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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marek_wojna who wrote (74752)	8/9/2001 6:24:14 PM
From: long-gone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116912

<<The reason I'm sticking to physical metal is I have a hard time to believe people will be ready to repeat dot.coms. Maybe just a gambling passion to cover the wounds. >> You too readily compare companies with 30-100 years history to the arriviste, dot coms. Even at its best mining is never that nonexistent idea cockaigne, rather, actual hard work, in rugged parts of the world, producing actual results.

To: marek_wojna who wrote (74752)	8/9/2001 6:34:24 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116912

First of all get over the impression that people have any brains. The world does not give them time to have any brains. The world does not want brains. It wants work and magic. That is why they hire experts to tell them what to do to make millions. The expert pretends to know what he is doing and provides a non solution, knowing that what the client wants is impossible to achieve with his brains. The client fails and blames the expert and/or the market. Did you know gold sticks to you, you do not have to stick to gold? Really, IKYN,LJP it sticks to your skin. I remember many moons ago, I was working on a gold claim hosing the outcrop to remove the soil so we could get at the rock and sample the veins. This was in Kirkland Lake Ontario, home of some of the world's largest hardrock gold mines. At the end of the day of playing in the dirt above the outcrop, we would go to the bar and relax. There, in the dingy barlight at night, we noticed an interesting phenomena. There were all sorts of gold sparkles on our hands and arms. Thousands of gold flakes were sticking to our skin! One of the workers remarked that he had noticed this effect before. Gold will stick to skin or leather readily. Apparently this was the secret of the golden fleece of the Jason's fabled Argonauts. People had thought that the golden fleece was a metaphor for using a sheepskin, wool side up, to capture gold in a sluice box. This is not what they did. As you could imagine, if one set a sheepskin in a sluice with tumbling rocks and scouring sand, the wool would quickly get rubbed off and not capture any gold. It was the smooth lanolin coated skin side of the sheepskin that they exposed to the slurry in the sluice. This gold-sticky surface would retain gold on the soft skin and separate it from other grains of sand and iron. Probably they did this in a secondary sluice, that was not so harsh an environment, in order to achieve a final separation. This is because they did not have any mercury or other means of separating the gold from sand of a sluice concentrate in those times. Gold is captured by organic materials. Skin oils or lanolin are what attach to the metal and glues it to skin. Ergo, the golden fleece. As any experienced prospector will tell you, the oil on your hands, or pine oil in some acidic streams, will float gold out of a pan. Look carefully at pools of irridiscent organic or "oil slicks" in quiet ponds where you may pan, and you will see a patina of gold-coloured fine flakes. These gold coloured flakes, my fren, are floating gold, aided in this by the surface tension of the oil and its ionic attraction to this metal. One can know that fine, fine gold colour is gold by the fact that any other substance would not have the reflectivity to show its colour in such a fine size. Gold will show colour of itself in a smaller size than any other substance. If a particle of, say, 1/200 of an inch were yellow pyrite, it would appear black at a distance of a few inches. Only gold will seem gold coloured. That is why the prospector knows that the finer the grain, the more likely it is gold if it's yellow. Another sure fire way of telling gold is that it seems to glow with its own light. (Glistering) This is because a gold grain has many, many surfaces of high reflection, whereas most other metals or crystals have few, and planar surfaces. Today the principle of gold's attraction to organics is used in froth flotation in mills to recover gold. Organic fatty acids coat bubbles of air in tank cells and these oil coated bubbles will grab gold from a roiling slurry preferentially to other materials. The bubbles float to the top of the cell and are raked off into launders to produce a concentrate. EC<:-}