I read an op-ed piece piece today by Malcolm Kendrick (RT News), a UK physician, who recounted an incredible metric-imperial conversion bust. In 1998, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the Mars atmosphere because of a failure to convert thruster pounds of force to newtons. Nobody told contractor Lockheed Martin who provided the Imperial inputs about NASA’s metric-based software that controlled the spacecraft, and NASA didn’t catch it. I admit to having made a few conversion errors in my time, but so far haven’t had the honor of crashing a spacecraft.
About 40 years ago, I got a job at the Carr Fork copper mine adjacent to Bingham Canyon, a mine billed as Anaconda’s new flagship and a proud leader in the then-President’s drive to convert the United States at long last to the metric system. What fun we had! Of course, no one converted the suppliers and contractors, or the buyers of product. Thus, we reported our copper produced in metric tons (tonnes) and our gold and silver in troy ounces/metric ton (tonnes)! Precious metal assays were generally reported in troy ounces/ton, or ppm, requiring conversion of every assay to the mixed reporting units. The exploration and definition drilling utilized 5 and 10 foot core barrels; each 5’ assay had to be converted to 1.52m. That left a rounding error that had to be captured in every third sample; i.e., 1.53m. All of this was done by hand calculator and architects’ scale. The mix of imperial and metric units resulted in numerous geology and engineering errors, and left one’s brain constantly spinning with odd conversion factors. Maybe that’s why one night the hoist man overrode redundant safety systems to triple-load the production skip which broke free and rocketed nearly 1000 m (not feet) to the bottom of the shaft, shutting down production for months. Was he just trying to do the math and got confused?
Another time, about 20 years ago, I was part of a due diligence effort on a U.S. property vended by a Canadian company. The company converted all of the assays, reported in ppm, to oz/t (ounces per short ton) using the wrong conversion factor, 31.10 instead of 34.29, thereby inflating grades by 10%. It was absolutely unintentional.
Just a few years ago, a Canadian company tabled a PFS for an historic gold mining district in the U.S., proposing to mine on a large scale from several open pits. All of the legacy data was Imperial system, as well as extensive newer drilling. In order to bring the mine into the 21st century, everything was carefully converted to metric, new surveys run in UTM. The data was submitted to the State regulators who balked. They couldn’t handle metric. Everything had to be re-converted to Imperial. As the project geologist on that job pointed out, the U.S. carries the Imperial torch in this world along with only Liberia and Myanmar. Since then, I read an account of how we got the metric system in the first place (Alder, The Measure of All Things). More on that below…
So far, 2020 has been a tough one for numbers that go into resources, despite 43-101. The year started off with a big bust for Mineral Reserves at Centerra’s Mt. Milligan property, that is if a 50% drop is big. It seems the resource model, metallurgical recovery, plant productivity and mining costs were all too low in the previous model, otherwise all good. Then, Pretium chipped in with still another big resource bust at Brucejack that cascaded into a savaged Mineral Reserve. The latter incorporates the biggest mine call factor (50%!) on reserve that I’ve ever seen. So much for arcane multiple-ouncealator estimation methods… This is turning into an annual event for Pretium. Finally, McEwen, not to be outdone, let the public know that the mineralization in its new Gold Bar deposit, Gold Pick, is vertical, not horizontal, or is it the other way around? Anyway, they whacked ~30% out of the contained ounces (no sense getting precise at this point) and blamed it all on the consultant. Classy.
But the gist of Kendrick’s post was the colossal misstatement of fact published by the CDC and NIH in a journal in February, and confirmed in March by their experts’ Congressional testimony. They reported that the case fatality rate (CFR) for influenza is 10x less than Covid-19, when it is actually roughly equal. Just applied a good number for infection fatality rate (IFR) to the wrong variable (CFR). That triggered, along with botched Imperial college research, a furious panic pounced on by every authoritarian and busybody around the world. But really, what’s the difference between 0.1% of a billion and 0.1% of a million—it’s still 0.1%, right? And if we find the fuss over Covid is a little fishy, so, too, we find out from Alder’s account that the 18th century premise (or, scientist) supporting the meter was wrong as well! I guess we scientists are marvelous at mathematics and terrible at arithmetic and common sense.
Let’s hope 2020 is a teaching moment that marks the bottom and is not a continuation of the trend.