I mentioned this video I came across recently. Jack thinks the Federal Reserve Bank in New York's gold bullion hoard is worth more. Let's see:
Gold on hand
6,331
tons
times
2,000
pounds per ton
times
12
ounces per pound
times
2,600
dollars per ounce
equals
395,054,400,000
dollars
Jack is right, 400 billion is more than 10 billion. Of course this depends on the Federal Reserve telling us the truth about how much gold they have and I am not sure I trust them any more than I trust the Federal Government.
In the Netflix series Black Sails, the pirates recover many tons of gold from a wrecked Spanish treasure ship. Gold is heavy, so they convert a portion of it to gemstones which evidently have a higher value to density ration. This seems to like a risky proposition to me. Gold can easily be measured, gemstones need an appraiser both when you buy them and again when you sell them, which means you are at their mercy, that is, if you can even find one. A couple of pounds of gemstones could be worth as much as a ton of gold, so if portability is an issue, then the risk entailed might be worth it. Gemstones have no particular attraction for me. Oh, they are pretty enough, but not they are not pretty enough that I am going to spend a pile of loot to acquire one just so I can look at it. If one did fall into my hands I would probably hang onto it because it is more likely to hold onto its value than anything else. Some people like to have them so they can show them off. I am not one of those people. My wife has to remind me to shave when we are going out.
Jack's sister recently sold a pile of silver coins she inherited from her father. A lump of silver the size of a pack of cigarettes is worth about $1,400. The coin man used the ping test on her coins.
Ping test is a good thing to have in your pocket if you are dealing in silver. There are any number of videos talking about the ping test and they are a real grab bag. First problem is that the ping test is not definitive. The second is it can be very hard to tell the difference between a real coin and a fake, especially if you don't have anything to compare it to. Third is that some real coins will fail the test. I picked this one because it's not too long and he just balances the coins on his finger.
Update the next day: changed ounces per pound from 16 to 12 per Stu's comment.
I did a post about making diamonds a while back so when this one showed up I had to post it. Looking over my blog I was surprised by the number of posts tagged with Diamonds.
Asia is kind of like a bigger version of the United States. There is Russia, China and India, corresponding to the West Coast, the East Coast and the South, which includes Texas. There is a big desert separating Russia and China, much like the West Coast is separated from Texas. We have the Rocky Mountains that separate the West Coast from the rest of the country, much like the Himalayas separate India from the rest of Asia.
Siberia Official Trailer (2018) - Keanu Reeves
Saban Films
We watched this odd little film last night. Today I am musing about it and it pops into my head that it's a Greek tragedy! I couldn't tell you which one, but there are just so many elements that are, um, iconic? Is that the word I want? I dunno. I'll just tell you about it and you can decide for your own dang self.
Kean-o (that's what I call him because no matter how many times my oldest tells me, I can never remember how to pronounce his name. Besides, who cares? It's not like I going to be talking to anyone in his universe. Though now that we're on the subject, we should probably all just call him Neo. I mean that's when he first crossed my event horizon.
Anyway, as I was saying before I got distracted, Kean-o is trying to facilitate a transaction involving a dozen, giant blue diamond gemstones. I mean giant like one carat, not like 20 or something ridiculous, he just has a handful of healthy sized gems. Well, he would if his partner would show up, but he doesn't. Matter of fact he never shows. We never see him. Kean-o calls him every five minutes from a new cell-phone and leaves him a voicemail, a message that is never returned. Grrr (that's Russian for Hmmm), me thinks there's skullduggery afoot.
The meeting is in St. Petersburg and the sale is supposed to be for $50 million dollars. $50 million for a dozen gems works out to around four million each. That sounds a little steep, until you realize the dollar isn't worth what it used to be, and there are a heck of lot more people now with big piles of money (10 times as many billionaires now as they were in 2000) just itching for something to spend it on, so of course luxury items have skyrocketed. And then these stones are special, and to the right knucklehead that alone can make them worth a zillion times more than their nominal value.
