Posts from — March 2007

Mining news from Cuba and Bolivia does not normally make headlines.  Over the weekend this piece appeared on one of those sites devoted to “cooperation against bilateral trade and investment agreement that are opening countries to the deepest forms of penetration by transnational corporations.”  If this kind of post-commie rhetoric makes you cross, avoid this report: 

[Read more →]

The most interesting site to pop up over the weekend is Inclinometer et al.  The site is run by Skip Gosnell, Marketing Director for Reiker Inc.  They apparently design and manufacture inclinometers that are used on almost every type of mining equiment and in almost any mining slope application.  This site is no doubt supported by the folk who make the equipment and is intended to promote their product. But that is no matter.  At least we have a human voice writing about technology from a personal perspective.  That makes the site valuable and one that I wish more of those companies that put out bland, uniformative, marketing, non-information would replicate.  In addition to his comments, the site has a great list of links.  My recommendation for the week.  I have added it to the Blogroll so you can find the site quickly in future.

A while ago I wrote about the BC Minister of Mines who resigned over a “nasty” e-mail.  At the time I could not find the e-mail.  Now I have from another blooger more resourceful than me.  Here it is, and all I can say is WOW!:

[Read more →]

It is hard to imagine there is any link between mining and dancing.  I grew up in the 1950s on a mine in South Africa.  A favorite passtime was to go to the mine dances.  On hot Sunday afternoons we would gather in the arena of the mine compound and watch in fascination as the black miners did their traditional dances.  My favorite was the gumboot dance: a stomp in four-time.  Then there were the wild gyrations of the Zulus in vivid headgear.  Or the shimmer of the Shona as they slide to and fro to a wild drum beat. 

I wonder if these traditions continue? Are they now outmoded and improper?  I make no excuses for a time when I was innocent of pubity and all that follows, when I was innocent of politics and racialism, and ethnicism, and all those terrible things that drove us from our homeland.   The memories are good and the pleasure of dance remains. Here in Vancouver I still go out to dance twice a week, and this is a brief description of just one evening. 

[Read more →]

Dorothy Kosich writes in Mineweb that the Colorado appeals court has ruled that Colorado counties may ban the use of cyanide in mining within the county.  Five Colorado counties have such regulations.  The Colorado Mining Association sued Summit County asserting that state law, which permits the use of cyanide in mining, pre-empts county regulations.  Not so, said the appeals court, ruling that the Colorado Mined Reclamation Act “specifically requires that mining operators comply with zoning and land use regulations adopted by political subdivisions.”

[Read more →]

Is this a sad story, or is it a story of human ability and success?  Persist a little while, for the story starts out sad, and you wonder if there is light at the end of the tunnel.  I think it is a story of the human spirit and the opportunities that mining brings.  The story comes to us via a letter in the January 2007 Canadian Mining Journal.  I quote, and liberally edit to get to the point of the tale. 

“I am the wife of a geologist…..entering the mining field means constantly uprooting the family and often living in remote communities, or always traveling and usually absent from important family celebrations…..this is an unstable profession and you could be without work in the blink of an eye if the markets fall….I recall many of my husband’s colleagues—bright, hard-working geologist—desperately seeking work in the early 1908s….and finally changing careers. 

[Read more →]

OptimiZ Consulting is Kay Sever. I have never met her. I have exchanged many an e-mail with her. I have read much of what she has written on the topic of improving quality in the mining industry. Now let me introduce you to her writings. Here are the papers she has sent to me and which I have featured on TechnoMine and keep in the InfoMine library:

[Read more →]

Everybody likes to go to a conference. The further away the conference, the better. The more exotic the locale of the conference, the better. Las Vegas, Honolulu, and San Diego are my picks for conferences. In the last year I succeeded in going to conferences in St Louis and Denver; so in retrospect I failed. But regardless of how cold and dreary those cities were, there was still benefit in being at a conference.

The obvious advantages of conferences are the chance to escape routine, to meet old friends, to see new places, and to gather information about one’s profession. In particular, the chance to attend talks and presentations by experts is a central part of any conference. There is no substitute for a live presentation of work done, ideas generated, and doubts expressed. We are creatures of a tribal past; I suspect our instincts are honed to sitting, talking, and listening as a way of exchanging information, making value judgments, and picking up scraps of useful information from even the most inarticulate.

[Read more →]

Alister MacLeod is a Canadian author.  In his collection of short stories, Island, he writes of a miner, on a beach, dreaming beside the sea.  I quote from The Closing Down of Summer: 

“We are perhaps the best crew of shaft and development miners in the world and we are due in South Africa on the seventh of July.

I have always wished that my children could see me at my work.  That they might journey down with me in the dripping cage to the shaft’s bottom or walk the eerie tunnels of the drifts that end in walls of staring stone.  And that they might see how articulate we are in the accomplishment of what we do.  That they might appreciate the perfection of our drilling and the calculation of our angles and the measuring of our powder, and that they might understand that what we know through eye and ear and touch is of a finer quality than any information garnered by the most sophisticated of mining engineers with all their elaborate equipment. 

[Read more →]

If only real-world mining were as simple as those incredibly complicated games played on the internet.  Here is my take on two.  I have sent this piece to my grandkids who will likely enjoy the games more than I do. 

First there is one of those dark sites that look like a bad Hobbit’s dream; or a Hobbit’s bad dream; it amounts to much the same.  You know the sort: mostly black with misty blue hills enmassed in smoke and mist.   There is a baroque castle and a wicked-looking fellow resembling the offspring of an angel and Osama Ben Laden.  The pusillanimity of the world they inhabit is well captured by the idiotic simplicity of the actions they scurry around performing.  For example, here are two Q&As re mining—something pretty essential to building castles, fighting dragons, and rescuing maidens. 

[Read more →]