A Greener World

I was really intrigued by the unique designs of Goodearth Homes + I think the concept of building a community of people committed to a sustainable lifestyle is brilliant + I also believe this social network could cultivate a sense of belonging which is going out of our lives incrementally due to rapid urbanization.

A great concept + I liked it.

Useful link:
www.goodearthhomes.net

'Origin' Chocolate

According to Barry Callebaut, shoppers in the United States, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, France, and Britain are starting to select their chocolate bars as they would a bottle of wine - studying the cocoa content and the origin of the beans.

Useful link:
www.barry-callebaut.com

It's intriguing to see parallels with gemstone (ruby, blue sapphire, emerald, tourmaline) origins and consumer preference (s) + in an ideal case, gemstone (s) from different countries are found in unique geological environments, with unique gemological properties, leading to one single source, if possible + if chocolate producers are able to label the origin of beans and the cocoa content with technology, why can't the gemstone industry do the same with high value colored stones? Start labeling the trace elements of colored gemstones and let the consumers decide!

Art Museums Provenance Issues

The article on Art museums struggle with provenance issues @ http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0402/p13s01-alar.html was intriguing because lack of knowledgeable experts + complicated laws have always made it difficult to figure out an object's history + this reminded me of the gem and jewelry industry: gemstones can pass through many hands on their journey from mine to consumer + the nature and number of intermediaries in the industry would make it impossible for most gem dealers/ jewelers to know the provenance of their supplies + you may also need special skills and knowledge to track their original source.

Sunstone Update

David Federman writes about natural Oregon sunstone, and similar-looking treated andesine, that's often confused, and sold as natural + other viewpoints @ http://www.colored-stone.com/stories/mar08/sunstone.cfm

Useful link:
www.colored-stone.com

Next Eleven

The Next Eleven (or N-11) is a short list of eleven countries named by Goldman Sachs investment bank as having promising outlooks for investment and future growth.

- Bangladesh
- Egypt
- Indonesia
- Iran
- Mexico
- Nigeria
- Pakistan
- Philippines
- South Korea
- Turkey
- Vietnam

Useful link:
www.gs.com

I think Africa will start playing an important role in global economy in the coming decades + the emerging markets in African countries will become with time more and more representative + we will see the US, China and the EU compete for market share one way or another + the future of Africa looks bright.

Bette Davis

I think Bette Davis is one of the greatest actress of the American cinema + my favorite is the panicky aging actress character, Margo Channing, in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 'All About Eve' (1950) + she will be remembered forever.

Useful link:
www.bettedavis.com

‘The Scream’, The Thief, And The 2 Million M&M's

Milton Esterow writes about stolen masterpieces + unique operating system (s) of 'Balkan Bandits' + other viewpoints @ http://www.artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2486

Useful link:
www.artloss.com

DSM-IV Made Easy: The Clinician's Guide To Diagnosis

DSM-IV Made Easy: The Clinician's Guide to Diagnosis by James Morrison is loaded with information and facts, interesting clinical vignettes + it's a great book.

Useful link:
www.psych.org

I have come across overly cautious or paranoid, conflicted, masked, revenging/consumed, fussy, depressed jewelers and dealers + interestingly these symptoms look like some of the mental disorder categories described in the American Psychiatric Association’s book Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Frank D Wade’s ‘Finely Cut Diamond’

(via Diamond Cuts in Historic Jewelry:1381-1910) Herbert Tillander writes:

In his book of 1916 Wade illustrates what he considers to be ‘a well made diamond’:

Table size: 40%
Crown height: 20%
Girdle thickness: 2%
Pavilion depth: 40%
Culet size: 2%
Crown angle: 35°
Pavilion angle: 41°

This differs from Morse’s 79 ct Brilliant in its circular outline, somewhat deeper pavilion, and smaller culet, but Morse also modified his ideal in the course of time.

Wade suggested virtually the same angles as Tolkowsky was to propose in 1919, but the former favored more modern shapes for the pavilion facets and did away with the disturbingly visible culet that Tolkowsky retained. Tolkowsky, on the other hand, rejected Wade’s table facet which, he claimed, favored fire at the expense of brilliance. Wade’s book and his idea of an ideal cut were obviously known to Tolkowsky when he was preparing his Treatise for publication in 1919.