The customer is not happy and Kean-o is in the hot seat, so he asks for two days to track down the diamonds. Any normal transaction, you would expect Kean-o to apologize and they would just say good bye. Somehow I suspect his thinking was influenced by the prospect of a multi-million dollar commission. How much? Gems are only worth about a quarter of their retail price. You can buy them wholesale for half of what the retailers charge, and the distributors probably get them from the miners for half of that. So depending on where they are getting them, how much skin they have in the game, and how many people there are between them and the source, it could be anywhere from one to seventy five percent. I'm going to say 25% because you are going to need that much money to support yourself in the rarefied atmosphere that your clientele inhabits. Probably split it with his partner. Might even be working for a retailer who has offered to split the profit on this very exquisite set of highly desirable blue diamonds that have been sitting in his vault for the last dozen years or so.
Rigid Cell Phone Faraday Cage** (At 1:36:17 from the end on Netflix)
Naturally, Kean-o calls his partner and leaves a voicemail. Actually, the first thing he does is change phones. He's got a bunch of cell phones and a bunch of brand new pre-paid SIM cards (you can tell they are new because they are still in the credit-card sized cards they come in and Kean-o has to break them out of the card). Anyway, he breaks out a new phone and calls Pyotr and leaves a voicemail and then he puts his phone inside a container. From the way it is built and the careful way he stows the phone I surmise it's a Faraday cage. Okay, now we're being double paranoid. But he's waiting for a call from his partner, and inside that box that phone isn't going to be receiving any phone calls. Bit of a dilemma there. He calls Pyotr repeatedly throughout the movie. Pyotr never answers. Matter of fact, we never see him. Kean-o believes he exists, so we do to.
Now he gets a message that Pyotr is in Mirny which is in the middle of Siberia. Kean-o hires a private jet to take him there. Pyotr's brother works in a mine there. Kean-o waits by the gate for him to get off work. We see a scene of a large industrial complex, looks like an oil refinery. Well cool, another big industrial establishment I didn't know existed. That used to bother me, finding out about giant stuff I had never heard of, but I've gotten used to it. There's a new one popping up every day.
So I go look up Mirny on Google Maps to see if I can find any sign of this giant industrial complex in the middle of Siberia, and it's not there. There is, however, a giant frigging hole in the ground. Looks like asteroid strike except there's no damage, no upheaval, just a big whole in the ground. Looks suspiciously like some kind of evil Cold War era defense project, but it's not. It's a diamond mine. I'll be durned.
Back to our story, Andrei, Pyotr's brother, doesn't know where Pyotr is either, but assures us that he will be back in couple of days. So our rich American gets acquainted with the locals - a gang of rowdy's who take him bear hunting. They all have big fancy bolt-action rifles. They give Kean-o a single shot rifle , one like you might give a kid who is learning to shoot. After making an series of jokes about how they have the big guns they eventually give him a bullet for his gun. Bullet, cartridge, don't quibble, I'm trying to tell a story here.
He also gets acquainted, biblically, with the waitress at the local diner. Can't say as I blame her. Fancy foreigner shows up in their podunk little town, of course people are going to be interested. She's of marrying age, too, so probably more susceptible to sexual urges.
Now it transpires that there are several other players in this game and another near identical set of blue diamonds, but this other set is fake. However they aren't fake like the ones you buy at the five and dime, these are also genuine diamonds, but they are manufactured diamonds. Presumably the original set are natural diamonds. These diamonds are so good the only way they can be told apart is via a spectroscopic examination.
Pyotr sold the fake diamonds to one of these other players, some dude called Samasov and he has discovered the deception and isn't too happy about it. You know, that might explain why we haven't heard from Pyotr.
