Selling stal?

cavermark

cavermark

New member
Ethical/conservation question:

A dig I am involved in has some bits of broken stal within the sediments that we are digging through.
A friend of mine has a shop that sells various ornamental minerals and crystals for hippies etc. 
Would selling the bits of broken stal here be unethical (e.g. would it create a market, or make people think it was ok to buy speleothems if they saw them elsewhere?).
They might not sell as they don't look that good from being buried in mud, although some of the hippies might want to get a healing vibe off them or something..

Opinions please..

And of course if anyone knows someone that wants to use them for dating I can do this.
 
Bottlebank

Bottlebank

New member
Tricky one really, after all new stal is probably being created far faster than hippies can afford to buy it.

On the other hand I think the caving world decided a long time ago this wasn't a good idea.

We've some great super healing rocks and fast acting mud balms in our digs, if they'd like to buy them. They could probably cure all known ailments. In fact merely turning up to collect them and carrying them back down the fell a few times would certainly make them fitter hippies and all for the price of a couple of pints.
 
Rhys

Rhys

Moderator
Not a good idea. Hippies won't know the difference between dig spoil and stal raided from a pretty cave somewhere - you would be in danger of legitsimising sale of stal from other dodgy places.
 
cavermark

cavermark

New member
Thanks all for your thoughts - I will leave it buried in the spoil tip!  Bottlebank, you made me laugh with your comments  :clap:
 
N

NigR

New member
Is this thread for real? Is the OP serious?

If so, I am firmly onside with Peter, Rhys and Chris.

NO, you should NOT sell stal anywhere, no matter how it has been found!
 
Bottlebank

Bottlebank

New member
cavermark said:
NigR said:
Is this thread for real? Is the OP serious?
Click to expand...

Is asking for the opinion of others to gain a consensus (about a hypothetical situation) worthy of such incredulity?
Click to expand...

No. It was a reasonable question.

Mind you if it was hypothetical it's was a little random? Perhaps you have too much time on your hands?

Have you actually tried to sell our healing rocks and fast acting mud balm to these hippies? Don't rule it out, you'd be doing them a favour and it would give you something more productive to do?
 
gus horsley

gus horsley

New member
I used to be a hippy back in the days when there were REAL hippies and I frequently used crystals to get rid of various negative vibes and unwanted ley line alignments which ran through gullible people's living rooms.  But I would never ever have dreamt of using stals because there's really bad karma associated with their exploitation.  Every hippy should know that they are earth roots which store far too much energy in them for us mere mortals to harness safely.

Sorry, I've just been diagnosed with adult ADHD.  Seriously.
 
B

Blakethwaite

New member
I think that the prices charged for extremely mediocre specimens in some of these shops will disabuse anybody of the notion that hippies are poor! Hippies, much like militant socialists, can be the grubbiest capitalists going given half a chance...

On a vaguely related note, have a strong recollection of seeing a cave equivalent to a spar box somewhere or other but can't for the life of me think where. Presumably in a Dales show-cave or museum. Any ideas?
 
C

crickleymal

New member
Remember the Ariadne column in New Scientist, where Daedalus would propound an fantastical theory or invention? One of the theories was that the rate of evaporation of water is controlled by air pressure, so in theory the density of a piece of stal would vary dependent on the air pressure at a particular instant during the formation of the stal. So..... as noise varies the air pressure it should be possible, by analysing the density of a cross section of the stall, to reconstruct sounds from the past. Cavemen talking and the like. Mind you as the stal is still forming it would also record the noises made by present day cavers  ;)

Another theory ran along these lines. A human hair has a certain amount of wind resistance. In theory there is enough hair on the head of the average hippy to create the same wind resistance as a parachute.
 
Bottlebank

Bottlebank

New member
Another theory ran along these lines. A human hair has a certain amount of wind resistance. In theory there is enough hair on the head of the average hippy to create the same wind resistance as a parachute.
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Easy enough to test that one!
 
kay

kay

Well-known member
gus horsley said:
I used to be a hippy back in the days when there were REAL hippies and I frequently used crystals to get rid of various negative vibes and unwanted ley line alignments which ran through gullible people's living rooms. 
Click to expand...

I remember listening to, I think, David Kendall presenting a paper in which examined whether ley lines were anything more than chance alignments, by taking random sets of 3 points, joining them in a triangle, and seeing whether the smallest angle was sufficiently small for the triangle to have collapsed into a straight line. A wonderfully exciting paper because the mathematics was complex, but boiled down to a very simple geometrical representation on a spherical surface. I think the answer was to debunk ley lines but somehow it wasn't important in the beauty of the maths.

So why are we all anti-hippy? I remember it as a time when there was real optimism that we could make the world better for all of us.


 
P

Peter Burgess

New member
It's obvious - we all come into contact with stal (go on admit you have touched some at some time in the past) and the bad karma rubs off, and the result is we all hate each other, never mind hippies.
 
Tony_B

Tony_B

Member
kay said:
gus horsley said:
I used to be a hippy back in the days when there were REAL hippies and I frequently used crystals to get rid of various negative vibes and unwanted ley line alignments which ran through gullible people's living rooms. 
Click to expand...

So why are we all anti-hippy? I remember it as a time when there was real optimism that we could make the world better for all of us.
Click to expand...

I'm with the Sex Pistols on this: Never Trust a Hippy.
 
Tony_B

Tony_B

Member
Back OT: I agree with the earlier posts - selling stal creates a market, and a climate where this is seen as acceptable. Leave it in your spoil heap.
 
C

Chocolate fireguard

Active member
On a stal-related theme, I have just been up Block Hall and along Watt Passage into the White River series. First time for 3 or 4 years. On all my previous trips I noticed that the 2 little stal pillars 10/15m into the crawl were surviving against all the odds. You had to be careful as you crawled between them. They weren`t that pretty and they weren`t that big but they were there and deserved (and were apparently getting) a bit of care. But some careless bastard has smashed them.
 
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