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Gold/Mining/Energy : Manhattan Minerals (MAN.T) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elizabeth Andrews who wrote (3294)	7/27/1999 2:17:00 AM
From: Bruce Robbins	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4504

You can not go in and mine something before you test it. Mines do not just occur anywhere. You have to find them first and that is not easy. First you come up with some targets (geologist hocus pocus). The cheapest and fastest way to test targets is drilling. They defined orebodies and developed mines using drilling for the last 50 years and will for the next 50 years. Exploration is drilling and drilling is exploration. It is risky and has always been so. I'm so sorry that you just woke up to this fact. The best statistical sample is to mine the entire orebody. If I mined the entire base metal orebody, I could calculate the average grade of lets say 2% copper. On a point scale (i.e. a drill hole), within that same orebody, I would sometimes get 1.5% copper, sometimes 2.5% copper etc. This all depends on the nature of the orebody as governed by the processes that formed it. I could establish a statistical range, i.e. my grade varies 95% of the time between 1.5% and 2.5% with an overall average of 2%. As you know in any statistics, the more points I have within the orebody (dataset), the better my statistics are. Lets use an analogy on something you know to put these twelve holes into a context- take out the stock chart of MAN for the last five years and do some TA. Calculate the minimum, maximum and average stock price for MAN with the last 1827 days (data points). Take twelve random days off of the chart during the same 1827 days and calculate the minimum, maximum and average price of MAN stock for the last five years. How close were you? Do it again with another 12 random points... Are you satisfied with the error? Would you bet on tomorrows price based on those 12 data points? There must be some number of points that will lead to an error that you can be satisfied with. Is it 50, 100, 200 or the entire data set? There is a trend in the stock so I would imagine that something less than the entire data set would be a good estimator of the average stock price, the minimum and the maximum. The assays presented to date are adequate. The holes done to date are adequate. There are not enough of them to conclude that this is uneconomic. I am simply placing the data in a context. In TG-3's case, I would love to have holes that are spaced a minimum of 50 meters apart before attempting a resource calculation. That would give us 96 holes on the 600 m x 400 m TG-3 target (and only cover 3% of the target area- if the results were good, I could justify taking a bulk sample or justify moving underground). Twelve holes is too little. At 22, we should have a pretty good impression of whether MAN should keep drilling or not. But 12 holes is not enough to calculate a resource. Elizabeth, you are calculating a resource by saying that TG-3 is uneconomic. Wait for the next set of holes.