Friday, January 29, 2010

Get your cameras at the ready!

The Snowden Mining photo competition is on again.

The standard of the photos has always been very good and often by the engineers etc. themselves. Actually, photography seems to be quite a popular hobby amongst engineers, maybe it appeals to their creative flair for problem solving, or maybe they're just geeks?

I saw a presentation yesterday in fact on the Canadian mining industry for CEMI (Centre of Excellence for Mining Innovation) that described the importance of mining to civilisation. It showed an interesting graph produced by an agency in the south of Ontario which demonstrated that "creatives" were found in high numbers around the major southern urban centres, but Sudbury ranked amongst the lowest for creative talent.

Now those of you who have been to Sudbury may be nodding your heads in agreement at this point, but the presenter made a good point that it all depends how you define creativity. If you choose cultural creativity, i.e. arts, then you are aligning yourself with the study, but if instead you take it to include innovative problem solving and the adoption and refinement of new techniques and processes, then the case for Sudbury's ranking to be improved becomes a little more reasonable.

I remember an applied geology professor opening a series of lectures on structural geology with the phrase, roughly recalled as best I can: "We are all artists and rock is the medium through which you have chosen to express your creativity."

Monday, January 25, 2010

Welcome

...and hello

These are my own thoughts and observations and are in no way affiliated with any of my employers, whoever they may be at a given time - you know who you are! They won't even be work or industry related all the time, but the intent for this particular blog is that they generally may be... Industry, that would be contracting and engineering, specifically for underground construction - civils or mining.

So, the title, just an observation that the underground construction industry often involves drifting (aka tunnelling) and (shaft-)sinking, so we can drift and sink without it being an aquatic adventure, but sometimes the process can feel like it is as we drift along or sink under our workloads. But on the projects, or in the companies where things really come together, then that is where it is a pleasure....