Back a few decades, I was working in a program with a local college in the Middle East.
The name of the program for ExPats has the clever acronym of "IDEA" (hey, I said it was clever); which stands for "Inter-Departmental Educational Adjunct". It's interdepartmental because my particular specialty not only covers field geology but also paleontology and a bit of archeology thrown in for good measure. Everyone hopes to have a good IDEA...
ahem...
Well, we saddle up and head for the Dune Sea out in the west of the country, where the Precambrian, Cambrian, Silurian, Cretaceous, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene crop out and access is relatively easy and non-injurious.
Well, we caravan out, some 30 Land Cruisers, Nissan patrol, and the odd Mitsubishi Galloper strong. We all get our maps, compasses and split up into 5 or 6 special interest groups ("SIG's"); where each IDEA has his own GPS and LIDAR laser ranging apparatus. Reason being, that there are very few benchmarks out in the desert, and even those are constantly at the mercy of the shifting and ever-blowing sands.
Since we're split into groups and at any one time, ranging up to and including some 50 km2, when a real find is located, a device called the "DIME" (Digital-Interface Monitor Encoder) is attached and programmed into the GPS for location later; it is a digital sort of low-frequency transponder, developed from technology used by offshore drillers and jacket setters where benchmarks are even more transitory.
The way it works is rather simple. When something is to be marked for later retrieval, a series of wooden posts are pounded in a triangular manner around the find and the DIME is set, programmed with the GPS and attached to one or more of the posts.
That's the theory, at least.
Everything works well, especially all the hardened electronics and computer gizmos, but attaching the DIME to the stakes is the real problem. It can't be nailed, screwed or fastened with any sort of metal contrivance as that farkles the magnetic field and causes all sorts of goofy spurious signals. Zip ties don't last long in the heat and duct tape is right out. Many sites have been lost to the shifting sands this way.
Velcro doesn't work too well, as the sand fills the hooks of the receiving piece of velcro and soon renders it useless. String or fishing line work, but that's temporary (they melt). Glue or mastic are out as these are supposed to be temporary. Even plastic sleeves don't work due to the heat out
... keep reading on reddit ➡Recently, Joe has been under the slight suspicion that his wife is cheating on him. So, one day he comes home early from work, to his crap-shoot apartment on the eighth floor, and hears her scurrying around when he enters. Almost as if there's another person in the house. When he calls out her name she hollers back that she just ran into the shower. So he investigates the bedroom and encounters a shocking surprise... a pair of hands dangling from the other side of the window sill! Those of a grown man, hanging on for dear life. Infuriated at the sight of the man who's sleeping with his wife, Joe takes the bedside lamp and starts bashing the guy's fingers until he falls eight stories onto the sidewalk. Only he's still alive, writhing and broken. So Joe hauls the refrigerator from the kitchen out the window, sending it down onto the poor sucker, killing him instantly. Now the hysteria of the moment induces a fatal heart attack and Joe himself, dies. So now, as he's up at the pearly gates, St. Peter is telling all the incoming souls that in order to gain access into heaven, they need to provide a solid account of how they died. After hearing Joe's story, St. Peter allows him in. The next man in line says that he was tanning in the sun, drunk, on the roof of his apartment building when he fell off, only to catch hold of a window sill that could have saved his life, until a crazed bastard beat his fingers and threw a refrigerator onto him. St. peter tells him that he's a shoe-in. And when he asks the next guy in line how he ended up deceased, the guy replies, "...So I'm naked in a refrigerator, right?"
