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mmarotta

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Posts posted by mmarotta

  1. I celebrate the spirit of creation. Everything I collect -- except maybe rocks and metereorites -- are artifacts of the highest achievement of the spirit of human reason.

     

    "To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return."

    http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1826

     

    My numismatic collections include these themes (sometimes overlapping):

    Tiimes and towns of famous Greek philosophers; Aviation; Music; Writing -- Poets, Authors, and Printing.

     

    I am a big fan of private issues. Money is created by productive effort, not by government fiat. Some government money is pretty, to be sure, but the true value comes from something else. I have stocks, checks, drafts, scrip, tokens. I have taken a shine to the Central Mining Company of Eagle Harbor, Michigan, for instance.

     

    "Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor... "

     

    I also have a few pieces of bitter irony, communist money, such as the large silver Roubles of 1922 with the proletarian showing the farmer the glorious new sunrise. The communists promissed a world without money. They might as well have promised a world without gravity.

     

    In short, my collecting area is "applied philosophy."

  2. Well, Stujoe got the ball rolling.

     

    Today, I sent out press releases to Coin World, Numismatic News, and a few other places. I will post announcements online later.

     

    I have often said on rec.collecting.coins that numismatic writers drive the hobby. Then someone comes back and calls me arrogant. :ninja: I consider online writing an important -- and underappreciated -- aspect of numismatics.

     

    A newbie comes to someplace like this and asks "What is this coin?" and they get an answer. Usually, it is pretty straightforward, common things being common. Less often, but perhaps more important, the answers generate more questions and people go back and forth a bit exchanging information to prove a point. The online world can do this. Print cannot, usually.

     

    Now, there is a magazine called PHYSICS LETTERS. Physics is a mature study and it has several important periodicals. However, it needed one just for that kind of discussion and this was all before the internet and WWW made it possible. Well, we do not have NUMISMATIC LETTERS and we do not need it now. We have Coin People and the other online opportunities, the sites, listservs, groups, etc.

     

    The collectors who willingly share great information via these virtual interactions generally go unrecognized. I intend to fix that problem by issuing awards.

  3. The challenge is to get past "numismatics" and even to get beyond "history you can hold in your hand." The history is easy to use, of course. I just wrote an article for The Celator about the University of Michigan's classical studies program. The professor who teaches Cinema gave me a good quote about using coins to bring the reality of these people to the classroom. This was Nero. This was Alexander.

     

    I teach science on the weekends at the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum. We have physicists on banknotes (and mathematicians on stamps). To me, one interesting fact about coins is that a US Five Cent Nickel weighs 5 grams. So, if you ever need five grams, there you are.

     

    The light-shifting of new paper money and the UV treatments are other examples of "coins and science."

     

    One of the displays is a recreation of an early-1900s general store. The old cash register is one way to challenge a kid to come up with ways to make a dollar from change. How many ways are there?

  4. Were there copies of this type of coin made? and does that mean its a Russian coin?

     

    A long, long time ago, when the internet was new, someone asked about a Maria Theresa taler and I wrote that it was a "Mother Theresa" medal struck for the little Austrian village that was her home... Well... it was pointed out to me that not everyone would see the humor in that. So, I really apologize for the (ahem) "humor." :ninja: I thought that it was so obviously overdone... but apparently, the only thing "obvious" is that numismatic catalogues are way, way, way too obtuse.

     

    Michael

  5. they're "warehouse receipts" redeemable for silver ounce rounds stored in idaho by the private company, norfed. the southern poverty law center is investigating norfed, and it describes liberty dollars as being a fund-raising project for an "antigovernment group dedicated to tax evasion and protest".

     

    The SPLC is a pro-government group dedicated to taxation and subjugation of the American people by a self-defined cultural elite.

     

    Be that as it may, one problem with Norfed warehouse receipts is that they did not keep their word and when silver went above the tariff price of these "receipts" they revalued the entire scheme. That would be fine because you are trading silver for goods and services regardless of the nominal "dollar" value of the silver. However, backpeddling on their promise of convertibility hurt Norfed in my view.

