[meteorite-list] Literal Meteorite Price Lists...I got some--want em?

From: martinh_at_isu.edu <martinh_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Nov 9 09:23:09 2004
Message-ID: <aa260faa289e.aa289eaa260f_at_isu.edu>

Hi All,

Actually Nick, ebay is totally different world than decade-old dealer listings. First of all, the posted prices are fixed whereas ebay is at the whims of the bidders who all have their own reasons for their bid amount.

Second, most (but of course not all as some of you know about) of the dealer's stock is listed giving an indication of the type and sizes available at that point in time, with many much larger than the usual material on ebay.

And third, there were many pieces of many rare meteorites offered through the years and the lists give a snapshot into the distribution of rare material over the years. It is really something to read through pricelists containing howardites, ureilites, carbonaceous chondrites, type 3s, eucrites, etc. and many of them are witnessed falls and none are NWAs or the like.

Frankly, I think an ebay archive would be easy. Just build a progam to crawl the meteorite auctions after their completion and store the data in a searchable datab
ase. The upfront time might be a touch high, but after that it would run forever with minimal tweaking. However, I suspect it might violate the ebay user agreement.

Cheers,

Martin

----- Original Message -----
From: Nicholas Gessler <gessler_at_ucla.edu>
Date: Monday, November 8, 2004 9:41 pm
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Literal Meteorite Price Lists...I got some--want em?

> This would be a good idea. So would archiving all of eBay's
> meteorite
> auctions. However, it's an enormous task: Let's see...
> 400 auctions per week times 52 weeks is around 20,000. Times 10
> years, is
> about 200,000. With 300x400 images or 100k pixels times 3 bytes
> per pixel
> is 300k bytes per auction (minimum). Times 20,000 is 6 megabytes
> for one
> year, or 60 for 10. It's late. Someone please check my math.
> Maybe it is
> feasible? Especially by someone who can write the code to do this
> automatically. But not by me...
>
> And then what have we got? Does the fact t
hat someone paid $100
> for xyz
> two years ago mean that $50 is a fair price today? Or $200? Oh
> well. Actually, I think the collection of photographs would be
> worth much
> more than the collection of prices!
>
> Cheers,
> Nick
>
>
> ______________________________________________
> Meteorite-list mailing list
> Meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com
> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
>
Received on Tue 09 Nov 2004 09:23:06 AM PST