What crushed those of us at TGC (TheGoldCone) was that entering our Twitter name in revealed nothing as there wasn’t enough information to identify us.

How non-existent is [...]]]> Follow Finder analyzes public social graph information (following and follower lists) on Twitter to find people you might want to follow.

What crushed those of us at TGC (TheGoldCone) was that entering our Twitter name in revealed nothing as there wasn’t enough information to identify us.

How non-existent is that!

I know.

Developer lays claim to more than gold in Oregon wilderness

By Les [...]]]> This article was in the Oregonian and is reprinted here for gold miners to find as mining for archival articles in online newspapers is awfully difficult.  Please look respect the advertisers and look at the original article and of course the comments which aren’t reproduced here.

Developer lays claim to more than gold in Oregon wilderness

By Les Zaitz, The Oregonian, March 13, 2010, 8:00PM

Courtesy of Dave Rutan

Camp Emily sits next to the Little Chetco River in southern Oregon’s Kalmiopsis Wilderness. CAVE JUNCTION — Three years ago, Dave Rutan opened a gold mining retreat inside the Kalmiopsis Wilderness of southern Oregon, bringing in helicopters, gas-powered dredges and paying customers.

He did so without the permission county authorities say he needed.

Now he wants to commercially dredge miles of the Chetco, one of Oregon’s purest rivers. He plans to helicopter in four-man crews to seek gold from the equivalent of nearly 50 truckloads of river gravel each season.

Some environmentalists are aghast.

“A lot of things he’s proposing are inconsistent with the wilderness,” said Barbara Ullian, a Grants Pass nature photographer with a passion for protecting the Kalmiopsis.

An Ashland environmental group, KS Wild, promised to fight Rutan’s mining plans “every step of the way.”

Rutan, 44, a trim, neatly barbered real estate developer from Washington state, says historic mining law won’t let Ullian or others interfere.

The clash over one of Oregon’s most remote territories is playing out in a half-dozen government offices. It has sharpened debate over when wilderness is truly wilderness, a sensitive topic in a state with a growing inventory of protected pristine places.

Rutan formed Chetco River Mining and Explorations in 2007, buying federal mining claims from a retired Portland gardener. The claims on the Chetco start six miles inside Kalmiopsis. They end downriver 24 miles, toward Brookings. It is here that Rutan plans commercial-scale mining.

He acquired Camp Emily, 45 acres of private ground whittled out of the national forest, also in 2007. He installed three cabins and a dining hall to handle up to 20 people, including customers coming to mine for gold in the adjacent Little Chetco River. Now, Rutan is peddling ownership in the camp.

The structure of those sales is unclear. Rutan initially advertised 12 shares at $65,000. He said he limited the number to avoid triggering more stringent state regulation of time shares. Recently, he started promoting an additional 200 “ownership interests” starting at $1,500, but said what a buyer gets for the price is “privileged information.”

Rutan granted several interviews to The Oregonian and provided additional information in writing. Subsequently asked to confirm certain statements during fact-checking for this article, Rutan responded that “12 of the 13 are false, misleading, misrepresentations or out of context.” Rutan identified what he said were factual errors in only one statement.

In a remnant of the Old West, prospectors can stake an exclusive claim to mine on certain federal land. The gold or other minerals they find are theirs, but the land stays in public ownership.

A handful of such claims were in place when Congress formed the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in 1964.

Ross William Hamilton/The OregonianDave Rutan runs a gold mining retreat in the wilderness of southern Oregon. His desire to commercially dredge miles of the Chetco River concerns some environmentalists.The congressional action allowed miners to keep working active claims. The action also restricted miners’ ability later on to patent their claims, buying public land for as little as $2.50 an acre.

In 1988, southern Oregon racehorse breeder Carl Alleman turned his claims at Camp Emily into private property. He spent thousands on attorneys, geologists and surveyors and paid the government $150 for the 45 acres.

Alleman was a weekend miner who liked the remoteness. His effort to keep road access across national forest and through the wilderness triggered a years-long battle with federal agencies and environmentalists. He lost and was left to get in cross country on foot or by horse.

Frustrated, Alleman agreed in 2002 to sell the property back to the government for $605,000. It was the only private ground inside the Kalmiopsis, and the Forest Service had been under pressure from a range of interests, including Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., to get it back.

Alleman signed the paperwork June 4, 2002. Five weeks later, as the contract awaited signature by the Forest Service, the Biscuit fire erupted.

