Got my first silver petol!

[Humboldt]

If you like silver, these are neat.

Guy in a tiny town in northern CA, Petrolia ~2005 (not a lot of info out there), had coins commissioned and minted.

Not sure they're .9 (early 60's dimes and quarters and halves) or .999 (common "pure" for silver rounds and bars), but a silver coin with local imagery. Cows and butter making, ocean views, pot leaves, sheep, salmon, redwoods.
Depends on the year and denomination.

Gorgeous coins.

He was hoping to get them accepted as currency in his small town and succeeded a bit.

Now more of a collector's item, but thousands were made.

Friend of mine gave me a 1oz 10 petol coin tonight, super cool find.

Worth ~22.50 spot, but ~$80 collector.

https://www.topic.com/the-silver-curren ... is-country

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ ... 3606285295

https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humbo ... id=2126044

[Humboldt]

Trying to post pictures from my phone but not seeing the option.

What am I missing?

[Philip]

Interesting... Didn't realize your county was like the cannabis capital.

[Humboldt]

Interesting... Didn't realize your county was like the cannabis capital.

Well...yeah.

So can I post pictures from mobile or no?

[Philip]

Excellent question... You should be able to, but at the bottom of the page you have to choose "Full Site > Go Advanced"... Then attach your image the same as on a desktop. As far as I remember the mobile theme doesn't have the option.

[Humboldt]

Worked, I think, but wow what a major pain in the ass.

Took over 5 minutes, maybe 2 next time now I know what I'm doing.

I frequent garden.org quite a bit (great place if you dig plants), and they have a very useful and quick method.

Below their main reply window is an option to "Drag and drop a photo here to upload, or click below".
Beneath that is a browse button that brings you to the last folder you uploaded from.

Works great, even mobile since everything is still scaled.

[Humboldt]

Crappy photos but that's 1 oz of .999% pure silver.

On the back you've got the milking, making butter and cheese.

The other side is Trinidad Head, amazing huge rock dome with scrub trees just barely connected to shore with a maybe 1 1/4 mile hiking trail around the edge.

Ocean views, whales, etc. Gorgeous. That view is looking back towards the cove and town and shows the old lighthouse.

The more I read about the guy who had these minted, Ken Young, the more blown away I am.

By went from Silicon Valley to a tiny and remote northern CA town with 1 grocery store.

Not only tried to start this alternative local silver currency, but got very into competitive running.
When he was 74 he'd run at least 140,000 miles.

https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-st ... g-data-guy
Great article

Over the last 40-some years, Young has spent 55 to 60 hours a week sorting through road, track, cross-country, and trail-race data, and organizing it with a software program he wrote specifically for the task. At first, he worked nights and weekends around his job as a college professor; since retiring two decades ago, the task consumes most of his waking hours. If he had been paid a modest $25 an hour for his running-stat labors, this would amount to about $3 million. He hasn’t received a cent.

Young inputs data to his computer only after he has satisfied himself as to which runner ran what race in what time. This process doesn’t optimize speed or size—it optimizes accuracy. Young manually enters about 2,000 new results a week, gathering the basic info from ARRS members, some elite runners, and about 150 global correspondents. He then checks for anomalies, not just in spelling and runner identification, but also in gun and net times, in event dates, and in the distance between a race’s start and finish lines. “I’ve worked with Ken for almost 40 years, and he has always used the best science in his record-keeping,” says Marty Post, a former Runner’s World statistician and current statistician for the World Marathon Majors. “His methods have a single goal: to ensure the integrity of top performances.”

While at the University of Chicago, Young joined the school’s track club, where he met influential coach Ted Haydon, twice an assistant U.S. Olympic track-and-field coach. Haydon enjoyed putting on a six-mile handicap race each summer that gave a head start to slower runners, but he wanted a more objective method of assigning handicaps. So one day in 1971, he asked Young for help. Right away, Young realized the solution would be cake if only he had tons of data. So he wrote to Runner’s World, asking an editor friend to forward race results he received. A few weeks later, Young had several cardboard boxes full of printed results. Using keypunch machines, he entered the data onto computer cards, and later wrote a program in Fortran to make sense of all the times and distances and to generate rankings. In effect, he devised “equivalent running performances” of the kind that became widely available on the internet some 30 years later: Who’s faster, a 43:00 10K runner or a 3:17 marathoner? Young figured it out long before anyone else.

Young holds himself to a high standard, and demands the same of others—at least of races and record keepers. This often pits him against the establishment.

In 1981, for instance, when Alberto Salazar and Allison Roe set world bests (back then, they weren’t called “world records&#8221 on a previously certified New York City Marathon course, race organizers jubilantly publicized the runners’ accomplishments. Young took a different stance, in effect: Hold on a minute. A world best is a pretty big deal. We need to re-measure the course to make sure it was accurate as run on race day. He says his argument fell mostly on deaf ears, and more than three years passed before a record validation was conducted. When completed, it found the 1981 course to be just over 157 yards short. As a result, neither Salazar nor Roe appears on the ARRS list of marathon world record holders.

My take is his software and methods are what's still used for official record keeping in the sport.

[Easto]

Interesting stuff and a lot of "interesting" people do live up in your part of the State.

[Humboldt]

Interesting stuff and a lot of "interesting" people do live up in your part of the State.

Indeed, and I know quite a few of them.

Good friend of mine retired as one of the world experts in nuclear plant decommissioning.

Snowboards after double knee replacements and does design/fund-raising for skate parks now.

His main generator can power 3+ houses (we get lots of outages) and has a Harley muffler welded to it.

Humboldt County.

[Philip]

"Harley muffler welded to it" whoa

I have a friend who put a military 6k diesel generator on his wife's food truck, the thing is very quiet and can run for years.. Got it at some military surplus, they also have them on eBay. I think if I ever need one bigger than 2k I'd go that way.