I have been slow to write these past few days. Mainly because the family is in town to celebrate summer’s arrival in Vancouver: beautiful sunny and hot sunshine.
I have taken my grandson to two movies: Despicable Me and today The Last Airbender. The former is to be seen as it is clever and entertaining. The latter is to be avoided as it is silly, full of platitudes and quite frankly demeaning to all the cultures it tries to portray.
Neither deals with mining, as both seem to be propped up by an inexhaustible supply of magic and abundant minerals to support the nefarious doings of the villains and heros alike. Both seem to be ignorant of the laws of physics, most spectacularly of the conservation of energy and mass, metal mass that is. Entertaining, but ultimately dispiriting as false pictures of the way things work. Still me and my grandson enjoyed the suspension of belief, the action, and the marvellous graphics of both.
Meanwhile the price of gold goes up and down and the platitudes on which way it is headed continue apace. Does anybody actually read all the nonsense put out by so-called analysts on the price of gold. Seems to me it is also all magic and a denial of the laws of physics and reality. I still see people calling for a return to the gold standard. From what I understand there is not enough gold in all the world to support economies as we know them with gold. Still belief in magic propels action and sale of gold.
Protests continue on the right of First Nations to determine their own fate. Academics still write of mercury in gold as used by artisanal miners. See the most recent issue of Mining.com’s new e-magazine if you really went more on that dreary subject. It is nigh impossible to read, but then believe it or not people do take the time to read as they fiddle with electronic buttons to get at a simulacrum of a paper version. Even my daughter is now wedded to one of those funny little pads that passes as a book. I get old.
I wrote the exam today to get a learner’s license to learn to ride a motor bike. I failed. Of course I blame it on ambiguous questions not written up in the book I studies for a whole hour. Maybe now I will take this as a sign that I should concentrate on the simpler things in life and read more, ride my bicycle more, and go to more silly movies with the grandkids—afterall there are ten with a new one on the way the end of this month. Stay tuned.
Since you’ve decided to read more, may I suggest an excellent philosophical book that I recently finished reading and will likely re-read.
You may have already read it.
It’s called “The Black Swan” and was written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and is presently on the best sellers list of The New York Times).
What he has to say about what we don’t know is really quite interesting and can be applied to many topics in mining from the discovery of new orebodies to tailings pond failures.
And he doesn’t have anything good to say about economic analysts.