[Sca-cooks] OT OOP tedious process

Stefan li Rous StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
Sat Nov 24 16:48:46 PST 2007


Malkin told about her scientific study and suspicious neighbors:

<<< Any labor-intensive multi-day project can take on the appearance of
drug manufacture to those unfamiliar with the intensity.

I once received a grant from the National Science Foundation under
the EPSCoR program to research the concentrations of chromium
diopside and pyrope garnets in a location suspected to contain
diamonds.  The process involved taking a specified weight  quantity
of ant hill, washing it to remove any organics, drying it to remove
the water and then using a light table, sorting the little clear red
and green rocks from the rest of the rocks, weighing the little red
and little green rocks using a grain scale and converting grains to
grams to determine percent by weight of the desired material from the
spoil.  We processed one sample from each quarter mile of an eight
mile by eight mile grid for 64 square miles.  That is 254 samples.

... Two of your research team lean over the
improvised light table with tweezers picking out all the clear red
and green ones.  >>>

Were you using "ant-hill" sized samples or were you specifically  
choosing samples from ant-hills?  It wasn't completely clear to me  
from your description and I can think of good reasons to use either one.

What do concentrations of chromium diopside and pyrope garnets have  
to do with probability of an area containing diamonds? Are these  
simply a common side-effect of the processes that also create diamonds?

Do we know what areas diamonds were found in, in period? Since  
faceting of jewels was a late period invention, did diamonds even  
rank high on the scale of precious gems in period? I can easily see  
where other, colored, stones might have more value/interest, if you  
don't have faceting to bring out the gems "brilliance".

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas           
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****





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