The Influence Of The Far East

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

But all the time he was amusing himself he worked, not so much in the studio of Gleyre—his official place of training, but irregularly attended—as in the streets and cafés of Paris and in his rooms. He divided his time between etching and painting, and in the former he appeared almost as a master in the first ‘French Set’ published as early as 1858. In the following year he produced his first great achievement in painting, ‘At the Piano’, which, though rejected by the Paris Salon of 1859, was hung at the Roya Academy in 1860 and subsequently purchased by the Academician John Philip, R A. In this picture, which represents his half-sister, Mrs Seymour Haden, seated, playing the piano, against which her little daughter Annie, in white, is standing, Whistler already shows the influence of Velazquez. Philip was well known as an intense admirer of this master, and it was doubtless the Spanish qualities in Whistler’s painting which led the older artist to buy it. Two years later Whistler set out for Madrid with the intention of seeing the pictures by Velazquez in the Prado, but on the way he stopped at a seaside resort, where he nearly got drowned while bathing and had to return to Paris without going to Madrid.

In 1863 he made his second attempt to exhibit in the Paris Salon, and again the jury rejected his picture, the full length portrait of a young Irish girl, known as ‘Jo’, dressed in white, holding a white flower, and standing against a white curtain. ‘The White Girl’, as it was first called, was the beginning of a series of pictures in which Whistler deliberately experimented in improvising a color harmony based on the infinitely delicate gradations of one dominant color. It was afterwards entitled ‘Symphony in White No.I’

So many paintings by artists of great talent were rejected by the Salon this year that the Emperor Napoleon III intervened, and by his order a selection of the rejected works wa shown in a special room which became famous as the Salon des Refusks. Of this epoch-making exhibition more will be said, when dealing with French painters who were Whistler’s contemporaries, but for the moment it must suffice to say that among the works there exhibited was ‘The White Girl’, which elicited high praise from the more advanced critics.

From 1859 Whistler had divided his time between Paris and London, and though he had many friends and admirers in the former city, he was hurt at the lack of official recognition. In 1863 he fixed his residence in London, where several of his family were already established. Whistler’s father had married twice, and one of the daughters by his first wife had married the English surgeon Seymour Haden, who afterwards made a great reputation as an etcher. Whistler’s mother had also now left America and was living in London with her second son William, a doctor. James Whistler himself had not only stayed and exhibited in London, but had worked there, for in 1859 he had already begun the series of etechings known as ‘The Thames Set,’ which marks the culminating point of his first etching period. ‘Black Lion Wharf’ may be taken as an example of the perfection of his technique in 1859, of the lightness and elasticity of his line, and of the vivacity of the whole. Though he afterwards produced etchings, perfect of their kind, in quite another style, Whistler never did anything better in their own way than some of the plates in ‘The Thames Set’.

The Influence Of The Far East (continued)

Colored Stone + Diamond Views

With the world economy in flamefusion-flux-hydrothermal-high pressure high temperature mode, and the diamond (colored stone industry = amorphous) industry debt in US$12 billion +/-, I have always wondered why there are no IPOs in diamond/colored stone trade, a method used by many businesses to raise capital to compete in the global market + my guess is, the diamond/colored stone trade would be petrified of detailed financial information disclosure and the risk factor, especially in today's volatile economic environment.

Gold Update

According to People's Daily Online, with a recoverable reserve over 200 tons, the Yanshan gold mine in Wen county, northwest China's Gansu province under exploration will become the largest gold mine in China.

Useful link:
www.chinagoldgroup.com

A Whole Rain Forest Market

The article On the Market: a Whole Rain Forest by Bryan Walsh @ http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1726381,00.html was interesting because if the new business model allows the tropical nations to keep their trees and capitalize on them, then it's a win-win deal.

Useful links:
www.globalcanopy.org
www.canopycapital.co.uk
www.iwokrama.org

The Baltimore Museum Of Art

(via budgettravel) A must-visit exhibition @ The Baltimore Museum of Art + Looking Through the Lens: Photography 1900-1960 + the museum's tattoo design contest + Meditations on African Art: Pattern .......is on display through August 17, 2008.

Don't miss it!

Useful link:
www.artbma.org

Design And The Elastic Mind

Design and the Elastic Mind = The Future of Innovation
A wonderful exhibition is on display in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) + I think when you pair designers with scientists, it's always inspiring.

Useful link:
http://moma.org

GPS Letter Logger

I found the Economist article on GPS Letter Logger @ http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10909558 interesting + insightful + I was wondering whether the technology could be applicable in tracking gemstones, diamonds and jewelry worldwide.

