You can choose any month for a wedding.  June, September, and October are the most popular.  However, tradition dictates the wedding diamond.  Since April’s birthstone is the diamond, now’s a good time to know a few tricks about the diamond business. 

Many of these of tricks are described in Fred Cuellar’s book How to Buy a Diamond.  For example, you could “buy-shy” – i.e., shop for diamonds that weigh just under half-carat and full-carat weights.  A diamond’s value jumps dramatically when it reaches true half-carat or full carat size, because the demand is higher. Instead, buy a 0.90-carat diamond instead of a full carat, or 0.45-carat instead of half-carat – a noticeable change in price, an unnoticeable change to the eye.

Everyone knows about the four Cs of gemstones – color, cut, clarity and carat.  The GIA (Gemological Institute of America) gives official grades for all the Cs, many which are unnoticeable to the naked eye.  GIA gemologists need special equipment to make these measurements.  But many jewelers frequently “bump” the grades up.  Some dealers use lights with a bluish tinge, making diamonds seem more scintillating.  Have any stone appraised by an independent jeweler!  But beware of what Cuellar calls a “sandbagger” – an appraiser who says you were ripped off…then sends you to one of his friends.

Many gems are artificially enhanced.  Victoria Finlay – author of Jewels: A Secret History – describes “a fifth C, certificate, which is becoming equally important.”  These certificates tell buyers if their stone has been treated, heated, colored, coated, lasered, oiled, or sealed with epoxy resin. 

Jewelers overprice their diamonds considerably.  If you want your diamond to retain its value, try buying from bonded jewelers.  Bonded gems cost 10-15% more, but a bonded stone gives you: lifetime breakage policy, lifetime buy-back policy, unconditional lifetime exchange policy and trade-in policy, market crash protection policy, and all bonded stones are natural and untreated. 

Diamonds aren’t rare.  In 1870 Erasmus Jacobs pulled a misshapen diamond out of South Africa’s Orange River.  In a few years, millions of carats had been mined.  The diamond market collapsed in 1882.  The De Beers Consolidated Mines cartel was created in 1890.  De Beers slashed diamond production by two-thirds the next year.  Today, the value of diamonds is the result of an artificially maintained shortage.

Instead of a diamond, my friend bought his fiancée an amethyst engagement ring.  They used the savings to help fund their wedding in Vegas.  Millennials are increasingly more likely to buy alternative gemstones instead of traditional diamonds. 

Diamonds are beautiful, but they’re true value is hard to ascertain.  Diamonds – like love – are only worth as much as you want to give.     

Sources:
Cuellar, Fred.  How to Buy a Diamond: Insider Secrets for Getting Your Money’s Worth.  Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2005. 5th ed. Print. 
Finlay, Victoria.  Jewels: A Secret History. New York: Ballantine, 2006. Print.
Raden, Aja.  Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World.  New York: HarperCollins, 2015. Print

Everybody likes - or needs - money. Want to double your money?  Maybe you think I’m going to tell you which stock to buy, which commodity to purchase, or at least which horse in the race is a sure thing (because I know a guy). 

Actually, this is where I show you math. There is math you can do on a calculator (boring!) or…you can do it in your head in seconds with the Rule of 72. 

I’m talking about interest rates. Here’s the boring formula for annual compound interest, including principal sum:  A = P (1 + r/n) (nt)
Where:
A = the future value of the investment/loan, including interest
P = the principal investment amount (the initial deposit or loan amount)
r = the annual interest rate (decimal)
n = the number of times that interest is compounded per year
t = the number of years the money is invested or borrowed for

Whew! That’s an eyeful. Here’s the simple way.

Here’s the magic of the Rule of 72. If you want to know how long it will take to double your money, then simply divide 72 by your annual interest rate. Is your index fund growing at an average of 8 percent? Divide 72 by 8 and the answer is: you will double your money in 9 years. 

What if my interest rate is not easily divided into 72? Then just use the magic Rule of 70! If your interest rate is 7%, then you’ll double your money in 10 years.