Kean-o goes back to St. Petersburg and goes through Pyotr's old hotel room, again. This time he finds a pistol hidden under the false bottom of a suitcase. And then he notices a fat blue candle on the counter. Wait a minute, that candle looks just like the one in the Gorynch Guest House* in Mirny where he was supposed to meet Pyotr. I mean, what are the odds? Apply boot heel to candle, it crumples, and looky there, a little red velvet parcel that contains one real blue diamond. Well, it there's something in this candle, might there be something in the other one? So he calls the waitress who brings him the other candle. Sure, enough, there is another velvet wrapped parcel inside, but this one doesn't contain any gemstones. If I recall correctly, it holds a map to a farm outside Mirny. So back to Mirny we go. Well, not quite yet.
First we have to deliver the gemstone to the customer. He tells his girl he will be back in couple of hours, but she can't sit still. She notices that he has written the address on a notepad, so she goes there as well. To consummate the deal, the customer wants to become like blood brothers with Kean-o, so he asks? suggests? demands? that the two girls give them blowjobs. His girl with give Kean-o a blowjob and the waitress will blow the customer. And the two guys must look into each other's eyes. Kean-o is reluctant, but the waitress has no qualms. Maybe she realizes what's at stake, or maybe just hanging out in this rarefied atmosphere has made her horny. In any case, the girls perform, heads bobbing dutifully, but the scene is not in the least erotic. I'm not quite sure why that is. Is it the hostility, the reluctance, or the small group of onlookers? And what would bring a person participate in such a scene? Well, Kean-o has two reasons: the potential enormous payoff and, hey, blowjob. But why is the customer instigating it? Probably because he has the urge and he has enough money to indulge his whims. Who knows what kind of whims you might want to indulge if you suddenly got a billion dollars.
There was another movie with Viggo Mortensen that had similar scene. Viggo was undercover cop who had wormed his way into the Russian Mafia so far that they are going to make him a 'made man', or the Russian equivalent. But before the boss will proceed, he has to know that Viggo isn't queer, so he takes him to a whorehouse where he has to fuck one of the girls while the boss is watching. So now I'm wondering if this a real thing, or they just wanted to put some sex in the movie but by populating the scene with Russians we can pretend that only foreigners are weirdos and nobody we know would actually do anything like that. Yeah, right.
There's some emotional fallout from this, but our happy couple deal with it and head back to their hotel. Where they run into the FSB (successor to the KGB). There's a couple of brutes standing in the lobby . He asks the clerk if there are any messages for room 701 and the clerk warns Kean-o that 'they' are waiting for him upstairs. It would have helped if I knew if his room was actually 701, but it doesn't matter because he walks right in. They separate them and tell Kean-o that they have the fake diamonds and they want him to sell them to his customer - or else. I'm not sure what the 'or else' was. In any case it's enough to persuade Kean-o to agree.
When he shows up to make the sale, the customer has brought a jeweler with a spectroscope. The jeweler has some trouble with some cables, Kean-o makes a remark, the operator gets flustered and customer dismisses him. Now he is trusting Kean-o that the diamonds are real, and Kean-o doesn't flinch, even though he knows he is probably signing his own death warrant. Those fake diamonds are still diamonds, but once you get into this oxygen deprived atmosphere logic and reason have no effect. They might be worth 90% of the real ones, but that 10% is still five million bucks. In this case though money probably has no bearing. They are 'blood brothers' and Kean-o lied. If Kean-o wants to save his skin, he better get on a plane back to America and do it pronto.
But we can't do that. We have to have the final shootout. He travels back to Mirny where he enlists the band of bear hunters to go with him to this farm (the farm on the map that he found in the candle that his girl brought him from Mirny). When they get there they find the brother, Andrei, dead, sitting in the outhouse. He has several injuries. I'm not sure whether he died of a drug overdose and he's just been sitting there for while and the critters have got to him, or whether he was tortured. Don't matter, he's dead. The house is old and worn, but somebody has been living there. The prop department botched the front door though. It's a simple door made out of planks, but there are gaps between the planks, gaps that you can see light through. That door isn't going to keep out the cold, and, in case you forgot, Siberia is cold in the winter. So, bad door, but otherwise the house was just what you might expect of a farmhouse that's been there for a hundred years.