     

    I have participated in an alternative economy via e-gold. I sold written content about numismatics to a libertarian website. They transfered e-gold into my account. I then searched the list of vendors and bought something I wanted, a facsimile edition of Webster's first 1828 dictionary of American English from a patriotic religious group.

     

    Also, as mentioned here and elsewhere, I have been involved in a "community currency" project. These are typically Green party type agenda projects.

     

    So, I have no problem with the idea of Norfed. I just found their implementation disappointing, even though their notes are stunning as collectibles.

  6. There are basically two kinds of loupe:

    1. Bausch&Lomb

    2.  the others

      Hope that was helpful.  ;-)

     

    Verzeihung! Du hast nicht recht.

     

    Zeiss is the number one optics firm in the world. No one is better than Zeiss.

     

    You might say that the cheap lenses and loupes are "just fine" for your use and perhaps they are. A couple of things come into play. Cognitive dissonance says that we justify the choices we make, so whatever you bought will be what you recommend. That is only human nature. Also, some people care about the chromatic aberration and other problems with second-tier products.

     

    Just for the record, I always carry a 5x aspherical B&L hardshell in my briefcase. It is fine for what I do. I do not collect errors. I care little about repunched Mint marks. Most of my work is naked eye (or with reading glasses) and I rarely use a lens at all. So, for me, the $7.95 B&L is fine. That said, Zeiss is the best optics firm in the world. If you want to shop for bargains and take a trade-off on price vs. performance, then that is your choice. If you are serious about your lenses and loupes, microscopes, telescopes and planetariums, then you buy Zeiss.

     

    http://www.zeiss.de

    http://www.zeiss.com

  7. Discussing old coins in found in change, Bustchaser wrote:

    ... I often received obsolete coins that dated back to seated Liberties and occasionally even a bust coin or two. ... Later, after college, I went back to said small town and asked a couple of elderly gentlemen who had been regular customers if they had been "priming the pump" so to speak and seeking a new collector. Never could get either to admit it but I still think so.

     

    I now do the same thing. It is really cool to see the look when you spend a large cent or cull silver.

     

    In Howell, Michigan, when the coin guys meet at the local Big Boy, tipping the waitress in odd forms of money is a custom. I mentioned this once to another coin writer and he said that it is pretty common. So, another coin writer overheard us and said we ought to do this with camera and tape recorder and write a story about spending Large Cents and 3 cent silvers and stuff around town. Then we both knew that he was even worse off than we were.

     

    That said, yes, coin guys do prime the pump of collecting. My favorites are British sterling with Victoria on them that I can get for silver over spot. You leave a six pence or a shilling, you know you made an impression.

  8. Some context is important. I am older, so I have gotten Liberty nickels and Barber dimes in change.

     

    However, counting only "recent" events, in 1999, in Basel, I got a 20-rappen in change from the early 1900s (1905 or so) and it was so nice, XF+ with luster, that I set it aside and put it in a 2x2.

  9. It is hard to say what motivates these things. For all we know, they are bowing to pressure from numismatists. :ninja:

     

    Declaring US money to be "obsolete" is not to be done lightly. The gold notes were demonetized. There might be some other obvious exceptions, but basically, all federal money has always been good. In fact, coins that had been of limited convertibility -- the 2 cent, 3 cent, half cent, etc. -- were made fully fungible. You could pay your income tax with 3-cent nickels if you wanted to.

     

    In most of the world, if the money changes, it means that the government has fallen. That is not a message we want to send. Also, we have exported a huge fraction of our inflation as the dollar is an international currency. Demonetizing any of it could cause much of it to come home as dollars are exchanged for euros or whatever.

  10. On weekends, I am a presenter at the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum. I do a liquid nitrogen show. Shattering coins is part of that. I freeze Lincoln cents and hit them with a hammer.

     

    I also shatter mums, but I do not like that. I talked my way out of it last time by telling the audience that when I was a kid, scientists would come do this demonstration and shatter a frog. Wasting a flower is almost as bad. Flowers should be given to a pretty girl. So, one guy in back pipes up: "You never gave a frog to a pretty girl?" :ninja:

     

    When I do this show again, I think I will expand the coinage a bit and see what breaks how.

