The Oil Drum

This is the start of a new semester and so it is time to begin the weekend Techie talks again. However this time I am going to try creating the occasional picture, rather than just referring to other sites, in the hope that this might be more useful. Some of these will come from 3-D models that I am building to make the illustrations, so if there are some questions or other views that might help, ask and I may be able to generate a different picture.

For the first couple of talks I want to go back and revisit coal mining. Both the Washington Post and the NYT have stories recently about coal mining and the people who work there. I remember once being in a class that was discussing D.H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" and the portrait of mining that it presented. It did not correlate well with my memories of being in a mine, which was often much warmer and drier than it has been described.

And so I thought that, today, I would try and create some simple illustrations of some aspects of what coal mining is all about. I am going to do this in two parts, because there are two distinct ways of mining the coal. One is called Room and Pillar, and that is this week, and the other is Longwall and that will be the next topic.