The Denver and the SME Conference was another chance to see the human face of the mining industry and to find out about new products and processes that may be of use at your mine. Having set up our booth, I wandered away to see what was new and different. 

 Here are four that caught my attention:

1. From California the sales rep from Hilfiker Retaining Walls, a family-owned business building earth retaining walls for mines. She told me of graduating thirty years ago with a degree in economics and joining the firm to market to the civil industry. Now with boom times in mining they are building reinforced earth walls for mines across the country: I am going to have to get more information on their projects at specific mines, but I am convinced there is no end of cost-saving opportunities in their products for your mine. 
2. From Kansas State University, Richard G Nelson has worked on turning corn into biodesiel for use in underground mine equipment. Apparently, the result is cleaner underground air. I can’t wait to get to Iowa and the corn-clean air around the farm and the ethanol plants that are springing up like spring corn even if some say this is the most inefficient way to get gas and my income-poor kids find the cost of chicken and pork rising fast. I have invited him to post more on TechnoMine so we can all benefit from his knowledge and the benefits of clean underground air. 
3. From Austria, the rep from Hilti who has a new rock anchors that seems to be superior to any I have hitherto seen or read about. Seems it is more expensive than others, however. But before we could get into to detail about how and why a mine would buy a more expensive rock anchor, they turned off the lights and kicked us out. I will have to return to probe deeper and beg harder for a large size orange shirt like those they all wear. The shirts are magnificent. 
4. And then I went to supper with the geologist from Spokane. Her son is in the National Guard and about to go to the middle east. My son is in the Navy and who know where he is now, but it is somewhere near Iraq and Iran. We did not talk mining, but talked rather of politics and war, of young men and heroes, of life and death. Yet I could not resist the truth that seemed to flow from discussions with her, with the people on the floor of the SME exhibition hall, and the very nature of what our sons are striving for and may yet have to fight for. And this is the simple truth of human nature—I repeat and edit for context from The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker:

Human beings are neither inherently altruistic nor selfish. Instead they are conditional cooperators and atruistic punishers.  Human beings have a predisposition to cooperate with others, and to punish (even at personal cost if necessary) those who violate the norms of cooperation, even when it is implausible to expect these costs to be recovered at a later date. In essence, people try to follow the Golden Rule, but with a slight twist: do unto others as you would have them do unto you (i.e., conditional cooperation) but if others do not do unto you, then nail  them, even at personal cost to yourself (i.e., altruistic punishment.) People have a highly developed sense of whom they can trust and whom they cannot, to whom they owe favors and who owes favors to them, and whether they are being taken advantage of. As the old adage says, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” 

There is a debate as to how much of this behavior is genetic versus cultural, but there are three pieces of evidence that point strongly to a genetic basis. First is the fact that strong reciprocity shows up in widely varying cultures—no society has been found that does not exhibit some form of it, thus indicating that its origins are not purely cultural. Second is the fact that similar behaviors have been observed in a number of primate species. And third, a biochemical basis for behavior has been discovered in oxytocin, a brain hormone that plays a critical role in generating feelings of trust and eliciting cooperation in humans. Although strong reciprocity appears to be universal, there is, however, a great diversity of ways in which different societies exhibit and enforce the behavior, thus making it likely that its development has been a case of co-evolution between genes and culture. 

Keep in mind I write this late Sunday so a little mix of mining and philosophy seems in order. Tomorrow we will get down to the details of reality.