The monster wildfire burned through the Kalmiopsis, scorching Alleman’s land, including a cabin. The Forest Service subsequently offered one-fourth the price it had been willing to pay Alleman, prompting him to reject the deal with what he said was colorful language.

Alleman was ready to listen when Rutan, a man he’d encountered in mining circles, wanted to buy.

Rutan told The Oregonian he has been a gold mining enthusiast most of his life. A native of Washington, he said he worked in high-tech before turning to real estate development. He said he sold some holdings at the peak and decided to buy Camp Emily.

Before he got the deed, Rutan approached Curry County officials with plans to replace the burned cabin with a substantially larger two-story lodge. County officials told Rutan that he couldn’t put up anything larger than the original cabin without getting additional zoning approval. The county advised Rutan that without that approval, he could replace only the original cabin, and that would require a building permit.

Rutan eventually decided to helicopter in three guest cabins and a dining hall instead.

He didn’t tell the county about this plan. Rutan said he read the county’s zoning for his land and concluded he needed no permits for his buildings.

The county thought otherwise.

Officials told him in September 2007 to stop all work. They said he violated the zoning law and contended that he didn’t have necessary building and sanitation permits.

Still, the helicopters flew, ferrying in customers. His Web site features picture after picture of smiling guests holding pans of gold flakes.

Although Rutan promoted “comfort and modern living” at Camp Emily, he said it was rudimentary. The “modern living” meant guests got a mattress, he said. Otherwise, they ate on paper plates and used an outhouse. Sinks in the cabins weren’t plumbed.

That troubled Curry County health officials, who advised Rutan he needed water and sewer services for a commercial operation.

The county issued Rutan a “notice of violation,” saying that sewage had been improperly handled at the camp and such violations “are a health hazard that must be corrected.” Rutan then applied to have the county evaluate his site for sewage treatment and disputed the county’s conclusions about his operation. The application is pending.

Last summer, county planner Candy Cronberger gathered government officials to figure their next step regarding Rutan’s operation. In an e-mail last June, Cronberger said it was time for the county to thwart Rutan’s “ongoing nose thumbing at everyone.” She wrote that he continued to ignore orders about his “illegal camp.”

Rutan, who denies his camp is illegal, told county officials they had not followed due process by issuing the order without visiting the camp.

He initially declined requests he fly county officials in for an inspection, telling the county that Camp Emily had only one helicopter landing spot. “The helipad will be occupied with my own aircraft. There are no other areas on the private property to safely land a helicopter,” he wrote last summer.

Rutan told The Oregonian that a second landing was installed in 2007 for hauling and emergencies. Asked to explain his statement to the county, Rutan said he wouldn’t recommend anyone land there “without experience and onsite clearance.”

The inaccessibility has stymied county officials, who say they can’t take more legal action against Rutan until they inspect the camp. Rutan’s Web site photos aren’t enough, they say. Rutan since has offered to fly in one county official — to inspect a sewer project he wants to build — but the trip he proposed never took place.

As officials fumed about what to do, Rutan moved to ramp up mining at Camp Emily. His customers looked for gold by using a gas-powered dredge to vacuum the bottom of the Little Chetco River. They panned finer material for gold.

Rutan wanted to deploy larger equipment to rip into gravel benches beside the stream.

Environmentalists opposed his request to open a road through the wilderness to move in an excavator and large mining gear called a trommel. Forest Service officials rejected Rutan’s request, and he now says he’ll fly in the equipment.

Environmentalists worry about what damage dredging will do to the Little Chetco River.

But they are far more troubled by what he’s proposing along the main Chetco.

For more than 20 years, Floyd Higgins worked Gold No. 11, his claim far up the Chetco in the Kalmiopsis. A helicopter would drop off his dredge in summer, and Higgins made a challenging two-day hike in to his camp to spend the season looking for gold.

Higgins, a retired Portland city gardener, said he pulled gold out of the Chetco’s gravel every year, using his portable dredge. He worked alone or with one other partner. He broke his leg one summer, used duct tape to splint it with a stick and kept on working, he said.

“If you haven’t got any guts, you’ve got no reason to be in there,” Higgins said.

He bristles at the notion that his mining damaged the river or its fish. “The fish and the river both benefited from my work,” Higgins said.

Courtesy of Dave RutanCommercial operations at Camp Emily troubled Curry County health officials, who told the camp operator permits were needed. He said winter’s high waters flushed clear any evidence of his work in the river. He said his dredging stirred up feed for hungry fish and created new spawning beds. He said he doesn’t think his dredge sucked up a single fish.

