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posted by martyb on Sunday March 31 2019, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Dead People And Pets Are Being Forged Into Pretty Blue Diamonds - Here's How It Works

When a person dies, cremation is an increasingly popular option. The practice eclipsed burials in the US in 2015 and is expected to make up more than half of all body disposals by 2020, according to the Cremation Association of North America.

[...] While at least five companies offer a "memorial diamond" service, Algordanza in Switzerland is one of the industry leaders — its services are available in 33 countries, and the company told Business Insider it sold nearly 1,000 corporeal gems in 2016.

Algordanza also claims to be the only company of its kind that operates its own diamond-growing lab for cremains — one of two in the world. (The other is in Russia.)

"It allows someone to keep their loved one with them forever," Christina Martoia, a spokesperson for Algordanza US, told Business Insider. "We're bringing joy out of something that is, for a lot of people, a lot of pain."

[...] Making a diamond from a dead person begins with cremation. The process typically leaves behind about 2.2kgs to 4.5kgs of ashes, much of which is carbon. Martoia said Algordanza requires a minimum of 500g of cremains. 'That's kind of the magic number, where our engineers can guarantee there will be enough carbon to make a memorial diamond,' she said.

[...] 'The diamonds can range from clear to very deep blue,' Martoia said. 'The more boron, the deeper the blue.' [...] Natural diamonds form out of carbon that gets stuck in lava tubes about a mile deep in the Earth's crust. To emulate that environment, Algordanza inserts the cell (now packed with graphite) into a platter and slides it into a high-temperature high-pressure (HPHT) growing machine. That machine can heat a growth cell to nearly 1,370 degrees celcius. It also squeezes the cell under 394,625kgs-per-square-inch of pressure.

[...] Depending on how big a customer wants their diamond to be, it can take six to eight weeks in an HPHT machine to coax graphite to crystallize into a gem. 'The larger the diamond, the longer it takes to grow,' Martoia said. When enough time has passed, technicians remove the puck of graphite and crack it open. Inside awaits a rough, uncut, and unpolished diamond.

Some customers take the rough gem, but many opt to have their memorial diamonds cut, faceted, and polished by a jeweller in Switzerland. Algordanza's prices start at $3,000 for a 0.3 carat diamond. Martoia said the average order is about 0.4 to 0.5 carat, though US customers usually request bigger, 0.8-carat diamonds.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 31 2019, @09:12PM (3 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 31 2019, @09:12PM (#822841) Journal

    FFF system [wikipedia.org]:

    firkin - mass - 90lb

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  • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Sunday March 31 2019, @09:27PM

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 31 2019, @09:27PM (#822849) Journal

    Ahhh, I should have dug deeper.

    From the mid 15th century until 1824 the beer firkin was defined as 9 ale or beer gallons. The beer or ale firkin was redefined to be 9 imperial gallons in 1824. It is therefore exactly 40.91481 litres or approximately 1.445 cubic feet.

    makes sense that it would be ~40.8 kg though. They just tallied up the mass, and presumably the .1kg difference is Ale vs. Water?

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 01 2019, @01:08AM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday April 01 2019, @01:08AM (#822919) Journal

    Meh, no excuse. The fff system fails at humor because it doesn't make sense. Firkins were NEVER used as units of mass. Historically a firkin was always a unit of volume. As they became standardized, some substances that were difficult to measure by volume became standardized as units of weight (e.g. a firkin of butter). Other equivalent amounts in terms of weight were often established for standardization, but the general connotation of a firkin has always been (and still is) a measure of volume. Regardless, the firkin was NEVER used to measure mass.

    Whoever designed the FFF system probably just was an ignorant person who looked for units starting with F in some conversion tables and didn't actually know what a firkin was (or had some attachment to the letter F and realized too late that there aren't really any good units of mass or weight for that matter that start with F... Well, I suppose the Russian funt, if that counts) .

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 01 2019, @02:29AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 01 2019, @02:29AM (#822953) Journal

      The length unit of the system is the furlong, the mass unit is the mass of a firkin of water, and the time unit is the fortnight.

      My fault, I should gave used the μfir abbreviation.

      Meh, no excuse. The fff system fails at humor because it doesn't make sense.

      Makes as much sense as "kg/sq inch" to my mind, either as serious or an attempt to a "tongue in cheek".

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