North Dakota's Legacy Fund Deposits For July, 2016, Have Been Posted -- August 5, 2016

Link here. Through July 2016, total deposits were $3,573,621,493.

I track the Legacy Fund here. 

In the previous report:

• June, 2016: $3.8 billion. Schmidt said the Legacy Fund will hold $3.8 billion with the June transfer of $28.3 million.

I cannot explain the July, 2016, "total deposits were $3,573,621,493" vs the June, 2016, summary.

Perhaps The Bismarck Tribune will post an update.

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Mysteries of Terra Firma: The Age and Evolution Of The Earth

James Lawrence Powell

President and Director, LA County Museum of Natural History

c. 2001

I have some handwritten notes on the subject of radioactivity back at the house. I had always planned on transcribing but never got around to it, and probably never will.

Fortunately, it looks like this short book may provide some of the same details that I had in those notes from a different source.

Chapter 1: The Mill of Exquisite Workmanship

• May 5, 1904: Ernest Rutherford, McGill University, Montreal; addressed Royal Society of London
• transmutating atoms
• alchemy
• "radioactivity": coined by Madame Curie
• radioactivity set the stage for the atomic physics and quantum mechanics of the 20th century

Chapter 2: Strange Rays ("Beta Rays" and "Alpha Rays")

• French physicist Antoine-Henri Becquerel (1852 - 1908)
• his student was Marie Curie
• she and her husband discovered two previously unrecognized sources of "radioactivity" in pitchblende: one they named polonium, after native home, Poland; they other they named, radium
• Rutherford's thesis professor, J. J. Thomson; intrigued
• Rutherford called "negative rays," beta rays which turned out to be electrons discovered by J.J.
• it took half a century, but Rutherford discovered the nature of "alpha rays"
• 1898: using thorium, discovered the principle of "half-life"

Chapter 3: The End of the Debate (over the age of the earth)

• Enough for now.