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msds commented on A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron   phys.org/news/2025-09-yea... · Posted by u/pseudolus
jandrewrogers · 3 months ago
I have only assayed samples from the iron cap. You would not expect to find much in that part of the formation but it still came in at 1-2g/ton. There is a large area of visually striking bornite[0] that I have not yet been able to properly sample which is roughly the area you would expect the gold to concentrate. It is in the walls of a narrow, deep canyon at high elevation. The region was mined for gold/copper a century ago, so the existence is not surprising.

The location makes access extremely challenging. It requires 3 hours of hiking, assuming you are fit, and borderline technical mountaineering once you get close to the site. The lower parts of the canyon are also under tens of meters of ice most of the year, which creates a separate set of safety issues. When these mountains were prospected in the 1920s, it would have been underneath a deep permanent snow field. I've visited some of the old gold mines in the area for calibration and this deposit appears substantially larger than those.

The discovery was accidental. I was looking for a waterfall I had seen on satellite imagery in the backcountry and came across an enormous chunk of molybdenite[1] while climbing across granite scree. I made several trips to find the source of the molybdenite higher up the mountains, which I never did, but while searching for that I localized a bunch of other beautiful sulfide/oxide mineral specimens to the above canyon. It gives me a great excuse to explore parts of the mountains no one has been into before.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bornite

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molybdenite

msds · 2 months ago
Honesty I know a bunch of people who are burntout climbers and burntout geologists - sounds like a blast. Fun mineralogy with climbing that’s not…super exotic but still fun? I’d pay for it.
msds commented on Building the most accurate DIY CNC lathe in the world [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=vEr2C... · Posted by u/pillars
IAmBroom · 3 months ago
Those are the kind of CNC kept in isolated rooms, and covered in gold foil to reflect heat. No humans allowed during the measurement cycle.
msds · 3 months ago
No, good thermal management with a chiller, active thermal compensation, and glass scales make um precision on that scale reasonable. 10-100x better? Sure, you’re getting into machines where the room to keep them happy is significantly more expensive that the machine…
msds commented on Let Kids Be Loud   afterbabel.com/p/let-kids... · Posted by u/trevin
msds · 5 months ago
Ok but my neighborhood children have started using electric leaf blowers as jet propulsion on skateboards. I have insisted they use hearing protection, but the rest of us are shit out of luck…
msds commented on Parametric Modeling with Grasshopper   baharmon.github.io/basics... · Posted by u/downboots
msds · 7 months ago
It’s fun seeing an uptick of rhino/grasshopper content here lately - two articles in a week?! The McNeel extended universe is a fun place to play around in, and I’ve met lots of great people since I started working on Rhino.
msds commented on Stainless steel strengthened: Twisting creates submicron 'anti-crash wall'   techxplore.com/news/2025-... · Posted by u/wglb
hinkley · 8 months ago
I sometimes watch machinists and blacksmiths on youtube.

One of the things I've become more aware of lately is the fact that hardened steel eats through cutting tools like candy, so the solution is to anneal the steel, do most of the shaping, harden it again (temper it for as much as 24 hours in a very smart oven that slowly slowly drops the temps), and then finish the piece with sanding and grinding tools instead of cutting tools.

I wonder if this treatment survives annealing and hardening cycles or if that just destroys the structure.

msds · 8 months ago
You've got the heat cycles for annealing, hardening, and tempering confused. The slow cooling is for annealing, hardening requires a fast cool from rather hot and is a very different process from tempering, which is a short soak at a comparatively low but tightly controlled temperature.
msds commented on A AI etymology deconstructor – can guess fake words   deconstructor.ayush.digit... · Posted by u/hyusap
msds · 9 months ago
It doesn't really detect stringing together latinate nonsense, so all of my coinages got perfectly coherent definitions. On the flip side, I guess if you're erudite and willing to butcher other languages for sport, nothing has ever stopped you from making up perfectly quasiaryiumaryesque words.
msds commented on Vinyl carver sparking a craze for cutting records at home   theguardian.com/music/202... · Posted by u/n1b0m
ffsm8 · 10 months ago
Your hobby is polluting the local area with highly toxic material? Dang man, that's evil
msds · 10 months ago
Very important habitat restoration for electric eels, actually.
msds commented on Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?    · Posted by u/101008
msds · a year ago
I'm not running the show, but I am working at a place that does this. One time fee for a perpetual license for the current major version, free support, and historically ~6 years of updates per version.

Users tend to be quite happy about it, and we're profitable enough to pay comfortable salaries and have...a lot...of runway.

Of course, this model is possible because there was never any outside investment.

msds commented on Making an intersection unsafe for pedestrians to save seconds for drivers   collegetowns.substack.com... · Posted by u/raybb
pnutjam · a year ago
If they get that close to me, the car is getting kicked or slapped to elicit a reaction from the driver.
msds · a year ago
Turns out you can take out a driver side mirror by putting most of your weight on it and bouncing a few times. But that's reserved for drivers that have made contact with me...
msds commented on Air Canada to remove free carry-on from basic economy   loyaltylobby.com/2024/12/... · Posted by u/lxm
msds · a year ago
If we're "unbundling"/giving into "free market" nonsense in a highly regulated area, I just want to be able to pay reasonably proportional fee for musical instruments and get a guarantee that they'll be carry-ons, and not destroyed in the cargo hold. My only other alternatives are buying first class tickets or flirting with the gate agent (...works remarkably well...).

u/msds

KarmaCake day393February 6, 2012View Original