The Wantok Geoscience Site

What is it with rotation conventions and mining software providers? Every company seems to want to use a unique, individual method of defining the rotation and then  provide a set of instructions guaranteed to confuse anyone who attempts to read them. I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed and I like to think I am not stupid but working out what rotation has been used to estimate a resource sometimes does my head in. If you use Surpac, and if someone gives you a model  estimated using Vulcan the rotations discussed in the paperwork (assuming the author got it correct in the first place) are different. But it is different again in Datamine where it seems you simply make it up as you go along! I reviewed a model done using Datamine where every domain used a different rotation convention (Dom1 = 3:2:1, Dom 2 = 3:1:3, Dom 3 = 3:1:2). And when I tried to create a search ellipse to match these rotations I simply could not get one to match the smoothing trend I could see i...

Fibro, geology and martial arts – my fibromyalgia story It’s November again, the muscle ache has flared up again, the arthritis is in the joints, the fatigue is back, there is that touch of insomnia, but there is also something new this year. At random occasions some mongrel darts in from somewhere and rams a knife into my thighs, the sharp pain I can live with but when the collapsing leg damn near caused me to throw my recently purchased coffee into the bushes I was seriously pissed. Yep, another anniversary of getting sick has rolled around, the 19 th in all. Working in Nicaragua So where did it start, it was 1998 and I was working in Nicaragua as a field geologist kicking rocks and dodging jaguars (and Rebels with rifles and bloody little black and white monkeys that constantly threw stuff at me – the content of which I prefer not to think of). Trudging around the hills and mountains, through rainforest and up creeks… many, many creeks… in northern Nicaragua. Now anyone ...