  11. I started a topic for Test Cuts.

     

    On the subject at hand ...

     

    There is a book on medical themes (Medicine on ancient Greek and Roman coins, by R. G. Penn, London : Seaby : B.T. Batsford, 1994.) This is hardly a unique work. Just entering 'MEDICINE' in the ANS library catalog brought over 150 hits. Several books and many articles have been written. Medicina in Nummis is the title of a series -- and there has been at least one conference just on that theme.

     

    Ships on coins is a theme not limited to moderns by any stretch. Ancient Greek and Roman coins feature ships, of course, as do Phoenicians, without surprise.

     

    Birds on ancients include owls, doves, and eagles, but also peacocks and geese.

     

    You can collect a zooful of animals, real and mythical.

     

    Celator publisher Kerry Wetterstrom achieved some notariety for his complete set on "The Twelve Labors of Heracles."

     

    Christians will look for the Widow's Mites, a shekel of Tyre ("30 pieces of silver"), a stater of any kind, an appropriate denarius of some kind (Tribute Penny). David Hendin's Guide to Biblical Coins is in its fourth edition and is an invaluable reference. Personally, I doubt the authenicity of most of the widow's mites being offered today: I don't think we know what a real one looks like. The Tribute Penny is a problem in itself. (See: "Six Caesars of the Tribute Penny" at www.coin-newbies.com/articles/caesars.html). "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Heb 11:1) I recommend the travels of Paul and Luke as a collecting theme. One coin from each town would be an excellent choice because it can be met with bronze coins normally overlooked by most collectors. The Seven Churches of Asia would be a good set, finite and easy to achieve while being patient for quality.

     

    ("What village was that?") If you happen to be Jewish, Italian, Greek or Celtic then you have the family angle for collecting -- and in my family, I think we are batting a thousand, when you count the in-laws.

     

    Headgear. Crowns, tiaras, diadems, veils, stephane, laurels,...

     

    Towns. Your normal, every day, village that's 3000 years old can offer you have some opportunities to collect by a very well-defined and perhaps challenging theme, Smyrna comes to mind, but there must be a thousand others.

     

    Metals. Electrum, gold, silver, copper, bronze, orichulcum, iron, and lead, are the openers. (As important as bronze was, it is curious that tin was never coined...)

     

    Electrum. It was issued for over 1000 years -- still being minted today, actually. It can be pricey or cheap, depending on your standards and your patience. (I wrote an article about "Electrum" for The Celator (August 2003)

     

    Astronomy. There is no shortage of stars, moon, suns, and things. You can collect the attributes associated with constellations, chief of which would be the Zodiac. Michael R. Molnar has written more than a few articles about "the Christmas star" and pursuing that, I almost began a collection of these coins from ancient Antioch. Ancient coins of Uraniopolis in Macedonia celebrate Aphrodite Urania.

     

    Musical Instruments. The lyre is pretty easy. The kithera can be found. Trumpets are known.

  12. In the thread on "Collecting Themes" the question of test cuts and banker's marks came up.

     

    We have the coins. We can see the cuts. We can see the punches. I have posted one with a cut, a stater from Sinope. (see http://mysite.verizon.net/jcarney44/coins/marotta.html and the article "The Crime of Diogenes," The Celator, May 1999). I own another, with a banker's mark, a little quinarius (half denarius), issued by Cato (Marcus Porcius Cato), the Roman republican who took his life at Utica. That banker's mark is not much different from the "chop marks" (or shroff marks) known on Spanish silver dollars and other coins that circulated in 18th and 19th century China. The test cut is another problem, entirely.

     

    I heartily recommend that anyone who thinks they have an opinion on this to first experiment with cutting and stamping coins. It is not trivial. You might think it is easy. If so, try it.

     

    By analogy, there was a project about 20-25 years ago to recreate the voyages of Odysseus and Jason. British archaeologists build exact replicas of ancient Greek ships and got some athletic lads to row them. Well, that worked for about five minutes. Seriously, the best they could do was a 7-minute stint, which required extra guys recuperating to take the place of the guys worn out after seven minutes. Obviously, the Greeks did not do it that way! However they did do it, we don't have the technique today. So, too with test cuts and banker's marks.

