Kyawthuite is so rare it's only ever been found once | Hacker News Reader

Kyawthuite is so rare it's only ever been found once

sciencealert.com

216 pointspseudolus97 comments

I'm no mineral expert but there's enough info in the TFA to suspect it's rare because no one is mining it or even looking for it. Apparently, it's very difficult to recognize in its natural form and easy to mistake for other less valuable minerals without lab testing.

It's just hard for me to imagine the natural processes that formed this grain of it didn't form a lot more of it in the region where it was found.

I would have to imagine if they find it particularly interesting it will be justified to go look for more, so it probably will not be the rarest gem for long.

The place where it was found was also where the find most of the now 2nd rarest gem Painite, supposed there are only 300 specimens found. So I'm sure miners and scientists are hunting there, especially since these gems goes for prices similar that of diamonds

According to Warren Buffet, all of the world’s mined gold would only form a 67 sq ft cube.

I think not quite; below link says a cube 22x22x22 m, which is about 67ft. But thats length side. Actual volume is just over 300k cubic feet, or in real units, 10,000 cubic meters.

https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/how-much-gold

Or about 4.26 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Finally a unit I can understand!

Suitable units can be found here:

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

Total weight is 1.6 million Sheila Broflovski's

Ah, a true answer to gold theft - esp snatch/grab, but there would be filers galore...

I would expect a cube to be measured in cubic feet rather than square feet.

That was exactly what I thought.

Comparison: "I sold my car. I got a good price -- 50kg of money!"

I mean, it may be true but it's an odd way of describing it.

It was a simple mistake. I typed “sq” instead of “cu” in bed after I woke up and fapped.

Also not a mineral expert -- I didn't really understand anything from Wikipedia's description, "monoclinic with space group I2/c, and is isostructural with...".

But since it's naturally occuring, perhaps even existing bismuth mines elsewhere have more of these rare grains, if one knows how to look for them.

The atoms in crystasl are organized in small repeated "cells". Monoclinic means that each cell has the shape of a small slanted brick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclinic . Isostructural means that other minerals have the atoms in the same arrangement.

Space group I2/c is more detailed info about where the atoms are in the small cells/slanted brick. I have no idea what it exactly means. It's a name very specific to cristalographers, sometimes the same group has a different name in math or phisics, and sometimes nobody has a similar problem to be interested in that group. You can try to take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallographic_point_group Aparently there are 6 (six!) naming conventions, but I can't find I2/c to save my life. And Google didn't help either. (I'd glad if anyone can give more info.)

So a physics stack exchange question (https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/221440/space-gro...) led me to a paper (https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/107/4/j74mig.pdf) that discusses the difference between C-centered (base-centered) cells and I-centered (body centered cells).

Long story short, I think I2/c is conventionally C2/c - https://www.globalsino.com/EM/page1891.html

This was very helpful, thanks!

It's often the very domain-specific language that hides (at least on the surface) rather simple concepts. I do appreciate how confusing software engineering terminology must seem to outsiders... zombies, chicken bits, duck typing, core affinity, etc.

If you think Wikipedia is hard to parse, try the womderful site Mindat:

https://www.mindat.org/min-46909.html

I'm a little surprised there isn't a giant k-way tie for minerals that have only been found once. Like, I get that minerals arise from natural processes, and it's a big planet, so maybe every process should have a potential to occur more than once and perhaps in more than one place -- but many kinds of natural processes create a long-tail distribution where there's a huge number of very rare things.

What if they have been found, but just not announced?

Who actually owns the stone currently? Did Kyaw Thu give it to National History Museum of Los Angeles County, or is it only housed there whilst Kyaw Thu still the owner?

Kyaw Thu is the given name. Burmese names don't use surnames/family names.

Ah, interesting thank you.

I wonder if this is the last country to not use family names. Thailand’s use of family names began in the 20th century, if I recall correctly.

Many Ugandans have two given names and no family name. And I know at least two Indonesians who only have a single name.

Iceland comes to mind, where patronyms and matronyms are still the standard.

I would consider all of surnames, patronyms, and matronyms, to be "family names" in the broad sense. They're based on who your family is, after all.

Wow. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

That isn’t how names work.

Can you be more specific, please?

Also, I hate these kinds of lists. Are we just supposed to take the author by his word? He says:

> If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.

Then why doesn't he? I'm really curious about that last one: "People have names."

A newborn baby doesn't have a name, and depending on the culture and country there could be days, months or even years before they get one.

That's already covered by points 32–36. I really want to see a counter-example to "People have names" that doesn't fall under "toddler who has yet to survive their first winter". When you're old enough that members of your community talk about you, they'll find some way to refer to you – maybe by an informal nickname, maybe by a description of kinship ("Dave's second son") – and that would be considered a name by the standards of that "falsehoods" list.

