As anyone who’s followed me on the birdly hellscape has probably heard already, I just got a gem faceting machine. The writing of this post marks the 145th day from this tweet:
where I’ve largely failed to resist the desire for the shiny new hobby.
While this may seem like a completely random new flight of fancy, it was actually 576 days from when I originally discovered that you could cut gems AS A HOBBY.
So, while you could say that I’m outlandishly impulsive in acquiring hobbies to go down, it’s very clear that these things stew in my brain for long periods of time before I actually pull the trigger.
But the story is much more complicated, and is a mix of strategic, and opportunistic, skill and tooling acquisition that very much resembles how I approach acquiring data skills, as well as planning on infrastructure programs.
The path to pulling the trigger
On the surface, “I’m going to learn gem cutting!” seems like a bolt out of the blue. Many questions come to mind… like fundamentally “is that even possible?” not to mention “so what does learning gem cutting involve? Isn’t it hard?” Also, “aren’t gems expensive?”
But internally, the path to gemcutting is a short extension to the existing knowledge and skills that I had already picked up in my rapidly snowballing universe of hobbies and skills.
Essentially, I’m just abusing my human skills at the “Transfer of Learning”. Transfer of learning is a complicated and even debated psychological theory that posits that humans can take things that they learned in one domain, and transfer knowledge to another domain. At a high level it makes sense, but as is typical of science, once you get into the specific details in defining what “knowledge” and “learning” and “transfer” is, things get extremely messy. It’s also somewhat tangentially related to the “Transfer Learning” concept in modern AI where you leverage a model trained to identify “cars” to identify “trucks”.
Cutting gems is pretty simple
While doing lots of reading over a year, it became apparent that people have been cutting gems for ages so the process isn’t rocket science. They obviously did not have the deep scientific knowledge about minerals, material science, nor optics back then, but they figured out how to do it through trial and error.
The basic theory for cutting gems is very simple:
Gem cutting is markedly split into 2 worlds under the lapidary arts —Diamond cutting and literally everything else, typically called “colored stones”. The difference is that diamonds are orders of magnitude more difficult and require specialized equipment and techniques.
Making any stone shiny is simple — you use abrasives grind the stone to shape, using progressively finer and finer grits until you get to a mirror shine
The primary equipment needed is a machine that can hold the stone at fixed angles and firmly grind them against flat spinning laps that carry abrasives. Things can get pricy quickly.
So with the investment of a few thousand dollars to get decent equipment, a bit more money to buy some rough synthetic or natural gem material, you too can grind stones into shininess. And it won’t take too much study besides maybe viewing a handful of YouTube videos or reading a good intro book.
The difficulty of the craft comes from dealing with rough stones and understanding how to handle crystals that have different physical properties like cleavage planes and different refractive indexes. There’s a lot of gemological knowledge that is very useful to know when dealing with gems at a commercial level, especially if you plan on buying and selling stones.
But if you just want to follow one of the many free gem designs available, you don’t have to care to learn any of that. So instead, deciding whether to pursue it primarily involved just figuring out whether I would remain interested in it over the long term, and whether the necessary skills are within my ability.
Obviously, the answer wound up being yes.
Skills don’t live in a vacuum
Making stones shiny with abrasives is a very simple idea. The concept itself is actually used in many places that you may already have personally experienced. Sharpening knives and woodworking tools involve the exact same skill. It only takes a couple of hours of practice to learn how to polish a knife edge using sand paper or diamond laps to get a mirror shine that’ll slice anything.
Similarly, if you’ve ever had to repair chips in your car’s paint, the process to smooth out the paint also involves using the same process, using extremely fine grits of sandpaper before resorting to liquid abrasive compounds to put on a shiny polish.
This also meant that if a person understood how those sharpening processes work, that same person already knows the mechanical aspect of cutting gems. The knowledge transfers practically 1:1.
I already had to learn those prior skills because 1) I like to cook and dull knives are horrible torture, and 2) I keep having to repair stupid nicks and chips in my car’s paint.
The optical calculations and gem designing that’s needed to actually create new gem designs is something that I have never done before and will take a lot of learning in the future, but luckily, there’s (paid) software that will let you cut and design stones, doing much of the more complicated optical math for you!