     

    That said, we do know a few things. (more later)

  13. In the discussion on the Aluminum Lincoln Cent slabbed by ICG, this came up.

     

    Syzygy wrote: Not saying it's not about profit, but if the cent contained more than one cent of copper it would not circulate for long - the aluminum cents might have made good sense.

     

    Fermento is not "wrong" of course. It is pretty clear that the matter is as described: if there is more than $20 in gold in a gold $20 coin, the coins disappear. That was the problem in the early 1800s in the USA (and the UK earlier). The US Mint had to keep a dollar's worth of silver in a silver dollar -- even though the price of silver fluctuated. It is also why the Mint went through Arrows and Rays and all that. They were trying to keep gold and silver on par.

     

    In inflationary times, when paper promises outstrip the precious metal stocks, metals disappear from circulation. Our clad coins are like the Roman folles of the tetrarchy -- they even look alike, really.

     

    Therefore, I am not alone in pointing out that the real problem is that the money has any unit of account attached to it. If the coin only said "0.25 oz 0.925 fine" it would be worth whatever it was worth.

     

    Claims that the "money supply" (gold? silver? stocks and bonds? tokens? cows? apples?) must keep "pace" (however defined) with the "economy" (measured how?) are fallacious. If coined precious metal money were only coined precious metals (not "dollars" or whatever), then as more and more goods and services were created, money would be worth more and more over time. A little bit would go a long way.

     

    Conveniently enough, we would never be in a situation where coinage disappears.

     

    Coined metals are only one kind of money -- a very good kind, but not the only kind. Legal definitions of "dollars" (pounds, francs, whatever) were only bad attempts at a good idea.

     

    Fractional Money by Neal Carothers. A classic American numismatic work known to too few. (Reprinted by Bowers and Merena in 1988). Carothers points out that circulating money -- even if backed in gold or whatever -- need not be gold or whatever and probably should not be. There is no way to circulate gold without wearing it down. (We decry "clipping" but mere circulation is only micro-clipping, really.) Make currency out of industrial metals (or kevlar!), but let it be of fixed value: not "Good for One Dollar" but "Good for One Ounce."

  14. Got mine yesterday! Pretty cool. I will scan and post later but mine was the one with the Greek orators on the face and the Concorde on the back. Well, I think it was Tiffany who drew big eyes on the plane. I thought it was pretty funny. (Anyone remember The Muppet Show when Carol Channing was the guest and they had dancing eyes?)

  15. Mercury Dimes. I wanted the experience... I guess that I am still waiting in that I do not have the 1916-D.

     

    I filled the folder mostly from "circulation" which is to say by going through bags of circulated Mercury dimes at a coin dealer's. I bought five or six that I did not find that way, the semi-keys and a couple of others.

     

    That was it.

  16. Aetheling wrote: "The Owl had a hole going only half way into the coin, it didn't go the whole way through."

     

    28Plain suggested: ...  the result of a metalsmith robbing a little metal from a coin to use as solder  in a brazing operation ... Maybe the practice wasn't limited to modern coins or to modern times. 

     

    I think that if the cut went halfway through, then it was a test cut to reveal the core, as AEtheling suggested at first. Just how this was done is not clear. We went around and around on this on Rec.Collecting.Coins and all I can say is that experiment should come before speculation.

  17. I go back to the event horizon. My oldest coin is in this series from about

    600 BC, probably a little later. This coin is a "trite" or one-third stater. Mine is a "hekte" or one-six stater. The incuse punches on the back are very different, but the reclining lion is similar.

     

    http://www.coinarchives.com/a/lotviewer.ph...ucID=55&Lot=180

     

    When I started collecting, I started with tokens as a project in December 1992. I went quickly to Barber Dimes and Mercury Dimes, but by Spring 1993, I had discovered that ancients -- especially Greeks -- are no more expensive than anything else. So, I focused on ancient and archaic Greek coins worth about a day's wages from the times and towns of famous philosopher.