While I was reading about Burmese names, I also learned that people in Burma can change their names pretty much at will, so even the idea that a name is a stable identifier for a person is not necessarily true, not to mention the whole legal name change thing or the common practice in many Western countries of women taking there husband’s name at marriage. I remember as a kid seeing occasional pieces of mail addressed to my mom under her maiden name even though she had been married for 15 or so years at that point. (Then there was the mail that I occasionally got addressed to “Donald Lopez” thanks to badly written code misparsing the joint ownership of the home I owned with my wife before the divorce.)

> > If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.

> Then why doesn't he? I'm really curious about that last one: "People have names."

Indeed, I dare to suggest that, while there are people who don't have names, there is definitionally no real name that can disprove the misconception.

Not sure if this exactly works, but how about ‘John Doe’?

A "John Doe" [1] presumably still has a name, even if it's unknown to you specifically. That would be a counter-example to "You always know a person's name", not to "People have names".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doe

Your IT system may need to handle entries linked to people who don't have names, for example, recording that some treatment was given to a baby who died soon after birth before being given a name.

That's a good point.

I had a neighbour without a name. He was Tiwi. When a member of the tribe, higher on the totem pole than you, dies, then you lose that name for an appropriate mourning period.

An elder of reknown, with the name, died. The tribe decided that the name would never be taken again, as a matter of respect.

So, as a sign of respect, my neighbour gave up his name, permanently. His license and passport have a number, not a name.

The Icelandic surnames are not constant through generations. You can have 10 grandkids, all with different surnames.

Erik's son Leif is Leif Eriksson, Leifs kids Björn and Gudrun are Björn Leifsson and Gudrun Leifsdóttir.

Yes, this is the difference between more typically Western European surnames and patro/matronyms. Russians typically have both, many Americans of Scandinavian descent have whatever patronym their paternal n-th grandfather had when they switched customs. I believe that's become the case for many Scandinavians of Scandinavian descent as well.

But in any case, these are names which come from the family. By Appeal to Wikipedia, "family name" redirects here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname

> A surname, family name, or last name is the mostly hereditary portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family.

Which links to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic_surname

Having this sentence:

> Nearly all [[Icelandic surnames]] are strictly patronymic

Linking to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name

Where these are also described as a surname.

Note that this is different from having one, two, or several given names, as the whole of someone's name. That happens as well. Such a person has no family name, unlike someone with a surname, or surnames, be they patronymic, matronymic, or otherwise.

> I believe that's become the case for many Scandinavians of Scandinavian descent as well.

That's true. I'm Swedish, and Sweden shifted in mid/late 1800s. Some families just kept the name they had, and some made up a nice sounding family name, typically nature related.

Obligatory reading: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Dealing with a defect right now in production where an external system had assumed that a person always has a first name and a last name whereas the person just has a name, which is neither the first name nor the family name – it is just a name.

Bali also doesn’t use family names. They have a birth order name and a given name.

we don't do that for burmese names but you can guess the day of the birthdate from the names most of the time

It's nobody's Bismuth.

Well done

>There, mineralogists were able to relate the stone to synthetic BiSbO4 – bismuth antimonate – though with the formula Bi3+Sb5+O4, an arrangement never before found in nature.

How do they know it's not a synthetic stone to begin with?

They assume that as there seem to be no production for this kind of material happening within the sphere of man made industry, anything found must be natural.

No, that’s not correct: there are tubular inclusions in the gem that are a sign of shear stress, which indicates toward natural formation.

Is anyone producing it artificialy? It's a strange combination of oxides. You probably have to mix them, heat them a lot and use a lot of pressure, just to get pitty tiny cristals if you are lucky. In Wikipedia, I don't see any industrial application that can pay for tweaking the procces for years to get nice gems.

I am from Myanmar and I am sure we didn't have technology to do that. We only have like 3 hrs a day of power and 24/7 full on war festival in WJ40k style factions waging war against the Chaos lord Min Aung Hlaing. We don't have infrastructure or technology, our technology now falling back to WW1 era

Unless it's the byproduct of some other valuable process, why would anyone go to the expense and trouble of figuring out how to make it?

“It also has hollow, tube-shaped inclusions called en echelon veins that are caused by shear stress – evidence of its natural formation.”

Thanks. They put that sentence in a weird place, I had missed it too and had the same question.

How about Cummingtonite?

They say it's commonly found, but it was named after Cummington

(I found out about it by watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya_D9IwB3-s)

Did you link the right video? This is an old Onion video about a NASA mission. Was it in there somewhere?

"Her eyes are the color of magnesium iron silicate"

The writers are the Onion were probably keeping that joke in reserve for a while LOL

Hmm. I heard that, but didn't put it together.

Magnesium Iron Silicate is Olivine. It has a very distinctive olive-green color: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine.

Cummingtonite is Magnesium Iron Silicate Hydroxide. It's not a plausible eye-color: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cummingtonite.

