Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how the mining city of Flin Flon, in northern Manitoba, was named after a character in a satirical science fiction novel titled The Sunless City.I describe how the novel was found in the wilderness and retell several versions of the story of how the ore body was discovered in 1915, which led to the founding of the community.As well, I discuss the controversy surrounding who really discovered the ore body.Turning to the novel, I provide some biographical information about its author, J. E. Preston Muddock, and examine several of the book's themes.Then I describe how the character of Flintabbatey Flonatin, the hero of The Sunless City, has been altered over the decades, in which the character has been changed from a Victorian era comic figure to a northern trickster-like figure.Briefly, I discuss what purpose this quirky story must have for the community.In 1912 an Act of the Canadian Parliament increased the size of Manitoba by adding 178,100 square miles onto its northern region.This meant that Manitoba now had a huge area of northern rock, forest, and marshland to call its own.However, it didn't take very long for the idea to take hold that "new Manitoba was mineral country" (Hedman et al., 1).In turn, it didn't take very long for prospectors to begin making their way into this new region: "Filled with expectation and hope, they came to the mineral country which promised rich returns, as in past years the northland had provided plentifully to the trapper and fur trader" (Hedman et al., 1-2).And yet, as we know from those famous lines by Robert Service, "There are strange things done in the midnight sun/ By the men who moil for gold…" (Service, 16).And one of the stranger, or at least quirkier, stories of moiling for minerals in northern Manitoba, is the story of how the mining city of Flin Flon received its unusually alliterative name.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".