311–320 of 455 posts
> The new synthetic diamonds will come in pink, blue and white, and the stones will contain a tiny Lightbox logo. De Beers said the logo won't be visible to the naked eye, but it will make the stones easily identifiable as lab-grown. This would suggest that it's not easy to identify lab-grown diamonds from other diamonds.
What drives the female desire to have an expensive engagement ring in the USA? I'm not criticising anyone for desiring one, but I've never asked easier. I like the idea of wearing rings, but I'd do something more exotic and rare, like iridium or something.
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Compare synthetic vanilla flavouring vs plant based. Same molecule, but big price difference.
Something is different though - vanilla flavouring doesn't taste nearly as good as real vanilla. I guess the vanilla contains a spectrum of substance, whereas the flavouring only contains the main one?
Vanilla is actually vanilla - it's a complex substance. Artificial vanilla is just one component of vanilla - vanillin.
My wife and I got married without buying a diamond ring. I simply refused to spend money in things that are overvalued by the market because some marketing scheme was so strong that it made facts look silly. I told her that I refuse to spend money on things that cause other people pain. Especially when there is no guarantee that the diamond we buy are not blood diamond. Instead we invested our money in buying things…
It's great that diamond mining is starting to fade from human history. It will take a while. The mall jewelry shops are still advertising the engagement-ring "one month's wages" schtick.
My snarky electrican engineer pal puts it this way. "Sure, crystals can put you touch with the whole universe. But you have to build them into circuits first!"
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I'm pro nuclear, but given that the side effects on the oceans and hence the entire planet are still to be accounted for and that we won't know before decades, I find that comment quite arrogant. It's also discarding the real suffering of all the people that were affected by the 3 major nuclear accidents. I have a friend of mine who his medicated for life because of Chernobyl. Black and white are rarely the winning c…
> I'm pro nuclear, but given that the side effects on the oceans and hence the entire planet are still to be accounted for and that we won't know before decades, I find that comment quite arrogant. The ocean already has about 4.5 billion tons of naturally-occurring uranium in it, as well as many other radioactive substances. Fukushima wouldn't have made a significant difference in that figure if they'd ground up the…
Intensity and locality are important factors. You can eat a spoonfull of sugar everyday for a year and be ok, but eating 365 in one day is going to be a different story.
Because ocean are very complex an interactive system, and local intense event can then have a domino effect on the rest.
Now as I said, we don't know the effects yet. I'm not pretending I know if it's bad either. That's the meaning of "we don't know".
But given we have only one planet and we kinda sitting on it, it seems very silly to me to state "nah, we'll be fine" and discard risks. That's how teenagers react.
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Mineral name wise, sapphires are a type of corundum. Usually blue, sometimes green, yellow, orange, or others, depending on various metals mixed into it. But if it’s red (via chromium) it’s a ruby instead. Clear crystalline aluminum oxide you’d generally just call corundum (or aluminum oxide if you’re not feeling fancy), but that doesn’t market as well when you’re making watch faces and camera lenses out of it, so I…
The names ruby and sapphire are not marketing driven; they are color terms that long predate the development of chemistry to the point where we could determine what gems were. Many famous historical "rubies" are not corundum but spinel; they were called rubies because "ruby" was the term for any red gemstone. "Moissanite" is purely marketing, though.
Interestingly enough, this starts to bring up questions that have previously only been super active in science fiction circles, particularly, Star Trek: If you can perfectly recreate something down to the molecular level, what actually has value? (Assuming, someday, that synthetic versions are excessively cheap, in Star Trek's case.) If you can replicate cooked food perfectly, will people still claim that "real" food…
The problem is that value for the unseeable differences is simply a human idea. Why would the paint arranged on a canvas by a famous artist have more value than the same paint arranged on the same canvas by myself? Value comes in the appreciation of the art. So diamonds that have been created over billions of years probably has more appreciation than ones created in 500 hours, even if they are exactly the same at the…
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The problem is that value for the unseeable differences is simply a human idea. Why would the paint arranged on a canvas by a famous artist have more value than the same paint arranged on the same canvas by myself? Value comes in the appreciation of the art. So diamonds that have been created over billions of years probably has more appreciation than ones created in 500 hours, even if they are exactly the same at the…
Really? I think its just status signalling.