I guess it's possible they were making this joke and flubbed it by leaving out a word?

(I looked it up because I live near Cummington MA, which it's named after)

I imagine they had to have been making the joke, because 1) it would otherwise be too random of a reference and 2) the youtubers all picked up on it lol

Are there predictive models or novel techniques such as interferometry that allow us to make better guesses where minerals and other natural resources might be located?

I've been hearing about startups driving around trying to detect gravitational distortions, or using satellite data. Are we getting better at this? Is there a lot of opportunity in the space for new methods and approaches?

I guess LLM will be amazing with proper training from scratch since they are amazing with paterns and discovering paterns

A variant of stable diffusion maybe. Not large language models.

Aren't LLMs and stable diffusion both generators? The are designed to generate a complex response to a simple prompt.

If you want to identify potential natural resource deposits, that's good old data science with some machine learning. You feed them a bunch of data and out comes a simple map with probabilities.

I suspect the relevant mining companies already have analysts who are doing everything they can to find deposits. No need for revolutionary startups.

See also https://web.archive.org/web/20160712224355/http://www.mmtime... (linked from the article)

> currently housed safely at the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.

I see that as a lead in to a heist movie.

Aside from that... I wonder if there are other samples of this material yet to be found. Also, is it the only one known because it's the only one that's been properly identified?

The rarest mineral is so rare it hasn’t been found yet

As Dick Dastardly said: I’m so sneaky, I can’t even trust myself!

Ranking minerals by "most rare" is stupid. They simply don't have enough data.

> you might mistaken it for amber or topaz

I suspect that there are dozens of other extremely rare minerals out there that have not yet been found or mistaken for different ones. Correctly estimating their relative abundance is impossible and pointless as the rarest will be single cases. In fact, the rarest mineral ever has likely not been discovered yet. I bet there is some famous math/statistics problem about this kind of situation.

And I wonder if any rare minerals have been classified by governments (or individuals) for whatever reasons. (Probably yes)

As with most pronouncements like this, you just have to mentally append "(known so far)" to the end and it will make sense. That's the implicit context for almost all of them. We can only say what we know, so far. For the reasons you stated, I don't think anyone actually thinks they know the absolute rarest mineral on earth.

Probably because it’s just a useless rock?

>>The world's only known piece of kyawthuite is currently housed safely at the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.<<

A shame that it’s not housed in a museum of its native origin.

Why is it a shame exactly?

Have you been to LA?

Do you know any good museums in Myanmar worth visiting?

none

I thought this was a thread specific throw away account due to the “kyaw”.

just my name

This kind of reasoning is self-perpetuating, though: there are no good museums here, so interesting things need to be shipped abroad to be exhibited properly, so there are no good museums here because there's nothing interesting to put in them ….

(I don't necessarily blame any individual for this—I think most of us are sometimes, or always, part of one system or another that everyone hates but that is the result of constant rational decisions.)

Could it be that the current political situation in Myanmar isn’t the most stable?

Eh, typically museums exist where there is a lot of money willing to be spent on showing things off, or spinning a narrative. Or capitals of empires that have done a lot of Looting.

Many of these things are basically variants of the same thing.

Myanmar, well…. doesn’t really have the wealth for most of those things.

This is really only a salient concern when foreigners abscond with things, but this was discovered by a Burmese geologist and it seems that it was his decision to house the mineral in the US. I would add that there is a big difference between natural science objects versus cultural artifacts.

It's lucky that the founder decided to host it at LA. It could have been gone at war if it's today, we are at full scale war now. Or the junta Chief would had traded to get some more MIGs.

As I said, it’s a shame.

Despite all evidence to the contrary.

You are pleased with the current situation in Myanmar? Do tell.

You might be replying to the wrong person, they never said they are pleased

Despite all evidence to the contrary…

Seems there is plenty to be concerned about in Myanmar.

See comment above. You are replying to the wrong person

I believe the confusion here comes from the ambiguity of the "It's a shame" comment, as it could be "It's a shame [that the gem cannot be safely stored in its home country due to the political situation]" or "It's a shame [that the gem is not stored in its home country despite the political situation]".

The "despite all evidence to the contrary" remark was in response to interpretation B when it seems interpretation A was the intended meaning.

What I believe what throwaway guy means by "despite all evidence to the contrary" is that evidence he see points that Myanmar is Fine.

Unless he says otherwise this is what I think..

What are the evidences? What are you even replying about?

“Rare” is being used in the same sense as “rare earth elements,” not in the typical, common usage of rare. The “rare” part comes from:

1. They rarely form concentrated ore deposits, instead being widely dispersed throughout rock formations

2. The elements are very chemically similar to each other, making them difficult and expensive to separate and purify for industrial use

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Or the headline

Please make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines.

Your comment would be fine with just the second sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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