So the house is lived in, but no Pyotr, so we sit down to wait. It doesn't take long for the bad guys to show up. The bear hunters have left Kean-o a rifle and a box of shells and once the bad guys show up he starts making effective use of it. He's shooting and knocking them down, one after another and you think maybe he will get out of this. I mean, the odds are low, there's only one of him and there's good half dozen bad guys. On the other hand it's a movie, and he's Kean-o, the savior of the world, he might pull it off. No such luck. The customer's head thug walks up behind him and shoots him in the back and that's it for Kean-o.
** I looked for a rigid cell phone faraday cage, but all I could find were bags. I wonder if cases ever were a thing, or whether I'm just not looking under the right rocks.
In the Keanu Reeves movie Siberia, Keen-o uses a magic box to tell real diamonds from fake ones. The fake diamonds aren't really fake, they are just as real as the real diamonds. The difference is the fake ones were manufactured while the real ones were dug out of the ground. I think the difference the machine is looking for is the presence of nitrogen - real diamonds have it but artificial ones don't. After rooting around for a bit I found that Raman Scattering is what the magic box uses to detect the presence or absence of nitrogen.
The Raman effect was named after one of its discoverers, the Indian scientist C. V. Raman, who observed the effect in organic liquids in 1928 . . . Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for this discovery.
In the beginning it was very difficult to observe the phenomena. Lasers have made it much more practical. Let's let YouTube show us how.
This one is so short that you won't have time to read the text. Remember the space bar is your friend. It's here because he has some good graphs of the results.
Basics and principle of Raman Spectroscopy | Learn under 5 min | Stokes and Anti-Stokes | AI 09
Practical Ninjas
Mr. Ninja is not a native English speaker. In this case subtitles are your friend.
Lastly, if you want one of these magic boxes, you can buy one from Stellar Net though it will cost you a pretty penny.
C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength contains the following passage:
“Look out! Look out!” said a dozen voices at once as a splintering of glass became audible and a shower of stones fell onto the Common Room floor. A moment later several of the Fellows had made a rush for the windows and put up the shutters: and then they were all standing staring at one another, and silent but for the noise of their heavy breathing. Glossop had a cut on the forehead, and on the floor lay the fragments of that famous east window on which Henrietta Maria had once cut her name with a diamond.
Is there is any historical basis for this? The short answer:
The reference to "that famous east window on which Henrietta Maria had once cut her name with a diamond" seems most likely to be a conflation of two or more of various events and artefacts connected to Henrietta Maria and / or her husband, Charles I. These events / artefacts involve Henrietta Maria breaking a window, Charles I purportedly inscribing messages to her on glass with a diamond, a window with an anti-Henrietta Maria inscription made with a diamond, and a marble tablet with her name inscribed on it above a window.
So who is this Henrietta? Well, if you screw up and ask for Henrietta Marie instead of Henrietta Maria you get a 17th Century slave ship.
During his 1631 Northwest Passage expedition in the ship Henrietta Maria, Captain Thomas James named the northwest headland of James Bay where it opens into Hudson Bay for her.
So is the Henritta Maria the same ship as the Henrietta Marie, or are they completely different ships? We're not getting any concrete answers here. The ship and the Queen are both from the 17th Century, so feel free to suppose that ship was named after the queen either as an honor or as an insult.
Henrietta Maria was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland from her marriage to King Charles I. Her Roman Catholicism made her unpopular in England, and also prohibited her from being crowned. King Charles fought Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army in the English Civil War. Charles eventually lost and was beheaded in 1649.
The North American Province of Maryland, a major haven for Roman Catholic settlers, was named in honour of Queen Henrietta Maria. The name was carried over into the current U.S. state of Maryland.
And that business about etching messages in the glass with a diamond? Well, there seems to be some truth to that.