Let’s say you invested $10,000 and you want to know how long it will take to grow to $40,000 at 6 percent? You want to quadruple your money (i.e., double it twice). A 6 percent growth rate means you double your $10K to $20K in 12 years. Going from $20K to $40K will take another 12 years for a total of 24 years!  

Is the Rule of 72 (or 70) just as accurate the traditional formula for annual compound interest? No. But it’s remarkably close. And close is good enough. But isn’t math supposed to be mercilessly exact?  Well no. 

Author and physicist Brian Clegg in his book “Are Numbers Real?” once defined math as a “set of rules that are used to get from a starting point to an outcome.” In other words, math must first be useful.

I learned about the Rule of 72 in this fantastic little book entitled “What the Numbers Say: A Field Guide to Mastering Our Numerical World.”  The authors – Derrick Niederman and David Boyum – wrote the book to combat the growing innumeracy in America.  Innumerate is similar to illiterate.  Innumeracy is to have poor quantitative thinking.  Numbers can intimidate us and even deceive us.  But quantitative skill is necessary…and doesn’t have to be scary at all.  Like the Rule of 72. 

As many states still lie entrenched in winter’s gloom, it might help to “know thine enemy.” Here's a list.
1.  Ice and snow are technically minerals, just like quartz.  They fit the official geological definition.  And just like other minerals…
2.  Ice and snow come in a variety of colors, depending on the impurities.  Volcanic particulates of the Tambora Eruption of 1815 produced blue, brown and red snows in Maryland; and red and yellow snow in Taranto, Italy.  In 2010, the Stavropol region of southern Russia experienced a light purple snow, attributed to Saharan dust.  There has even been…
3.  Pink snow!  Pink snow is regularly found in the Sierra Nevadas and is called “Watermelon Snow” due to its pink color.  It even smells like watermelon (though you shouldn’t eat it)!  The color is the result of Chlamydomonas nivalis, a species of cold-loving green algae that has a secondary red carotenoid pigment (astaxanthin).  But the true color of pure ice and snow is…

4.  Blue!  Pure ice is blue, for the same reason the sky and oceans are blue.  Water absorbs more light from the red spectrum and reflects more blue.  However, snow looks white because trapped air reflect back all light.  If an ice cube doesn’t look blue, it’s because large quantities are required to make the effect obvious…and beautiful.  But you don’t want too much ice or otherwise we could have another…
5.  Ice Age!  Starting about 2.5 million years ago (the Pleistocene Epoch) glaciers grew rapidly and spread across the world.  At their peak, glaciers covered as much as 30% of Earth’s current land area.  Summer temperatures were 10ºC (18ºF) colder than present.  Sea levels dropped by more than 90 meters (250 feet), resulting in an extra eighteen percent increase in dry land, in turn creating land bridges across the Bering Strait, the English Channel, and Indonesia.  The last Ice Age ended 15 thousand years ago, and the Pleistocene Epoch ended almost 12 thousand years ago.  But to this day, no one is really sure…
6.  Why the Ice Age began in the first place!  Theories abound.  The foremost theory involves the Milankovitch cycles, a term for how the Earth’s “wobble” (precession), axial tilt (obliquity), and planetary orbit (eccentricity) all vary with a regular cycle of every 20 thousand, 40 thousand and 100 thousand years respectively.  Those variations affect how the Earth is exposed to the Sun’s heat and radiation, and could chill the planet.  However Milankovitch cycles have operated since the Earth was turning.  But the Ice Age was a geologically recent event, only in the last couple million years.  For the majority of Earth’s history, the planet has been considerably warmer.  What else could have cooled the planet?  Did the erosion of the newborn Himalayas absorb and remove vast quantities of carbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas?  Did the connection of the North and South American continents provide the catalyst?  When the two continents joined, the Gulf Stream now carried much warmer and wetter waters farther north.  This would increase precipitation (snow), and so increase glacier growth.  Other scientists say that continental drift plays a factor, as Ice Ages don’t really occur until there were large ice caps on the North and South Poles (which only occur when large landmasses are near the Poles to serve as climatic “anchors”).  No one is certain how the Ice Ages were born, or if they’ll return again.   