After he turned 80, Higgins retired from mining and in 2007 sold Gold No. 11 and seven adjacent claims to Rutan.

Rutan subsequently tried to essentially rent his claims to California prospectors.

“Our objective is to get a working relationship of several dredging companies,” Rutan wrote to one in an e-mail the spring of 2008. “There is plenty of miles to work and lots of gold.”

In May 2008, Rutan proposed that his company, Chetco River Mining, engage in a far larger operation than Higgins had undertaken. In a revised proposal submitted to the Forest Service last month, Chetco River Mining proposed a landing pad for helicopters for at least 20 trips a season. The proposed operation would vacuum up about a dump truck load of river bottom each day crews are in the field.

Tim Haderly, Rutan’s partner in Chetco River Mining, said the unhappiness about their plans is no surprise.

“People’s perception of a wilderness is untouched. Unfortunately, the claims were established before the area was withdrawn from mining,” Haderly said.

Some environmentalists, including fish biologists, say dredging the Chetco would damage a pristine environment ideal for endangered fish. It makes no sense, in their view, to create temporary gravel bars that seem to be perfect spawning grounds only to have winter high water rip out the bars — taking along buried fish eggs.

Aside from scientific issues, fans of the Kalmiopsis can’t imagine why dredging and commercial operations should be allowed. Wilderness has value just for its wildness, they say.

“It’s a quality you feel in your skin, you feel in your bones,” said Ullian, the Grants Pass photographer who has tramped the Kalmiopsis. “You have to have places like that.”

Forest Service officials say they are caught between the tough language of the 1872 mining law and the more recent wilderness law. One remains in force to allow mining on federal land, the other to protect untouched places.

Alan VanDiver, Forest Service district ranger in Gold Beach, said he plans to hike into the claims this summer before judging whether to allow Rutan to go ahead.

He said the agency’s decision may turn on whether there is proof that dredging harms fish. From experience on the gold-bearing Klamath River in California, VanDiver said, he hasn’t seen any research on the effects of river dredging that he finds definitive. Once the agency assesses the impact on fish and streams, he said, Rutan may be able to mine his Chetco claims.

More recently, Rutan has invited environmentalists to end mining on at least one of his claims.

He’s offered to “retire” a linear foot of Gold No. 9 for every $100 donated to a charitable trust he controls. His Web site said nearly all the money would be paid out to southern Oregon charities.

While he forges ahead on the Chetco project, he is also pressing to sell Camp Emily instead of mining it himself despite what he said is its rich gold reserves. He said he has more fun showing people how to mine than getting at the gold himself.

“I’m not in this for the money,” Rutan said.

– Les Zaitz

Until then the GoldCone Marketing Guy is giving a paper at the Linux Cluster Institute.

You can see the [...]]]> It is almost Spring and that means time for the snow to melt in the midwest and time for getting your GoldCone out and going prospecting.

Until then the GoldCone Marketing Guy is giving a paper at the Linux Cluster Institute.

You can see the program below.

Professor David Bunde Shares in Computer Programming Patent 1% speed boost is a big deal — for a supercomputer with 10,000 processors

October 13, 2009

David Bunde, assistant professor of computer science at Knox College, helps computers run 1% faster. That’s a significant improvement, when you’re talking about a [...]]]> Professor David Bunde Shares in Computer Programming Patent | Knox College

Professor David Bunde Shares in Computer Programming Patent
1% speed boost is a big deal — for a supercomputer with 10,000 processors

October 13, 2009

David Bunde, assistant professor of computer science at Knox College, helps computers run 1% faster. That’s a significant improvement, when you’re talking about a supercomputer that has 10,000 processors in a massive network.

David BundeBunde is one of four computer scientists who recently received a patent for developing an improved method of assigning tasks in a computer program to a group of networked processors. U.S. Patent #7,565,657 covers “communication routing and processor allocation in multiple processor computing.”

Bunde explains: “In multi-processor supercomputers, tasks are assigned to groups of processors that work in parallel. Intuitively, the best allocation assigns a task to processors that are close together, since this shortens the time necessary to send messages between processors working on the task. But if your program spends a lot of time on the calculations to make the assignments, that’s time taken away from working on the task itself.”

The work covered by the patent was completed in 2005 at the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico by Bunde, Vitus Leung, Michael Bender and Cynthia Phillips. At the time Bunde was a doing post graduate work at the University of Illiniois at Urbana, and the other researchers were from Sandia and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Their work also has been honored with an “R&D 100″ award from R&D Magazine.

