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Suggestions for Functional Jewelry?
szyzyg asks: "I'm getting married and my girlfriend and I have been looking around at rings and not really getting anywhere. I have all sorts of high concepts about what this should represent and I keep coming back to the thought 'nothing which is useless can be truly beautiful'. So I've been fighting with the idea of how to make a ring which has some use beyond simple symbolism... concepts like using magnetic minerals to turn it into a compass, or engraving some sort of measuring mechanism into it. So here's the challenge I'm putting to the Slashdot bright idea machine: How do I make a simple piece of jewelry useful? Someone out there must have better ideas."
A lot of people really detest the diamond industry. I for one hate DeBeers, even more than I dislike Microsoft. At least Microsoft doesn't use slave labour, murder people, and abuse their workers. It's hard to justify a shiny peice of carbon with an artifically high price on it when you look at all the human rights violations the companies that mine them cause.
I know there's sociatal pressures that say you need to have a diamond. And why? Because DeBeers invented it!
http://www.africanfront.com/diamondboycott.php
There's one link, I'm sure you can find more with a quick google.
Real women don't want a diamind:
A real woman will know that a diamond is just an expensive way to dazzle the easily dazzled.
She will also know it's just carbon.
She will aslo know that it's a common stone, kept uncommon by a diamond cartel.
She will aslo know that many diamons are mined by children in conditions akin to slavery.
She would also rather have flying lessons, a trip on the Concorde to Paris, or a Harley.
I suguest, that any woman that has a social structure that makes getting a diamond more important than getting a hang-glider and lessons, is a woman to be dumped to the curb.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
On titanium rings:
They're not practical for any purpose other than being a wedding ring, and do you honestly need any more purpose? If I ever have need of one, I'm definitely going with the sine wave style.
Dan Statman (of the site you linked) is a member of the TurboCNC community, CNC software that runs on an old 486 with step rates up to 20,000Hz. TurboCNC is being actively developed by Dave Kowalczyk. It's 100% free to use, $20 for the Pascal source. This is for something that can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars elsewhere, and would never run on anything below 400MHz.
Dan Statman built all of his own tools, using TurboCNC to drive his titanium-ring engraver. He quit his job and does this full-time now. He's a regular poster (as am I) in the TurboCNC user group.
It's amazing what you can do with $300 of scrap metal and surplus parts.
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Youll be lucky to get 1/10 of what you paid for it. GOld jewelery alwasy sells at a little bit above melt value, and noone buys diamonds for anywhere close to what they sell them for. This has been repeately documented, but hasnt sunk into the brains of the populaion yet. Want resale value? Buy gold, silver bars and coins.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
if anything happens she can sell the ring and live for a month
Very wrong unfortunately.
Diamonds have absoulutely no resale value worth speeking of. Have a look at this slashdot story
Yes a diamond could be used as a bribe, but you certainly can't live for a month on one.
Gold might be slightly better. Most jewlers will readily give money for 'scrap gold'. Althouh most survivalists will tell you how useless gold Kruger rands /soverigns etc are. Most banks wont accept them and jewlers will often just give 'scrap gold' value.
If you want jewlry as an emergency money source, try a necklace made of gold segments (or heavy gold chain) The segments can be broken off individually and sold / used for bribes.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
We didn't do the engagement ring thing, and we bought 2 beautiful silver rings for our wedding bands. Total cost with shipping was just shy of $100. We're both proud of the cheapness factor, as we know the price of precious metals/stones is such a sham. Though, you'd be amazed at how many women turned their noses up at the rings. She doesn't care (that's my girl!) and neither to I. The rings are beautiful and we both love them, and that's all that really matters.
I got this ring, the knots symbolic of my science/math/mechanical nature. I'm the organized one in the pair; I bring order to the chaos. In turn, she has this ring, the ivy symbolic of her being the more "wild" of the two of us. She gets me out into the sun and has a better sense of adventure. We're a perfect match, and over the years our personalities have melded a bit, which goes well with silver (a highly malleable metal). I'm thinking for our 10th anniversary, we might get a new set of rings, but with both having the ivy and knots intertwined (that is, if the owner of this site will custom make them). We may even try to get them in platinum or tungsten, much more sturdy metals.
We've been married 5.5 years and are closer than ever.
Yeah, it's all symbolic, and has no utility value. But my going on about this is simply to illustrate that one can ditch the status quo and have much more meaningful symbolism than "Look! he spent 2 month's salary on this boring ring of gold with a fleck of clear rock on it!"
I encourage everyone to browse the site linked above: metalsmiths.com. The guy has rings made of meteorite that I'd like to get -- too cool! His work is truly unique.
My only suggestion for a practical ring would be either a sun dial type of ring (calibrated for your latitude, of course) or a very simple, solid and heavy ring of platinum which you could hawk if you ever got into a real jam. About the latter suggestion... I've ready to many "urban survival" threads in misc.survival. ;-)
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