Adjacent skills are also indirectly relevant
Cutting gems is fine and all, but unless you want to have a giant pile of shiny rocks in a box, you’ll need to actually use them for something someday. This is where having adjacent skills come into play. If your gems are cut to standard dimensions, you can buy tons of pre-made settings in all sorts of metals. Some require a bit of specialist tooling to cut notches into the setting, others you can just snap the stone in and call it a day.
From there, it doesn’t take very much work to convert the stone into a pendant, or an earring or some other decoration. Very often, you can buy a nice chain to stick the thing onto and you’re done! I did something very similar around Oct 14th… notably, a single day before my brain started preparing to pull the trigger on gem faceting. The inexpensive machine-cut gems that I had easily purchased (cubic zirconium, topaz, and ruby below) were shiny, but not THAT shiny and pretty. I wanted better than that was available and is likely the actual trigger for the journey.
Going beyond simple snap-in settings, it might take a bit of soldering work, but making new creations that way is also possible. The process for soldering precious metals like silver is similar enough to electronics soldering or home pipe soldering that you might already have those skills too. Gold and platinum are way too expensive for me to work on as a hobby.
There’s obviously much more complicated skills that take significantly more training to use to make beautiful jewelry, but basic stuff that’s showing off a centerpiece stone? Seems doable.
So enough talk, what’s this nonsense about strategy/opportunism you mentioned near the top?
When you trace the garden path my brain took to reach this point, things link up. Gemcutting, jewelry making, wood carving, woodworking… they all have an overlap in the tools and skills they need. One small step at a time.
Part of this chaining comes from deliberate planning. Before making an expensive tool purchase, I’ll always look at all the potential uses I can put it to. The more things I can use it for, the better. So a wood carving tool that can do extra duty for metalworking and polishing? Done! I’m interested in all of those anyways and it gives me a way to get value on the investment without locking me into a single task.
Other times, I’ll look at the tooling I already have, and come up with projects to put them into use, lowering my outlay. That’s the opportunistic part. Since I’m willing to fall into all sorts of rabbit holes pretty equally, it’s OK to let my existing tools dictate where I go too.
This is a very risk-adverse way of doing things. I’m very rarely left with a piece of kit that sits unused in storage (but that definitely does happen on occasion).
I take a very similar strategy for when I suggest how we approach investing in new data tools and skills on the job.
Why should I engage in a very risky data warehouse project? Because even if that project fails, I’ll have built tooling that can be used for other stuff. Why would I learn some newfangled magic technology? Because it’s useful today, and it takes me one small step closer to the direction I’m interested in.
My managers are often surprised when I’ll take on certain unsexy projects like “build a dashboard for execs about this important thing”, because we all collectively understand that the dashboard will be used exactly three times and then forgotten. By all rights, the project dashboard itself is a failure, and I do push back on being forced to do useless failure work because it sets bad precedent.
BUT SOMETIMES, I find those failure projects useful enough to agree to do them. The reason being is that I don’t care about the dashboard that’ll get forgotten in a month. I want the backing to build out some tooling that can be used for multiple other purposes. I need to have the conversations with people to get processes and habits in place. This’ll get me closer to where I’m interested in being, even if the excuse is a rather lame one.
Baking in failing successfully
While some people like the quote about aiming for the moon because something good happens even if you miss, I prefer the more pessimistic variation of planning to wind in situations where the failed state is a desirable one. The successful state is even better, but thanks to Murphy’s Law I don’t even like betting on landing wins. If I get prematurely bored of cutting gemstones in the future somehow, I’ll still have an industrial-strength grinding and polishing machine to use for other projects.
But if you keep building on the little bricks of foundation you lay down on projects over time, eventually things reach a tipping point where opportunities arise. Oh, we want to analyze customer retention, then all that cleaning up customer purchase activity data for the failed dashboard will be useful for that. Hey that clean telemetry pipeline we painfully put in place for that unused exec report can be extended to feed into our newfangled recommender system now!
Few endeavors, however inane on the surface, are entirely worthless if you peer into the future a bit and can see places you’d like to go.
Next week I promise to write something more data-centered. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have. Just send me an email or tweet.
About this newsletter
I’m Randy Au, currently a quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. The Counting Stuff newsletter is a weekly data/tech blog about the less-than-sexy aspects about data science, UX research and tech. With occasional excursions into other fun topics.
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cool. adding this in my newsletter tomorrow. legit.