To help celebrate Arizona’s centennial, there is a new web portal that “offers a tour of the people, places, and events that defined our past and are shaping our future. The Arizona Experience is your passport to Arizona’s hidden treasures. Interactive features allow you to customize your tour. Visit Arizona’s iconic landscapes, listen to the oral histories of descendants of early explorers, settlers, and miners, or discover how our leading innovations in biotechnology, alternative energy, and high-tech products are creating a promising tomorrow. Each month during the 2012 Centennial year will launch a new theme to showcase the 48th state.”

The theme for March is mining and minerals.  The features include:

Mining Arizona’s Metals – interactive map of active mines in Arizona, Morenci mine flyover, and surface and underground mining techniques slide show.

Rock Products – Building Arizona – interactive cement plant tour, map with  locations and mineral commodities of more than 300 quarries or mines, videos and photo gallery.

Featured Artist – World renowned mineral photographer Jeff Scovil presenting a photo gallery of some of his best images of Arizona minerals, as well as a short video on “how to photograph minerals”.

Miners Story – Video gallery of the men and women of San Manuel recounting their experiences living and working in one of Arizona’s historic mining communities.

H. Mason Coggin Photo Collection – Arizona historic mines and miners photo gallery.

The Arizona Experience is a dynamic, multimedia, 4D web environment with interactive maps, hundreds – soon to be thousands – of images, historical time-lines, flyovers of iconic landscapes, interviews with Arizona leaders, featured artists, hours of videos – onsite and at the Arizona Experience YouTube channel, and oral histories that capture the experiences of the men and women that shaped the state.

According to Dr. Michael Conway of the Arizona Geological Survey, “We used Microsoft Research’s new Layerscape visualization software to produce the 3D flyovers, and we worked closely with ESRI to broadcast interactive maps that incorporate spatial data, content, interactive timelines, and photo galleries.  These dynamic tools and extraordinary content are tailor made for teachers challenging their students to explore Arizona’s past, examine its present, and imagine its future.”

Take a few minutes to look over the home page, and sample the various features.  There is more to it than initially meets the eye.  There are lots of nooks and crannies that bring up very interesting material.

Click on http://arizonaexperience.org/ to start your tour.

Arizona State Geologist, Lee Allison, notes on his blog that the New York Public Library has placed about 40,000 historical stereograms online.  About 196 of these are from Arizona (see here). A stereogram is a pair of photos taken from slightly different positions, which, when viewed properly, can produce a 3D effect.

If you go to the site, you find a gallery of photo pairs.  Click on one to see it larger.  Another click will make it even larger.  With practice, you can see the 3D effect even without a stereo viewer.  Try it with the medium size (one click from the gallery) photo pair. Here’s how. Instead of focusing on the computer screen, defocus your eyes and look behind the screen or cross your eyes.  Move your head around a bit and the photos will coalesce into a 3D image.  I have a practice photo pair below.  If that doesn’t work for you, go back to Allison’s blog and click on the “stereogranimator.”

From the Federal bureaucracy run amok: Doctors and hospitals use about 18,000 codes to classify their treatments for insurers. Now the federal government is mandating an expanded code which features 140,000 classifications.

See the story in the Wall Street Journal here.

The title of this post is a real new code. Among some others are: W22.02XA, “walked into lamppost, initial encounter;” W22.02XD, “walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter;” and R46.1 “bizarre personal appearance.”

“There codes for injuries received while sewing, ironing, playing a brass instrument, crocheting, doing handcrafts, or knitting…”

The big question: will your insurance pay if the coders accidentally enter a W22.02XD before reporting a W22.02XA?

Is this part of President Obama’s new jobs program for medical coders? Your tax dollars at work.