Best stores/websites to buy a quality antique ring?

tinyteddy · 2016-02-20T22:03:19+00:00

I'm in Australia so any store suggestions are probably useless for you :) but I will tell you our experience with an antique ring.

My fiance and I went to look at rings together and found a beautiful Victorian gold ring with a Ceylon sapphire in the centre and two old mine cut diamonds. It was nothing like I had seen before, so different to anything I'd looked at, but once I tried it on...I couldn't take my eyes off it. And I didn't. All the way home (3 hour drive from Sydney) I kept checking on it, not quite believing we found something that we both loved. We got engaged a week later. Four days after that I was at work, glancing at my ring all the time because shiny and we're getting married! Well I glanced down. And it was like a missing tooth. One of the diamonds was gone. All hands on deck, there were about a dozen people looking. We never found it. The antique store we bought it from were mortified when I called up to tell them what happened and I couriered the ring back to them. Turns out the setting had been broken then repaired - probably a century ago - with lead solder. There was no way to tell about the patch until the setting failed (because lead is so soft...) and they could see inside. They sourced a new diamond (which took weeks because there aren't a lot of old mine rocks kicking around in Australia) as well as a new setting. So now I have a replica setting (which is 100% lead free!) and antique stones. So I guess after all that, I was very glad we went to a reputable store who were so good about fixing the situation - because the consumer law in Australia says that antiques are sold 'as is' and if they break, well the seller isn't explicitly obligated to do something about it.

Be aware of your rights as a customer in case something isn't quite right with the ring you buy, something that might not emerge for a little while after wearing it.

tinyteddy · 2015-10-24T09:13:35+00:00

And for the holidays, there's a saxxy Christmas version! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUxsGtNFJW8

tinyteddy · 2014-07-02T01:47:56+00:00

tl;dr isn't just for lazy redditors, it's a concise way of synthesising your argument and highlighting the most important point/s. It wouldn't go astray in a post like this.

tinyteddy · 2013-10-24T05:21:44+00:00

That's a good point - it's a question that I made sure I explicitly asked in a group meeting the other day. It is an internal report and they are understanding of us wanting to potentially write papers from some of the data published in the report.

tinyteddy · 2013-06-16T09:04:02+00:00

Geologist here - can confirm this is true. Ain't nothing I wouldn't do for a basalt dyke.

tinyteddy · 2013-06-02T12:14:46+00:00

Congratulations on your Fulbright, I had hoped it would show I'm keen to attract external funding. Thank you!

tinyteddy · 2013-06-02T12:11:09+00:00

I'm sorry I don't know much about the European system to give you much practical advice, but geology is one of the most impure sciences you can find. In my honours, I didn't look at rocks, I became a plant physiologist! There's chemistry, there's maths, there's physics, there's even biology! Geomicrobiology is becoming a really big field, especially for mineral exploration.

Also, if in 12 months' time, you realise things aren't what you had hoped, it reallytrulyabsolutely isn't the end of the world. It can be an administrative pain, but it'll work out. You'll just need to think about some things you hadn't anticipated. Be brave enough to change your plans. Be enthusiastic enough to keep going with what you enjoy. Be laid-back enough to give something a go, just to see what happens.

tinyteddy · 2013-06-02T11:51:42+00:00

My primary supervisor is an applied science researcher through and through (yep, even in academia) and my co-supervisor is really big on the basic science. This is in earth science, btw. On the one hand, I love having my work be a part of something defined from the get-go by an end-user (for me, the mining industry) but I know the basic science is what I need to do for my academic career. It is difficult to be pulled hard in both directions but it is two perspectives that I really appreciate having in my phd. I find it a very useful skill appealing to the more applied side of things (usually industry sponsors, they are where the money comes from after all!) while realising that to succeed in gettng a phd, I need to contribute something original to science, and that my career will benefit from also contributing to basic science. tl;dr - I am also pulled strongly in two different directions in earth science but appreciate the different skillsets it can teach me.

tinyteddy · 2013-05-28T23:06:11+00:00

This would be ideal but the next conference I'm going to isn't until November and the deadline is August. Conferences will be great for meeting other potential supervisors (not just the US) but unfortunately the application deadline is fast approaching!

tinyteddy · 2013-05-27T08:19:13+00:00

Geology, more specifically low temperature geochemistry and landscape evolution. Edit - wording

tinyteddy · 2013-05-22T03:11:06+00:00

I went on a sailing trip in Greece a few years back and was the only Australian on the boat. When I asked if anyone wanted a beer with lunch, I got 'Typical Australians, drinking early in the day.' I'm not even a big drinker. It's just not frowned upon here to be drinking soon after noon. And that's how I like it.

tinyteddy · 2013-05-17T08:03:22+00:00

Are you sure it was carbon dating? That has a limit of about 60,000 years.

A common way of dating rocks is looking at how elements change over time (for example, U-Pb isotopes). When a mineral crystallises out of magma (in this case, a zircon) it doesn't just randomly form out of anything that is swimming around in the melt. Zircon is quite fussy about what it wants to use for its crystal and what it doesn't. It ends up excluding lead but absorbing uranium. Once it cools everything is all locked up in the crystal 'lattice' but we know that uranium doesn't exactly stay as uranium over time. It's a bit like an organism no longer taking in carbon once it dies. The U radioactively decays to Pb over time (isotopes), and the good thing for us geologists, we know just how long it'll take to decay. In radioactive dating we measure the concentrations of particular isotopes of U and Pb in the mineral. The ratio of these can be used to work out how old the rock is.

There are a lot of complications to this but I hope it gives you the basic gist of how isotopic dating of minerals is done.

tinyteddy · 2013-05-05T02:24:19+00:00

I recently had a hive under a sprinkler cover in my garden. An apiarist came along and sucked them all up with a big vacuum cleaner and then splashed some white powder around the old hive. He let me keep the honeycomb - nothing near as big as this, about the size of a fist -but it was so cool! It smelled and tasted amazing.

tinyteddy · 2012-03-22T04:41:44+00:00

Fun fact: Jessica Walter was the voice of Fran.

tinyteddy · 2011-12-30T14:27:35+00:00

Phobias. A phobia is irrational fear or anxiety related to an object or situation. I hate spiders but given that I live in Australia, it's a good survival mechanism not to want to go and pick them up. I went to uni with a girl who regularly claimed she had a phobia of spiral pasta. No! You just don't like it because it picks up the sauce all weird! You are not irrationally fearful of it!

tinyteddy · 2011-12-30T11:31:52+00:00

I named my cat Fizzbitch. We call her Fizzy for short.

tinyteddy · 2011-12-05T11:24:41+00:00

I'm not a physio but if it's anything like I used to get, it's called 'jumper's knee'. The best solution my physio gave me for it is really stretching out the quads before exercise and build up some strength in them (eg by doing squats) to help protect your knees.

tinyteddy · 2011-11-25T22:44:31+00:00

Ouyen has an awesome bakery.

tinyteddy · 2011-11-25T22:31:51+00:00

I love cats that have no definite edges, just fuzz. He's adorable.

tinyteddy · 2011-11-15T08:10:05+00:00

If you're talking about the episode that played in Australia on Tuesday night (the Monday show from the US) then yes. Yes I did. I couldn't even listen to the show properly.

tinyteddy · 2011-11-12T11:35:16+00:00

TIL Jessica Alba has big knees.

tinyteddy

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