tommykins

I don't code much anymore, the vast majority is reviews the only time I really need to get on the tools is if it's a concept that I need to teach someone, or more likely, something has gone quite badly wrong and it's 2100 and I don't feel like waking anyone.

Making me do math on my lunch break? This is outrageous

Ah spatial autocorrelation, my old friend.

Very good work - but typically we don't build prospectivity models this way (or rather we don't validate them this way anymore). Great to see the USGS starting to dip their toe back in this though, they and the GSC were long the leaders in this, but have dropped it on the last 5-7 years.

Strong recommendation is to read any other source of this news, not the Jo Nova nonsense spin of it.

I like KoBold a lot, but this is a wild take on what has happened so far - a traditional mining exploration technique found this deposit, KoBold then brought into this as a typical cashed up midtier/large miner would and haven't released a resource and reserve calculation at all.

Not really the point but AI generated music recommendations have been great for me.

As someone who uses Machine Learning to predict the presence of Talc I approve of this, even if I have no use case for it whatsoever.

I will never understand the use of Stata to achieve anything.

Welcome to the world of resource and reserve calculations, where the numbers are made up and the points don't matter.

It's very easy to come up with a back of the envelope calculation to say we have this much Lithium, or this much Copper and come up with an absolute whopper of a number, the question is how much of it is recoverable and can it form part of a resource. There's a reason we (mining industry) don't let people produce these kind of numbers offhand, it's wildly speculatory and holds no basis in mining reality (yet!) - however very cool stuff and might provide a new exploration target in the future.

Oh man - there's actually a much cooler version of this scenario, which is Sudbury impact crater, which was a massive Nickel deposit that was 'enriched' by the impact crater that hit it, not by adding Nickel, but by adding heat into the system.

Oh interesting - in Australia the current go to theory is Hydrogen leakage.

I think it's worth reading the article mate, it's talking about how they observed that satellite emissions and the effect it could have on their research and the things they do.

Nick Cave and HackerNews intersection is not something I saw coming.

I think is true for >general< data science houses and firms that offer Data Science across any domain - I'm generally wary of anyone who writes about Data Science as a concept, rather than the use of Data Science to solve a particular problem in a particular domain, the rise of the Machine Learning bros is very real.

Fly into a blind panic, normally.

Not US based but have done work in Nevada, Arizona + Utah and might be able to answer your question.

The major problem for copper is the lack of large projects in the pipeline - current mineral explorers are entering a new phase of what they need to look for and it's a super exciting time to be working in Exploration, honestly.

P.S - Incredibly biased as I work in Mineral Exploration.

It's more to do with the overall intensity of the anomaly. If you'd like to become thoroughly confused, I'd recommend looking up remnant magnetisation, which is the bane of my existence.

I'm not sure I'm quite following your train of thought, is the implication that offshore wind farms are going to have a greater negative effect on the planet than our current energy mix? I don't think anyone who works in this field from a technical level has an opinion that you can plonk down a solar panel farm and have a net zero effect on the local environment, but there's a bunch of examples of where there's been an accidental positive feedback loop that's occurred with solar panels in certain regions. This is specifically not cited by the article.

Apologies for the lack of clarity in that sentence, there is a recognition that intermittence is one of the biggest challenges that is currently faced by the power grid in it's current form. But we actually have ways to get around this currently, it's just very rare for them to be put in place (there's also some large omissions from the current state of the South Australian power grid that is mentioned).

We still have to explore for coal as an industry, too. So should we presume that the moment our current coal reserves run out that this is the end of all coal power?

No.

Anyways, no-one has really made a case for renewables being a silver-bullet who works in energy policy, I would not be inclined to use this article as a touchstone for the problems the industry faces.

Holy Moly. For the first time ever I'm nearly an expert on something on HN.

There's quite a few arguments in here which run the gamut from 'interesting point that people who work on clean energy think about a lot' to 'very close to, if not a straw man argument'

There are some really interesting micro-biome studies that show there are local effects that are caused by wind turbines and solar arrays, I don't think I've ever seen a study which has said that the amount of carbon produced by these local changes in biomes is anywhere near the carbon saved by the move to renewables.

The REE exploration problem is also a good point on current EVs, but there's a good chance that new batteries will have no Cobalt in them at all (as an aside, the reason that companies are looking to migrate from it has little to do with the scarcity, but more to do with the fact that it's largely mined in very, very poor ways, I'm looking at you, Glencore).

The point about intermittency and "Wind and solar promoters need to start admitting that they are not capable of providing this type of continuous and on-demand electricity supply on a national scale that modern societies are used to" is not an overly well made one, there are a bunch of ways around this and it's one of the biggest challenges being faced today in the industry. HDR, battery technology have come a long way in the last little bit.

Anyways, take the article with a grain of salt as you should do with everything.

I have 5 tabs open with emails written ready to send at some point. Had issues saving drafts, too.