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Two Billion Light Up: The South Asian Electric Wave
…In the electric age, platinum, and quartz, and every existing substance can be melted and distilled or sublimed. Thus, mighty new industries have grown up, and many new materials made available to man, as alumnium, silicon, calcium, chromium, the carbides, cyanamid, acetolyene… Charles Proteus Steinmetz, Scientific American, 1914 […]
When a Rush Begins: A Field Guide to the Helium Hopefuls of the USA
What does it take for a marginal commodity on the fringes of speculation to transcend into a credible and fungible entity? Hype alone won’t suffice: this much can be deduced from lithium’s slow going rise-to-respectability over the 2010s. Even before this century had hit its teen years, lithium had garnered […]
Vulcan’s long shadow: Do volcanic eruptions have predictable impacts on the weather?
The skies are brass and the plains are bare, Death and ruin are everywhere; And all that is left of the last year’s flood Is a sickly stream on the grey-black mud; The salt-springs bubble and the quagmires quiver, And this is the dirge of the Darling River. — Henry Lawson Henry Lawson’s poem, […]
Goldlands
…Gold and silver have, uninterruptedly to this day, continued to be the universal currency of the commercial and civilized world … Jim Rickards, The Death of Money: The coming collapse of the International Monetary System Is gold truly universal, as is reputed by gold enthusiasts such as Jim Rickards? The universality […]
Riddle of the silver cauldron
Then there grew upon my headTwo antlers with three score pointsSo that I am rough and grey in shapeAfter my age has changed from feebleness Scél Tuáin maic Cairill In 1891, while working in a bog in northern Denmark, a group of peat-cutters stumbled upon an unusual object within the mire. A closer inspection […]
French Revolution 2020: Food wars down the streets of France
…Masses of delivery riders continue to multiply on public thoroughfares, creating living hell for residents and restaurateurs… Le Figaro, June 2021 It would be one of those times when years of change would unfold within weeks. Nowhere was this more evident than in France, the first nation in the European Union […]
Children of the Hercynian
…It is useful now to point out a distinction unknown by most. Those tribes that live inland from Massalia, as well as those around the Alps and those on the eastern side of the Pyrenees are called Celts. But those tribes in the northern area near the ocean, those near the Hercynian mountains, and those […]
Three Commodity Booms
…But when Orion and Sirius are come into mid-heaven, and rosy-fingered dawn sees Arcturus, then cut off all the grape-clusters, Perses, and bring them home Hesiod, Works and Days Ancient peoples looked to the heavens for guidance, knowing that the appearance of certain constellations in the night sky forewarned of an impending change of season. […]
