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USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

usgs.gov

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Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#211

Post by jncfhnb »

prog_1 wrote: post #193
jncfhnb wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XGBoost models are random forest models. They’re also just consistently better for very little effort.

you surely mean that both are ensemble models. RFs and GBMs differ in how they fit the data

A GBM like XGBoost is an ensemble of trees. It may be that when you load RandomForest modules they fit based on entropy or whatever the typical DecisionTree does but imo the term “random forest” should really convey nothing more than “ensemble of trees”.

I’m saying XGBoost would be a subclass of RF

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#212

Post by volkl48 »

lightedman wrote: post #161
silisili wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

37th/50 isn't good. But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely). This same ranking puts states like South Dakota and Indiana ahead, which I'm sure many would object to all the same. This is the second day in a row I've watched threads about Arkansas of all places devolve into these nasty generalities(yesterday's was about WalMart and Bentonville). I don't live in A…

"But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely)." Well, here's why it sucks, just so you can feel better. 1. the apartment rental industry is outright violating a court order that basically sets late fees and needs to outright face criminal charges. See Orozco v Casimiro 2. Ill-advised farmers up north are consuming tons of water on crops that make zero sense, and in…

> Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.

I feel like it's extremely misleading to give this example without providing surrounding context.

"Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today.

It's not very obvious at all that it makes sense to spend money replacing the 100+ timber bridges along the stretch rather than just abandoning most of the road/downgrading it to a 4WD road with no bridges - although repairing/rebuilding it does seem to be what San Bernadino County hopes to eventually do.

Many of the bridges, while partially failing due to age, are also failing due to flooding damage - which is what caused the 3 ton weight restrictions to go in place in the first place and the sections that have been closed since 2014/2017.

-------

Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population, and there's basically zero regional significance to the closure beyond mildly inconveniencing a few people in Amboy who can now only go West to get to I-40/civilization. (Especially since most reports I've seen suggest you can continue to the unpaved/rarely traveled Cadiz Rd anyway, which was the only connection that could only be accessed from the closed section).

The road from Ludlow to the Dish Hill Volcano is open, just less convenient if you used to get to it from the East.

Citation: https://dpw.sbcounty.gov/operations/road-closures/

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#213

Post by Ancapistani »

snakeyjake wrote: post #28
thesuitonym wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume any positive effects are balanced out by living in Arkansas.

People downvoted you to the point that your comment is grayed out and about to be hidden but there is hardly metric by which Arkansas is not in the bottom ten on a list of states. Infant mortality rate? 3rd most deadly for babies. Poverty rate? 7th poorest. Homicide rate? 7th most dangerous. Obesity rate? 3rd fattest. Practically any map of any measurable statistic where states are colored red for "bad" and green for…

Our unofficial state motto is "Thank God for Mississippi!"

If not for them, we'd be at the bottom of most of those lists. No one pays attention to the second-worst :)

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#214

Post by anon291 »

EA-3167 wrote: post #45
idontwantthis wrote: post #40

Say Lithium becomes essentially free because we find so much of it…would that drastically lower battery costs? Is our current supply of lithium limiting production?

The major limiting factor of lithium is not really availability so much as the cost of extraction. China is the leader in this field, not so much because of abundance or stellar technology, but out of a willingness to completely ignore environmental externalities (including those of the power generation involved in the whole process). As a result the price of Chinese lithium is low enough that it would be essentially…

The obvious answer is tariffs.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#215

Post by hinkley »

rootusrootus wrote: post #32
hinkley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only experience with Arkansas was waking up to a speeding ticket at 3 in the morning. Who puts out a speed trap at 3 in the fucking morning? But if it’s anything like Oklahoma…

I would have guessed better results in the 1am to 2am time slot, but 3am is not totally out of line. I bet the fraction of drivers at 3am that are drunk is much higher than at, say, 3pm.

