Way to go Gloria and Phil............. Tell'em .. You do so much to help us all !!! We all are entitled by being human with and occasional error but this is ridiculous. Carole Cargill ----- Original Message ----- From: Gloria<mailto:gjs11054@cox.net> To: RIGENWEB-L@rootsweb.com<mailto:RIGENWEB-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2006 11:50 AM Subject: [RIGENWEB] Explanation from Dr. Phil I hope this resolves the issue. Mr. Brock Way should email Phil privately if he would like to discuss this further with him. ----- Original Message ----- From: Phil Albro Greetings. I am the biochemist who minored in geology and organic chemistry, who for 26 years did research at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, followed by 10 years as Technical Director and internal consultant for an environmental analysis company. The one who has been teaching environmental chemistry at the graduate school level for the past 19 years. No secret, you can determine all that with a Google search. I am the one who wrote the article on how using shaving cream to make tombstone inscriptions easy to read causes them to weather more rapidly in climates where the temperature drops below freezing in the Wintertime. And so it does. If you smear shaving cream on the highly polished surface of a granite stone marker, it can be rinsed off completely. If you smear it in the roughened, carved out inscription of a granite (or other) stone marker, it will not rinse off completely with water. It will soak into the myriad of surface cracks. The emollients will retard its evaporation, but not prevent its freezing and thawing. This accelerates the natural edge-crumbling that eventually makes exposed gravestone markers illegible. If you rinse with water to get a sample for analysis, you won't find anything. That is what I just said above - you can not rinse it completely from the cracks with water. To get a sample for analysis, wet a pre-cleaned cotton ball with high-purity methyl alcohol and press it in the inscription region. The alcohol will break the capillary attraction and surface tension that are holding the water + emollients in the cracks, and they will seep into the cotton ball from which they ca! n be extracted for analysis. Yes, I have done this, using discarded stone work. I don't need to pick which articles by others I choose to believe on these matters. I too have read the original story about "DHMO", although I had nothing to do with it. It was not intended by its author to be a hoax, it was intended to be a joke! DHMO stands for "dihydrogen mono-oxide", which is water. It was a parody of the EPAs tendency to use acronyms for the chemicals it bans or restricts. The tendency to turn joke into hoax, the next level being "conspiracy", is indeed something to worry about. Phillip Albro palbro@mindspring.com<mailto:palbro@mindspring.com> ==== RIGENWEB Mailing List ==== Visit RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative: http://www.rootsweb.com/<http://www.rootsweb.com/> WorldConnect Project -- Connecting the World One GEDCOM at a Time http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/<http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/>