Ross & I are watching some PBS drama about merry olde. An upper class victorian dude is at a jeweler's buying a dark brown colored diamond for his beloved. He's picked out the gem (we never actually get a good look at it, it's just a small dot on the screen) and agreed to a price of around $5K (though units are not mentioned either. Could be pounds.) He and the clerk then go through some rigamarole negotiating when it can be delivered (it can't possibly be ready today) and where it is to be delivered (some specific address, presumably his house). All terms satisfactorily completed, dude goes out the door, and as he does he is suddenly struck by the idea that $5K is entirely too much money to pay for a bauble, so he turns and goes back in. He starts to talk to the clerk but is interrupted by a call on his mobile phone. He's talking about stock market trades to someone in his office, a partner or maybe his broker. The transactions they are talking about are like a hundred thousand dollars. I turn to Ross and say something to the effect that he's being kind of a cheapskate and Ross replies 'what do you expect from some upper class twit'? Then I woke up.
The target is a diamond necklace, supposedly worth $150 million. Although Sandra promises each member of her crew $16.5 million each, I expect they would only realize 10% of that, being hot merchandise and all. The Adventurine has the backstory on the necklace.
Jewels are very nice and all, but they aren't particularly useful. Oh, you can use them to cut glass, but a simple carbide point can do that. They occasionally show up in movies at the focus of an evil mastermind's laser weapon, but a professor in Washington wanted some big diamonds so he made his own. They have no real, practical value.
I guess it's kind of like art and fancy cars. When you have more money than you know what do with, you go looking for things you can buy, things you couldn't buy when you were a poor schmuck like the rest of us. It's the magpie gene, we like shiny things.
The Diamond Age (as in The Bronze Age or The Iron Age) might have not quite arrived, but it's getting closer. We now have a couple of different methods for making synthetic diamonds and they work well enough that they are economically viable, i.e. they can make gemstone size diamonds and are undercutting the natural diamond producers like DeBeers.
I remember hearing about some guys trying to make diamonds a while back. They were having some success using washing-machine size machines that focused enormous pressure on a tiny little sample. That was ten years ago or so.
The Diamond Age is also the title of a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. One of the premises of that story is that man has learned to make diamonds and it has opened whole new venues of technological progress. Society as a whole still sucks, but what else is new?
I'm not sure how I got started on this, but when I started looking I wasn't finding much, well, except for a bunch of ads for engagement rings. But eventually I found some bits and pieces. Here are some videos give a pretty good overview of what's been going on.
Growing Synthetic Diamonds
synthetic diamond factory
These lab-grown diamonds are identical to natural ones
How To Make A Diamond - Bang Goes the Theory - BBC O
I also remember watching a video where a guy made diamond from pencil lead using a microwave oven, but I can't find it now, so maybe I just imagined it. If so, I've got a really good imagination because I remember it clearly. In any case he turned a ceramic coffee mug upside down and used the depression in the bottom as a crucible. He laid a couple of leads from a mechanical pencil there and added a couple of drops of oil (mineral? vegetable? my memory is fuzzy on this point). He set another coffee mug on top, this one right side up, so the graphite and oil are semi-contained, and then he fired up the microwave and ran it for I don't know how long. I don't recall what method he used to verify that his experiment worked, but if it did, the crystals were very small. Really bugs me that I cannot find this video.
The older HPHT (high pressure, high temperature) method is still in use and has grown considerably:
China is producing quantities of gemstone quality synthetic diamonds and shipping them to India where they are cut and made into jewelry.
Considerable effort has also been expended in finding ways to determine whether a diamond is synthetic or natural. One way was to laser engrave some kind of a miniature marking on the edge. Another uses spectroscopy. Natural diamonds usually include a bit of nitrogen and synthetic diamonds don't.
A comment on my previous post got me looking into this. It's quite the story involving royalty, peasants, theft, murder, corrupt government officials, fouled diplomatic relations and it's been going on for 28 years.Wikipedia has a summary. Vice News has slightly fuller story (2 years old).
The elevation here is about 10,000 feet, so I suppose the white stuff in the center of the screen could be snow, but it looks more like somebody wrote over the image with a white marker. Or an eraser. Someone could be trying to conceal something, but what? It's a very public enterprise.
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