Useful links:
www.trackingtheworld.com
http://trackingtheworld.com

Henry D Morse

(via Diamond Cuts in Historic Jewelry:1381-1910) Herbert Tillander writes:

Henry D Morse (1826-88) began his career as a diamond cutter in the Boston family firm of Morse, Crosby and Foss, where he was taught by Dutch specialists. To begin with he was more interested in weight retention than in refined work, but gradually, under the guidance of the instrument-maker Charles Field who became his collaborator, he abandoned the classic proportions in favor of lower main angles and smaller tables and culets. He also insisted on a regular girdle outline and the symmetrical distribution of facets.

All this, of course, involved a far greater weight loss than would have been tolerated in Europe at the time, but this problem was solved when Field invented a power-driven circular saw which could divide the rough into pieces suitable for fashioning. In fact, Field invented a number of machines for carrying out work previously done by hand.

By contributing to the revival of precision cutting, and through his ability to profit from Field’s mechanical inventions, Morse revolutionized diamond-fashioning methods. He was also responsible for changing the attitude of American jewelers to the details of make—that is, the quality of gem diamonds. This attitude was reflected by W R Cattelle in 1911: ‘A diamond....if it is poorly proportioned, shows an equal distribution of light and brilliancy at all distances from the eye. The center under the table is as full of light as the edge facet, because the back facets are holding the light which has entered from the front. If the stone were cut too deep or too shallow, part of the light would pass through the back facets and leave a dark center, called a ‘well in a deep stone, or ‘a fish-eye’ in a shallow stone.’

Of course, symmetry is as important as correct proportions. It was already considered so in the Table Cut era, rated even more highly during the period of precision cutting in London, and then forgotten again. Morse reintroduced the concept of perfect symmetry, but its importance was not stressed in print until 1916 when Wade stated: ‘The well-cut stone must be perfectly symmetrical. All the facets of a given set should be alike in size and shape. No additional facets should appear....The make of the girdle should be especially scruitinized.’

Wade went on to describe te debt owed to Morse by the diamond cutting industry: ‘When Henry Morse, of Boston, made a really scientific study of the effect of the brilliant upon the light which entered it and found out the angles which gave the best possible results, and then religiously cut his diamonds in accordance with what he had found out, little room for improvement was left. A fine five-carat Morse cut which the writer has seen is about as handsome as any diamond to be found among stones more recently cut. There has been some further refining of the lines and angles, but the ideal brilliant is not far from the shape that Morse gave his stones.

‘The necessity of sawing the rough, in order to save weight and thus cheapen the finished product, has brought us a flatter-topped stone with deeper back. It is very good, but certainly no better, everything considered, than the full-fashioned brilliant of the Morse type.’

The first of two important stones known to have been fashioned by Morse is the Dewey Diamond, a well-shaped rounded octahedron that was discovered in Virginia in 1855, the largest crystal to have been found in the United States. It originally weighed about 24.35 ct and had two large flaws, one on either side. Despite this, Morse was able to produce a Brilliant with a weight loss of only 51 per cent. Presumably he used classic proportions as this was towards the beginning of his career. The final weight of the fashioned diamond was about 12 ct.

The second diamond of which we have details is discussed and illustrated by the eminent American gemologist, Joseph O Gill (1976). In its rough state the diamond weighed about 128 ct and, after fashioning, 78.92 ct—a weight loss of 61.1 per cent. Sawing was not necessary as the rough octahedroid crystal had a rounded bipyramidal form with a height equal to its width. We cannot calculate its exact proportions from Morese’s report because the figures he gives for the main angles do not tally with his sketches, but they are likely to have been within the following ranges:

Table size: c. 49%
Crown height: 18 – 20%
Girdle thickness: (included in crown and pavilion)
Pavilion depth: 39 – 42%
Culet size: c. 5%
Crown angle: 35 – 38°
Pavilion angle: 38 – 41°

These are simply the proportions favored by the rough, so we cannot take them as necessarily represented Morse’s ideal.

It is remarkable how far Morse succeeded in making a slightly cushion-shaped Brilliant appear circular by applying as good as eightfold symmetry all over. He considerably lengthened the lower girdle facets which, in the classic Standard Brilliant, were supposed to be the same as the upper girdle facets (round the turn of the century O M Farrand elongated them further, from 75 percent to nearly 90 percent of the distance from the girdle to the culet). The culet on Morse’s diamond is a relic of the time when this small facet acted as a reflector. Today it would be considered ‘a disturbing spot, seen through the table.’

The yellow Brilliant in the Grϋnes Gewölbe, Dresden, fashioned in the early part of the eighteenth century, is surprisingly similar to Morse’s 79 ct diamond. Only the faceting of the pavilion differs. Obviously, also, the Baroque stone lacks modern precision. The gem weighs about 13.5 ct and has a diameter of 15mm.

