181–190 of 270 posts
I wonder what the second-order consequences will be. That is, people will still want to signal their commitment/ability to provide when proposing, so the drop in the price of diamonds won't necessarily reduce the overall outlay. Instead, it would shift the expense to another category (platinum or other expensive metals) or simply lead people to buy more carats (4 is the new 2!). In some ways, these moves could help l…
I just got engaged. When we looked at rings, the jeweler asked my fiancé if she wanted natural or synthetic, and she responded “I don’t want a blood diamond!!” Of course, mined diamonds aren’t blood diamonds, but her impression was still they were a little ickier. The jeweler told me that one reason to get a natural diamond was that the prices of lab grown diamonds had been falling, whereas natural hasn’t as much, so…
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Lab diamonds are routinely grown in the shape of giant wafers. (And then smaller parts are cut out of the wafers.) This shouldn't be that hard to get if you really want it. (I have a friend who used to have a job drawing cut plans for diamond wafers at Kyocera Unimerco.)
Hm, almost 5x the thermal conductivity of copper. Since this is HN.. let's say we were actually to build such a pan, is it practical? My first thought is that the high conductivity doesn't necessarily mean it won't, being loose and hand-wavey with terminology because I don't know it, fracture with thermal shock, like non-borosilicate glassware (don't change the temp. too quickly) say, or ceramics (don't introduce too…
I wonder how prohibitively expensive it would be to grow a ring made entirely out of diamond.
I just got engaged. When we looked at rings, the jeweler asked my fiancé if she wanted natural or synthetic, and she responded “I don’t want a blood diamond!!” Of course, mined diamonds aren’t blood diamonds, but her impression was still they were a little ickier. The jeweler told me that one reason to get a natural diamond was that the prices of lab grown diamonds had been falling, whereas natural hasn’t as much, so…
Yea lab grown diamonds are insanely cheap. You can buy them on Alibaba. A 3 carat, D VVS1 with an excellent cut is $3K.
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I did a bit of Googling and pretty much every article on the subject of clear ice includes impurities other than air: > The most common impurities found in tap water include lime (also known as limescale), calcium, fluoride, nitrates, magnesium and certain other organic elements that are practically impossible to remove with regular filtration methods. So, when water freezes, the impurities that were evenly distribut…
There are other impurities than air, but they don't contribute making the ice cloudy. The only thing making ice cloudy is the bubbles. And you can verify it experimentally in your own freezer just by using a different freezing technique to create perfectly clear ice: https://youtu.be/E1G1I1LJjrI
As evidence that directional freezing can filter out impurities other than air, I would point out that the directional freezing process is an effective enough filtration method to filter salt out of sea water in sea ice. [1] So my assumption is that those other minerals commonly found in water (lime, calcium, fluoride, magnesium, etc) are also being filtered out in the process - and it certainly seems plausible to me that filtering those out contributes to the clarity of the resulting ice.
So my intuitive understanding, along with what I could learn with a bit of googling, is that there are a number of impurities which can make ice appear cloudy including (but not limited to) dissolved air. A number of people here seem to be adamant that it's just air bubbles, so I'd honestly like to know why they believe that to be true (e.g. sources, some clear explanation, etc)? So far the only justification I've seen is "because directional freezing works" - but as explained above I really don't see that as being a sufficient justification since it filters out a number of impurities other than air.
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They are extremely hard, which is in most respects the opposite. Doesn’t take much to shatter one into a million pieces… Try hey will also burn readily at house firm temperatures
You obviously haven’t seen the video of a diamond being hit by a hammer against a steel anvil…and it was fine, even putting a dent into the anvil. You have to cleave it in just the right spot to split it - blunt force isn’t going to do it.
The reason why on an anvil you need to orient the diamond carefully to break is just because the tip needs to be facing some kind of reasonably hard material like tool steel, if it's being driven into mild steel, that will basically just act as a pillow for the diamond and allow the flat face to align parallel to the surface of hammer, minimizing the impact.
Why do I think, whenever someone male defends artificial diamonds, that it's Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory talking? There's no logic involved here.
People buy all kinds of expensive stuff because it has a brand name on the outside. It’s not what I would do, but there it is.
One of the scandals post 2008 crash was how bankers in Switzerland would use diamonds packed into tubes of toothpaste to spirit millions of dollars out of various countries. Diamonds were essentially a shadow banking system, with analogies to the way crypto exchanges work today. You put cash in to get a tiny portable stone that you could exchange for cash or deposits anywhere else in the world, and you could reliably…
Why do I think, whenever someone male defends artificial diamonds, that it's Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory talking? There's no logic involved here.
If it’s a beautiful rock on a ring, and you show it off to people and nobody can tell the difference. Make your own decision I guess? People buy all kinds of expensive stuff because it has a brand name on the outside. It’s not what I would do, but there it is.