In a way, it’s much like our winters today.  They come.  They go.  But humans have tackled winters - and worse - and we still survive.  We have fought every crisis that Mother Nature brings to us.  And we have what it takes to overcome…or move to Florida.
 
Sources:
"Southern Russia overwhelmed with purple snow 09/03/2010." YouTube. Uploaded by czesio95, 8 Jul. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty8kWGhWyYU. Accessed 22 January 2017
Armstrong, W.P. "Watermelon Snow." Environment Southwest. Number 517, 1987, pp. 20-23.
Officer, Charles & Jake Page. Tales of the Earth: Paroxyms and Pertubations of the Blue Planet. New York City: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Fagan, Brian, ed. The Complete Ice Age: How Climate Change Shaped the World. New York City: Thames & Hudson, 2009.
Rafferty, John P, ed. The Cenozoic Era: Age of Mammals. New York City: Britannica Educational Publishing, 2011.

Spring!  Things get warmer and wetter.  “April showers bring May flowers.”  But rain showers also bring mud!
 
Mud is the toy of children and bane of adults.  Mud dirties our cars, stains our clothes, and forces us to clean our dogs before we bring them inside.  But there’s another aspect to mud too.  The most important ingredient in mud is clay.  And clay might be the most important mineral in human history!
 
Clays are minerals?  Yes!  Clay is basically an aluminum silicate (technically a phyllosilicate) with bonded water attached.  Of course, there are variations from kaolinite to montmorillonite, from smectite to illite.  Incidentally, kaolinite is the famous source of porcelain.  Clay crystals are very small, about 0.7 microns in diameter and 0.005 microns in thickness (one micron is 1/25,000th of an inch). 
 
Basically, clay is a flake - very wide and very thin - whose sides are electrically charged.  That electric charge attracts water, which is what turns clay into a very slimy mud.  But it also gives clay its plasticity; it’s ability to be molded into a mind-boggling array of shapes.
 
Before the Iron Age, before the Bronze Age, humankind’s first step towards civilization began with clay.  Ancient tribes and peoples began making idols and pottery at least as early as 12,000 years ago.  Thanks to clay pottery, humans learned to cook foods like soups and stews, which not only broadened our palate, but allowed humans to ingest the previously unavailable nutrition of cereals like barley and maize.  Clay pottery made cooking (and with it, cereal agriculture) worthwhile.  And if you leave a barley-water mixture unattended for a while, you get beer!  And so pottery allowed humans their first constructive use of chemistry in the form of viniculture. 
 
Clay was used to form bricks, stucco and tiles.  Permanent walled structures were built.  Cities were born.  Metallurgy may have been born in a potter’s kiln.  How?  Thanks to the high temperatures and oxidation processes in pottery kilns, brightly colored oxide pottery finishes (think green malachite or bright blue azurite) would yield refined metals like copper.  Smelting was born, and with smelting came the Bronze Age.  The first written words of history were recorded on clay tablets.   
 
So thanks to clay, humans took their first steps in the sciences of cooking, chemistry, metallurgy, city-building, and the written word.
 
Clay influences our lives to this day.  Clay is used for the cups we drink from, the dishes we eat from, the tile we walk on, and the toilets we sit on.  But clay is also used for paper and rubber production, cosmetics manufacturing, petroleum exploration and certain medicines. 

According to the USGS’s Mineral Commodity Survey 2016, America produced over 25 million tons of clay from 150 companies in 40 states worth a total of $1.5 billion.
So my sympathies for parents and pet-owners who have to clean up their loved ones after a rainy day.  But playing with mud is how civilization began!
 
Sources:
United States, United States Geological Survey.  Mineral Commodity Survey: Clays, 2016.  USGS, Jan. 2016.  minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/clays/mcs-2016-clays.pdf.  Accessed 23 Jan. 2017.
 
Staubach, Suzanne.  Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element.  New York: Berkley Books, 2005.
 
Prinz, Martin, George Harlow, and Joseph Peters (Eds).  Simon and Schuster’s Guide to Rocks & Minerals.  78th ed.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.