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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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