Slashdot Mirror
How a Rogue Geologist Discovered Diamonds
prone2tech writes "Both NPR and Wired are running stories about how nearly two decades ago, a dogged, absentminded Canadian geologist named Charles Fipke who was practically down to his last nickel when he discovered diamonds in the Northwest Territories. Back then there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond, and today, Canada is the world's third-largest producer. The story behind the addition of Canada to the ranks of diamond-producing nations leads back to this one man. His discovery started the largest staking rush in North America since George Carmack found gold in the Klondike a century earlier."
The areas where diamonds have direct, practical use have been on artificial diamonds for a while (specifically, diamond cutting blades). It's only the jeweler's diamonds that are still natural.
There are also some potential practical uses of diamonds that have no current use because large quantities are too expensive. Such as building materials, thermal conductors, and semiconductors.
Until recently, most artificial diamonds had too many impurities to look good on a ring, even to an untrained eye (you'd have to be blind to not notice that your stone is distinctly yellow). Even now, making pure artificial diamonds is about the same price as digging them out of the ground. Still, the techniques are only going to get better, and I'll be dancing the streets when DeBeers goes bankrupt.
Not a typewriter
That's just because it's relatively cheap to produce. You can make blue, orange or natural clear as well.
For instance D.NEA
http://d.neadiamonds.com/
Diamonds are precious because about 70+ years of marketing by DeBeers has made popular opinion think they are valuable. All those "Diamonds are forever" type of ads you see? Marketing. And not just any diamond, they had to be big, beautiful expensive diamonds, not the cheap ones people used to buy in the early 1900's. And not only that, but marketing to convince people they need to keep buying diamonds.
And yes, we can make them artificially - either vapor deposition, or large pressures and high temperatures, or probably a ton of other methods. Look up for industrial diamonds (they're quite useful in industry).
It's basically all DeBeers marketing - DeBeers basically bought up all the diamond mines and established a complex network of distributors that effectively took over all cosmetic diamond sales. These diamonds were then effectively rationed to make their price go up. When some shrewd business practice causes potential losses in the value of diamonds, DeBeers puts some control that effectively disrupts the practice. (DeBeers has tried hard to quash any sort of thing that might disrupt the price of diamonds and collapse its monopoly). The price of a diamond is artificially inflated, and kept that way. And marketing ensures that you can't get away with some low-quality diamond, you must buy a nice expensive one for your significant other.
In fact, the resale value of diamonds is quite poor, so as investments, you can do better elsewhere.
Here's an interesting read on how DeBeers turned a relatively cheap gem into something desirable, and managed to keep tight control over production in order to keep value up.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/198202/diamond
Fortunately, diamonds will sell for ten dollars per carat in the year 2015. All of us will benefit from inexpensive, flawless diamonds. Computers will become faster and less expensive. Advanced medical equipment will become available to more people. Photovoltaic cells made from diamonds will bring cheap power to the masses. What an exciting time to be alive!
It's "Mohs scale", not "Moh's scale". Mohs was the name of the German bloke the thing's named after.
So much for being a "geologist geek" (and shouldn't that be "geology geek", anyway?).
I think the defn of rogue they're using is: no longer obedient, belonging, or accepted and hence not controllable or answerable; deviating, renegade. Not the best word choice, but if you accept this defn and strip any negative value judgments from it, it is technically not far off.
More to the point, though, who cares what other people say? Read his words, form your own judgments. If you do your part as the reader, then it doesn't make any difference what others want you to think...you've figured that out for yourself.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.