Great Blog

Great Blog – I suspect Ross also adds in his bit?

The Bre-X analogy is spot on, though from personal experience I sometimes wonder whether we see too much good in the usual suspects.

Not to mind, time will show all and our “gut feelings” will be vindicated.

Great Blog, just discovered it and will report on it, where appropriate, on Henry Thornton’s SMERSH Section. I have already done so, by the way.

You make an important analogy of the Mann et al episode to the Bre-X scam. Most monumental stuff ups occur from human imperfection, including egos and what, not producing acute embarassment which often results in irrational reactions that are mis-interpreted.

The biggest issue with quantification of data of a geoscientific nature involves understanding the sample-volume-variance phenomeon, dealt at length in Koch and Link, 1972. Subsequent research, mainly in the discipline of geostatistics, (that of Krige, Blais and Carlier, Fritz Achterberg, etc, has not resolved this problem.

In the diamond mining game random statistical theory is workable for primary diamond deposits but geo-statistics fails (and conventional statistics totally) in dealing with diamond distribtions in alluvial diamond deposits.

Diamond distribution in hydraulic systems, whether marine or terrestrial, in which turbulence is the dominant physical process, has resisted analysis. Like climate systems, in which coupled, non linear chaotic systems dominate, prediction seems impossible for the moment.

But considering the amount of money we, in the diamond business, have thrown at the issue, no serious diamond explorer looks at alluvial diamond deposists. Mind you some are profitable, or seem to be, but from experience, it is literally impossible to predict, from a statistical sense, the diamond grade of a block of ore in an alluvial diamond deposit.