Journal Comment
A monthly publication devoted to scientific transactions and specialist technical topics is unlikely to be on the priority reading list of the majority of the mining and metallurgical community. But it is the ambition of the Publication's Committee to make the Journal of much wider interest to our general membership from technician trainees to mine managers to CEO's of our constituent companies. It is to entice general readership that some 1200 words of valuable space are devoted to the Journal Comment each month. This is intended to highlight some of the features and impact of the papers to excite and activate attention.
To entice this preliminary glance before confining the publication to the book shelf or even the wpb, the author has to call on a large measure of journalistic licence in style, titles and quotations. It is essential to be spicy, controversial and even provocative to separate it from the abbreviated authoritative but necessary scientific style of the bulk of the contents.
The Journal Comment aims to be an enticement to dig into some important feature of the papers in the issue. For this reason it has been decided to include it as a separate item on the Institutes Web Site. This might provoke those who enjoy twittering, blogging and googling to submit comment and criticism, all of which will be welcomed and responded to. At least it is proof that somebody has read it.
R.E. Robinson
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Created: Saturday, 01 October 2011 00:00
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Written by RE Robinson
“History must be written of, by and for the survivors, Anonymous
There is a wealth of interesting reading in this issue with papers taken from the recent PyroMetallurgy Conference. It is possibly one of the most pleasing editions we have published with items from our University departments of mining and metallurgy, and our research institutions of highly significant and scientific research stature. Also it focuses on topics representing great future wealth potential.
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Created: Monday, 01 August 2011 02:00
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Written by RE Robinson
‘Good prose is the selection of the best words……’ Poetry is the best words in the best order; And journalese (legalese) is any old words in any old order’ In a letter (1987) to the Times of London.
There is much food for thought in the papers in this issue, which were selected from a workshop that was held last year on the Health and Safety Acts in South Africa. Three of the papers by W. Le Roux are in the form of a digest and commentary, specifically as valuable guidelines for those in the industry.
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Created: Friday, 01 July 2011 02:00
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Written by RE Robinson
‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job’, Winston Churchill, 1941
The highest priority in South Africa is job creation, and this also applies to most of Africa. On a time scale that is critical, this can come about only through international investment and assistance.
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Created: Wednesday, 01 June 2011 02:00
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Written by RE Robinson
“Science is built of facts, as a house is built of stones; But an accumulation of facts is no more a science Than a heap of stones is a house Henri Poincaré 1854–1912
Once again, the Journal presents a miscellaneous group of papers, rather than a collection from a colloquium or conference. All of them represent facts and footsteps forward in areas of importance in Mining and Metallurgy, rather than the final chapters in a new plant or mining enterprise
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Created: Sunday, 01 May 2011 02:00
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Written by RE Robinson
‘Every revolution evaporates, Leaving behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy’ Franz Kafka 1883–1924
There is no common theme such as a topic of a conference in this issue, but rather a collection of papers from different countries and different subjects.
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Created: Friday, 01 April 2011 02:00
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Written by RE Robinson
The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: ...Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is well possible in a certain sense to prolong our lives backwards by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as well as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life. Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp.
The papers in this issue are a selection of the best presentations at a colloquium of undergraduate student projects held between the mining and metallurgical orientated faculties in Pretoria and Johannesburg, together with students from the Tshwane and Vaal Universities of Technology.
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Created: Tuesday, 01 March 2011 02:00
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Written by RE Robinson
‘In its short commercial life, titanium has been tagged ‘the wonder metal’. As strong as steel, it weighs only half as much; Heavier than aluminium, it is twice as stong’. Time Magazine 11 August 1952
The papers in this issue are a selection from the ‘Advanced Metals Initiative: The Light Metals Conference 2010’, held at the CSIR, the home of much of the materials science work in the last few decades.
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Created: Tuesday, 01 February 2011 02:00
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Written by RE Robinson
‘Do you know who made you’ ‘Nobody, as I knows on said the child, with a short laugh I ‘spect I grow’d’. Topsy, in Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
It was in 1924 that Hans Merensky first reported the presence of the platinum group metals (PGMs) on the rim of the largest and most complex igneous extrusion known.
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Created: Saturday, 01 January 2011 02:00
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Written by RE Robinson
Apuleius, Roman philosopher (124–170 AD).
From the time that mining involved working in holes in the ground, it has been considered a dangerous occupation. It is obviously so because of the possibility of the walls, the hole, or the roof of a tunnel collapsing on the miners.
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Created: Wednesday, 01 December 2010 02:00
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Written by RE Robinson
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new’
It is appropriate that the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy devote an issue of its Journal to the 12th International Ferroalloys Conference, even though published proceedings are available.