     

    I have another silver 1/12 stater from Miletos about 550 BC for Thales and I have I have several from the early classical era, 480-450 BC from Abdera, Klazomenae, etc., for Democritos, Anaxagoras, etc.

     

    Of course, I have an Owl, attributed to 450-420 BC and many others after that into the Hellenistic era after Alexander post-300 BC.

     

    When the collection was complete -- I since stopped collecting and sold off most of my coins -- I had a pretty full set from Thales of Miletos to Hypatia of Alexandria.

     

    I still have the electrum "hekte" from 600-550 BC.

     

    (My inspiration for all of that was a tv presentation of "Backbone of the Night" one of the chapters in Carl Sagan's COSMOS.)

  18. There are overlaps between coins and stamps, so there is that.

     

    Clifford Mishler said that as our hobby becomes more and more specialized, we run a risk of falling to factionalism. "How can you collect that junk?" Mishler says that collecting "is a gene you do not inherit." People who collect one thing usually collect something else. If this or that does or does not appeal to you, that is all you can say, but to denigrate another area of collecting misses a basic point.

     

    Writing in the Minkus Stamp Journal in 1971, Ayn Rand said:

    "Those bright little pieces of paper will carry your words across oceans, over mountains, over deserts, and still more difficult: over savage frontiers (the most savage of which are not on the underdeveloped continents). ... It is the voices of individual men that stamps carry around the globe; it is individual men that need a postal service; kings, dictators and other rulers do not work by mail. In this sense, stamps are the world's ambassadors of good will."

    (See http://ellensplace.net/ar_stamp.html)

     

    You do not have to collect everything. You cannot. Claiming that all the commemoratives "ruined" philately takes the wrong view. I collect the ones I like according to my standards.

     

    I use those many commemoratives for business and personal correspondence. I buy old commems in bulk for 90% of face from my local coin store. (You can buy them from classifieds in the coin newspapers, also.) I just invited the Mayor of Dearborn to cut the ribbon at the CSNS/MSNS convention in August and I put the NUMISMATICS stamp on the envelope along with BANKING AND COMMERCE stamp which has more coins on itl.

     

    When I send a letter to Europe, I always make sure that it has some very positive, very American theme expressed in the stamps.

     

    In the past, I have sold plate blocks at Libertarian Party conventions. My favorites are the Bill of Rights commems, the Fifth Amendment commem that shows a hand inside a door held up in the Stop! position to another hand offering a warrant. Show me a coin that carries that message.

     

    As a writer, as a teacher, I celebrate literacy, learning, the right to read and freedom of the press, to say nothing of science, chemistry, dinosaurs, rocks, folk art, folk music, and famous capitalists.

     

    ... but that's just me. You don't have to like stamps.

  19. ... i would take the collect by deity approach.

    Even there, assuming that you start with the Twelve Olympians, would you do Roman or Greek? Apollo is Apollo and popular, but some of them (Zeus/Jupiter, Hermes/Mercury, Athena/Minerva, Artemis/Diana) would be easier than others. Hestia might be harder as a Greek than as Vesta the Roman. Hephestion/Vulcan would be a toughie in either case. Ares appears easily on only one series of Greek coins I know of, though Mars is pretty common for Roman coins of the military anarchy, which figures, of course. And still, the congruencies are often of our own design. I mean is Hermes really Mercury?

     

    Beyond that are minor deities. The manheaded bull is often called a "river god." Similarly, when we have a generic coin from a generic town with a generic female on it, we call her "Nymph" by the name of the town.

     

    "... i've nearly bought an Athenian Owl, the only thing that stopped me last time was the hole that had been drilled into the coin. (Were these not done by bankers? Or someone similar to test for either the purity of the coin or to see if it was real?

     

    Usually -- without seeing the coin -- a hole drilled through it is for hanging the coin as jewelry. Testing with a cut usually meant making some kind of cut at the edge into the coin along a radius, or perhaps punching it on the surface, to see if the surface is just plated.

     

    Like everything else in numismatics it seems, Owls are going up in price. A nice one -- genuine from a reputable seller -- will run about $900 or so. Not that you cannot find a bargain. Centering, wear, etc., are in the eye of the beholder, as always.

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