015Re: FluornatromicroliteReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Minerals.(Scratches head) I thought I had understood the dominant-valence rule…
So is there new research to justify singling out a particular trivalent cation to arrive at a charge-balanced end-member formula - e.g. some kind of superstructure ordering? Otherwise, looking at the (few) empirical ...
Jun 2015Re: The best mineral photos on mindat?Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in General.Wading through my old this-caught-my-eye notes and hitting the 3-images ceiling by Jan 2010:
Texture, reflective and still-transparent surface
Fluorescence illustrated
Enjoy,
Gerhard
Jun 2015Re: Self-collected?Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in General."Personally collected" works when the person is clear from the context, and has been suggested before in this forum.
I understand "self-collected", having seen and heard it often enough, but it still causes my English parser to do a double-take and backtrack for a few milliseconds (something ...
Apr 2015Re: Fluor-tsilaisite (IMA2012-044), publishedReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Mineralogical Classification.It seems a transcription error has crept into the empirical formula… Aren't there 1.2 or so Mn2+ missing at the Y site? And the sum for that site should be 3.00, not 6.00.
In fact, it should even be a bit more than 1.2 in order to have divalent cations dominate at the Y site, no…?
Cheers, ...
Jan 2015Re: FRL or TL?Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in Mineralogical Classification.Type locality pages (and their parents) were showing FRL instead of TL next to the species entries after the site upgrade, but that's one of the teething glitches that Jolyon has already swiftly fixed. :)-D
If you still see FRL where it looks out of place, try clearing the cache on that locality ...
Jan 2015Re: 2 different Rozna deposits in Czech Republic?Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.Thank you Sebastián for chiming in!
Yes, that's what I figured - the pegmatites, the one uranium deposit which was showing in two different places in the mindat location hierarchy, and the opal occurrence.
I have now moved to the pages for each of the six mines under the Rožná deposit, ...
Jan 2015Re: 2 different Rozna deposits in Czech Republic?Reply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.Good catch Vik!
It looks like someone, at one point, had moved an original "Rožná deposit, Vysočina Region,…" page to Rožná deposit, Žďár nad Sázavou, Vysočina Region,… but forgot to update its six child locations (mines) accordingly, so they're now half-orphaned, with the region ...
Jan 2015Re: stereo errorReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.Far or near sightedness is not very important here: regardless how the half-images are arranged, your eyes need to focus on the screen, just the same as with a simple 2D image.
The main limitation of non-crossed, side-by-side stereo pairs (putting the image for the left eye to the left of that ...
Feb 2015Re: Rosenbuschite from Norra Kärr = MosandriteReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.Fascinating - thanks for checking, Knut!
Still (playing devil's advocate), it's not conclusive proof that the fluorescing crystals must be R. and the non-fluorescing must be something else. It's just another hint, another puzzle piece falling into place on top of the visible-light ...
Feb 2015Re: Rosenbuschite from Norra Kärr = MosandriteReply from Gerhard Niklasch in Improving Mindat.org.Do the yellow ones fluoresce under SWUV, like the TL material does?
Asking because I have a couple of specimens with scattered, pale crystals in a dark matrix which I had received labelled as Rosenbuschite, and which show no detectable fluorescence under my lamp - so I had already filed them for ...