Table size: c.50%
Crown height: 19.7%
Girdle thickness: thin
Pavilion depth: 39.3%
Culet size: very small
Crown angles: 33.3° (average)
Pavilion angles: 39° (average)

The Influence Of The Far East

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

2

Among the artists of the nineteenth century Whistler holds a unique position. He was the first great painter of American birth to win universal renown. His life was a long struggle against hostile criticism and misunderstanding, and he defended his art and his ideals with the pungent brilliancy of a wit and with the undaunted pugnacity of a soldier. By example and precept he eventually revolutionized English ideas about art and interior decoration. He compelled people who stubbornly repeated ‘Every Picture tells a Story,’ to realize at long last that every picture ought to sing a tune, that is to say, it ought to utter forth a melody of line and harmony of color; in a word, he compelled all England and the United States to recognize the decorative as well as the illustrative element in painting. More than any other English-speaking man Whistler opened our eyes to the true value of Velazquez and Hokusai, and he invented a new style of portraiture in which Spanish realism was exquisitely wedded to a Japanese sense of decoration. A stranger within our gates, he revealed England to the English and recorded both in his etchings and in his paintings poetic aspects of London’s riverside, aspects to which hitherto all artists had been blind, aspects the beauty of which all can now see.

Whistler was born on July 10, 1834, at Lowell, in Massachusetts, and was baptized there with the Christian names of James Abbott. This second name he dropped in later life and substituted for it his mother’s maiden name, McNeill. His father, Major George Washington Whistler, after leaving the United States army, became a railway engineer, and in 1842 journeyed to Russia with his wife and family: he had been appointed chief adviser of the railway under construction between Moscow and Petrograd. The most important consequence to James Whistler of this boyhood stay in Russia was that in Petrograd he learnt to speak French fluently. His father died in 1849, when the widow returned with her children to the United States.

Following in his father’s footsteps, James Whistler in 1851 entered the military college of West Point, but after three years of desultory study he was dismissed, chiefly owing to his deplorable failure in chemistry. The first question in his oral examination floored him completely, and later in life Whistler humorously said, ‘If silicon had been a gas I might have become a general in the United States army.’ Even from his Russian days Whistler had shown a remarkable capacity for drawing, and his delight in sketching prompted his relatives, after his West Point failure, to obtain for him a post as draughtsman in the Government Coast Survey Department at Washington, thinking that this occupation might be more congenial to him. To some extent it was, for here he learnt to engrave and etch, and he executed an excellent plate of a view taken from the sea, of cliffs along the coast; but the fancy heads and figures which he irrelevantly added in the margin showed that he could not take his topographical studies seriously as a preliminary to map-making, but only as an excuse for sketching. In February 1855 he resigned his position, and the end of the year found him an art student in Paris.

Many painters have spent joyous student-days in Paris, but few of them bear the traces of it in their lives as Whistler did. He had barely turned twenty-one when he arrived in Paris, and his high-spirited temperament and sense of fun delighted in all the antics which then distinguished the Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. In those days the art students lived a life apart, making themselves noticed by wearing unorthodox clothes, playing all sorts of practical jokes, affecting to despise the common mortal, and never so happy as when they succeeded in shocking and bewildering what they called the ‘bourgeois’. Whistler plunged hot-foot into this way of life, and, as the distinguished French critic M Théodore Duret, who knew him well, has remarked, there was grafted on him ‘the habit of a separate pose, whimsical attire, a way of despising and setting at defiance the ‘vulgur herd’ incapable of seeing and feeling like an artist. This combination of the distinctive chaaracteristics of a French art student and the manner of an American gentleman, in a man otherwise full of life, spirit, and individuality, made of Whistler a quaint original who could not fail to be remarked everywhere.’

The Influence Of The Far East (continued)

Every Disaster Tells A Tale We Can Learn From

(via HBS Working Knowledge) I found the article Sharpening Your Skills: Disaster! @ http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5881.html brilliant + useful.

Ancient Gold Jewelry Made In The Americas

It has been reported that the earliest known gold jewelry with either greenstone or turquoise, made nearly 4,000 years ago, has been found in a burial site near Lake Titicaca, Peru + the experts believe the gold was probably wrapped around a piece of wood and pounded until it was folded into small tubes to look like jewelry.

I think it's an interesting find + it also highlights the status-consciousness of the early people.

Useful link:
www.pnas.org