I think that is a socially damning statement about Arkansas if the drunks are still out driving at 3 am.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#216

Post by hinkley »

lightedman wrote: post #158
hinkley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only experience with Arkansas was waking up to a speeding ticket at 3 in the morning. Who puts out a speed trap at 3 in the fucking morning? But if it’s anything like Oklahoma…

"Who puts out a speed trap at 3 in the fucking morning?" Cops trying to catch drunks speeding home after the bars have closed. In the south, last call was 2:45AM where I served as a freshly-turned 21 year old.

Good god.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#217

Post by _heimdall »

pfdietz wrote: post #210
volkl48 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thacker Pass appears to be federally owned (Bureau of Land Managment) land. The public does own this land and does deserve some degree of a say in what's done with it. I have no issue with this project, and I certainly don't think that means a loud but tiny opposition should be able to derail it, just noting that this isn't private property and thus public oversight should be higher.

Yes, and that degree of say comes in the form of voting.

This is a particularly tricky year to argue voting, particularly for the president, is the right level of public oversight. We were offered two candidates with comparatively little say or visibility (compared to the last few decades) during the primaries.

Trump effectively sat out of the primary season, though primary voters did overwhelmingly support him they did so without ever having the chance to hear him pressed during a debate or contentious interview. There is at least a case with Trump to argue voters already knew they wanted him and simply didn't need a primary, the democrats don't have that argument to make.

The democrats didn't even bother to have a primary and went out of their way to pressure debate organizers to block Kennedy entirely before swapping out their candidate last minute.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#218

Post by jofer »

pfdietz wrote: post #146
jofer wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are expensive and are avoided when possible. Brine ponds are cheap if you can use them. But with that said, yeah, evaporation ponds don't work especially well on the Gulf Coast.

The process for here, I was reading, would involve concentration of the lithium with resin absorbers (to separate it from other alkali elements, I imagine), followed by elution into water, reverse osmosis, and only then evaporation. This is called "DLE": Direct Lithium Extraction.

Yes, but that's among the most expensive ways of approaching the problem. In regions where it's feasible, evaporation approaches are far cheaper, which is why they're still the most widely used approach. In humid regions with a lot of precipitation like the gulf coast, though, you have to take more expensive and energy-intensive approaches to concentrate things.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#219

Post by Animats »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #168
diggernet wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your description of the location of this mine doesn't match your Wikipedia link. Searching in Google Maps, Thacker Mine comes up as 40.58448942010599, -117.8912129833345. As you say, that is near I-80 and Mill City, and there is nothing there. But Wikipedia says it's at 41.70850912415866, -118.05475061324945 in the McDermitt Caldera, nowhere near Mill City or I-80. I'm thinking probably don't trust Google on this one…

I don't trust latitudes and longitudes that are precise down to the nanometer. :) 4-5 digits should be enough for any use outside of surveying, that's a precision of 10 meters and 1 meter respectively. Even Wikipedia is making me suspicious by using hundredths of arc seconds, despite linking the document that came from. How do you localize a mining site down to a single foot?

Right. If you look at the area in Google Earth, you can see lots of small dirt roads and little round areas which are probably test drilling sites, spread over tens of square kilometers. Like most open-pit mines, it will be big.

If you want exact coordinates, here's the future mine entrance in Google Earth.[1] The county or state widened the road, put in a turn-off, added turning lanes, and posted a "Mine Entrance" road sign. The turn-off dead ends within ten meters at the property line, as of when the picture was taken. The mine hasn't built their side yet.

[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/Thacker+Pass/@41.6994929...

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#220

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

pfdietz wrote: post #210
volkl48 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thacker Pass appears to be federally owned (Bureau of Land Managment) land. The public does own this land and does deserve some degree of a say in what's done with it. I have no issue with this project, and I certainly don't think that means a loud but tiny opposition should be able to derail it, just noting that this isn't private property and thus public oversight should be higher.

Yes, and that degree of say comes in the form of voting.

That's not at all how our system works. This is comically wrong.
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