"Stardust"
Much like the multitudes of tiny, barely perceptible, stars sprinkled throughout the skies, the seemingly random thoughts and philosophies that sparkle from time to time in my head need some place to call home in the cosmos.Thus, "Stardust" allows me to share thoughts and ideas from all of the ranges of human thought: personal, natural, scientific and various excursions into otherwise random thoughts. Some may have no beginning, no end. But others I hope that you might benefit through knowing.
Essentially, "Stardust" is my personal forum to talk to YOU; hopefully you will be a dedicated listener. You may not agree with me all the time - perhaps some of you never - but it might be fun for you to judge for yourself just how misguided I am in my wanderings.
I have had a rich life: art, poetry, music, archeology, paleontology, geology, microbiology, astronomy, astrophysics, environment. But richest of all are the humans that I have come to know and those with whom I have shared my life.
Please indulge me while I share just a bit longer.....
.....welcome to "Stardust."
Dr. Clay
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Carden Bottoms and the Silent Schoolhouse
byP. Clay Sherrod - May 5, 2016
[photos by Clarke L. Sherrod]
Sometimes the things closest to us reveal amazing secrets that we would miss unless revealed through the tales of others.
Such is the case of what appears to be the amazingly flat, fertile and desolate land just west of Petit Jean Mountain known as "Carden Bottoms."
Earliest History
Also known as Carden's Bottom or Carden Bottoms, this land today is home to a vast farming industry, a rich alluvial
flood plain that covers both Conway and Yell Counties, created by the Arkansas River and partially from the flooding of the smaller Petit Jean River. The land was settled by the first European descendents by the James Carden family in the early 1800's.
The first secret that this massive agricultural Mecca held was that of the Native American Woodland and Mississippian cultures who lived in huge populations throughout this valley; indeed early French explorers
April 16, 2016
CREATING A WEB RATHER THAN SPINNING ONE.....
Hopefully if you are reading this, you have realized that Arkansas Sky Observatories has a new, improved and state-of-the-art website. The old site was an incredibly intricate and beautifully designed effort, but things change and ultimately it became so antiquated - shall I say 'old fashioned?' - that it literally quit working.
Not such a problem if you have a webmaster, which ASO did not; the creator of the original award-winning ASO site in 2001, my brother, is sadly no longer in the web business. I know how to push buttons on computers to get them to work and to accomplish great high-tech stuff. But I do not know, nor need to know, how they do what they do. I just want them to work. I wanted our ASO website to work.....but ASO is a 'non-profit' in the strictest sense of the word.
CREATING A WEB RATHER THAN SPINNING ONE.....
Hopefully if you are reading this, you have realized that Arkansas Sky Observatories has a new, improved and state-of-the-art website. The old site was an incredibly intricate and beautifully designed effort, but things change and ultimately it became so antiquated - shall I say 'old fashioned?' - that it literally quit working.
Not such a problem if you have a webmaster, which ASO did not; the creator of the original award-winning ASO site in 2001, my brother, is sadly no longer in the web business. I know how to push buttons on computers to get them to work and to accomplish great high-tech stuff. But I do not know, nor need to know, how they do what they do. I just want them to work. I wanted our ASO website to work.....but ASO is a 'non-profit' in the strictest sense of the word.