Bunde and his colleagues discovered that even though processors are physically connected in a three-dimensional network, it was faster to assign tasks as if processors were arranged in a line. “We found that it is more efficient to ignore the third dimension and allocate tasks to a processor and its neighbors on either side,” Bunde said.

The research group reported an improvement of 1% over methods that looked at a three-dimensional grid of processors, and a 23% improvement over previous one-dimensional methods of making assignments. Their method can be used to allocate tasks to upwards of 10,000 processors, more than twice as many as prior methods.

The research uses a formula, the Hilbert space-filling curve, first described in 1891 by a German mathematician, David Hilbert. The formula calculates a path that passes through every point in a grid.

“We developed a 21st-century application for a 19th-century mathematical discovery,” Bunde said.

“The Hilbert curve has a number of useful attributes for this problem,” Bunde said. “Because it’s ’space-filling’ it doesn’t leave any ‘holes,’ or unused processors in the neighborhood, when you’re assigning processors to a task. It has excellent ‘locality,’ which means each processor is close to the other processors that are working on the same task. It is a simple formula, so you don’t waste a lot of time figuring where to assign the tasks. And, finally, it is what mathematicians call a ‘fractal’ — even though it is a simple formula, it can be scaled up to handle the thousands of processors in a supercomputer.”

Typical problems that require supercomputers include simulations of physical events, such as nuclear explosions or rocket launches — and much of Sandia’s work is classified, Bunde said.

Computer science faculty members David Bunde and John Dooley
Bunde joined the Knox faculty in 2006. He is a graduate of Harvey Mudd College and earned his doctorate in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He has conducted research in computer program scheduling, in particular the balancing of speed with energy conservation. At Knox, he teaches introductory and advanced courses in computer science, including algorithm design.

Bunde has collaborated with several Knox students on projects to improve the performance of scheduling in supercomputers. Most recently, he was an advisor for an independent study project during the summer of 2009 with Peter Walker, a senior mathematics major from Portland, Oregon. Bunde and one of his colleagues at Sandia, along with Ojaswirajanya Thebe, a computer science major from Nepal who graduated from Knox in 2009, co-authored a paper that was published in the Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing.

Bunde also has worked on computer allocation and scheduling studies with Knox student Christopher Johnson, a senior mathematics and computer science major from Hammonton, New Jersey; and with 2009 Knox graduates Kyle Sibley, a computer science major from Galesburg, Illinois; and Alexander Lindsay, a computer science major from Benicia, California.

Bunde has given presentations on raising the efficiency of computer programs at conferences worldwide, including the International Workshop on Models and Algorithms for Planning and Scheduling Problems.

Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 47 states and 48 countries. Knox’s “Old Main” is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Freshman Jason McGeeney passes the disk upline past his defender from Northern Illinois [...]]]>

What the Marketing Guy is doing while the ground is to frozen to use The GoldCone!

Original Post on The Knox Student Online

The Lost Dutchman’s Mining Association was founded by George, Wilma, Perry and Tom Massie in 1976 to provide places where men, women and their families could meet, prospect and mine for gold. Beginning with one historic gold property, Italian Bar in California’s Mother Lode, the LDMA now has an [...]]]>

The Lost Dutchman’s Mining Association was founded by George, Wilma, Perry and Tom Massie in 1976 to provide places where men, women and their families could meet, prospect and mine for gold. Beginning with one historic gold property, Italian Bar in California’s Mother Lode, the LDMA now has an ever growing number of private properties and claims in several western states and also in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Lost Dutchman’s private camps and claims boast some of the finest gold reserves and prospecting in this country.

One of the most important considerations when new properties are being evaluated for the LDMA is their gold-producing potential. Exhaustive tests are made in the area to ensure that Lost Dutchman’s members will have continued access to proven gold reserves. Members in past years have reported finding anything from a few flakes of gold to some very large nuggets on our properties.

LDMA members can prospect and/or camp on deeded, patented properties such as Stanton, Arizona, a gold rush town north of Phoenix that is being restored by volunteer members. Or, there’s our Scott River property, deep in the lush forests of northern California, where fog often drifts through the trees. The Klamath River itself provides gold-rich gravels in an unbelievably beautiful setting. An LDMA membership is something that you and your family will enjoy for many years to come.

LDMA members also have access to a multitude of valuable mining claims in some of the West’s richest mining areas. All of the gold that members find is theirs to keep!

The Lost Dutchman’s Mining Association represents more than just prospecting. Join us on holiday outings at historic gold mining camps. Enjoy prospecting and mining seminars, demonstrations, field trips, camaraderie and more!

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