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shine on your crazy tourmaline (or whatever)

luriete — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:09:47 -0800

When I was a kid living in La Mesa, California, my mother got to poke around in the tailings at local tourmaline and mica mines as part of weekend classes we took at the natural history museum. Are there any kinds of similar gemstone mines anywhere near where I live now - Sacramento, California - that offer similar opportunities?

Which gem mines in and around Franklin, NC should we go to?

julen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:40:39 -0800

Which gem mines in and around Franklin, NC should we go to? My family went to one (we think it was the Sheffield Mine) 20 years ago and loved it. We're finally going back, and we're looking for the best experience possible now on a summer weekday. We want decent customer service, a good variety of gems, minerals, and/or cool rocks to find, and we would prefer to not be crowded in by a flood of people pressing against us or pushed out after 2 hours. We recognize that we could very well walk out without finding something large or amazing - we're going for the experience first and foremost, although we will be taking anything we find home with us gleefully. So which mine(s) should we go to?

I'm looking for Metafilterian experiences - I've read reviews from elsewhere on the web about several of these mines, but I can tell I can't trust a significant subset of them (i.e. I'm not going to complain if I don't find the world's largest ruby, and it's not going to color my perception of the day if I do or don't find one).

How does Terapeak do it?

omnipotentq — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:03:47 -0800

How do sites like Terapeak and Hammertap get their data from eBay? I'm exploring opening an eBay store with my eBay-savvy fiance, and as someone with a systems engineering background, I see the advantage to doing research through tools like Terapeak and Hammertap before we actually decide what to sell and how to sell it. However, I'm also very intrigued by these sites from a technical perspective, and I wish I could figure out how they get their data.

So my question to all of you DBA junkies is this: How do these sites mine their data? Or do they just have a contract with eBay to get data dumps sent to them and then they parse it and deliver it to the customer? And how would you, as a DBA-savvy person, go about creating your own Terapeak or Hammertap?

Many thanks in advance!

What to do with rough sapphires?

Phyltre — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 21:55:06 -0800

I'm no lapidary but I need to separate some sapphires from the surrounding rock and polish them (slightly, I want them to stay rough, no shaping/mounting.) How can I do this without spending multiple paychecks on professional lapidary stuffs? After unexpectedly befriending the owner of the Old Pressley Sapphire Mine in NC, I got some (delicious) personal time with a chisel, hammer, and bountiful cliff side. As a result I've got several pounds of specimen sapphires still in their gleaming white surroundings...and, in a month, will probably have twice as much. They're not quite ring quality but they're beautiful grays, the sort that become cabochons. Because they're useless locked in the rock, I need to extract them. I also want to polish them slightly so they're more appreciable.

The problem is, I can't afford professional lapidary equipment. As a corollary, though, I don't need professional results--so what can I do? I've done some preliminary research online but I can't find any good resources with the obvious keywords. And I know firsthand that commonly available diamond Dremel tips grind down/disintegrate(!) when faced with rock, but maybe I need special tips? Rockhounds, unite!