re-finding motivation

How much I accomplish on any given day depends upon a lot of factors. With the heat that has plagued southern Europe recently my motivation levels have been at a very low ebb. The longer the heat lasted, the less motivated I was to do anything near the computer (which generates its own heat, making matters worse). Eventually, in hopes of getting out of the cycle of thinking “I should be working, I’m too hot/miserable to work” I booked tickets to go visit a friend in Scotland for a week, thinking I could bring my computer and get more done while here than I’d been accomplishing at home, even with the distractions of a friend to visit.

Much to my delight, it is, in fact, much cooler here. This morning I enjoyed my first hot shower in weeks (it has been so hot that only very cold showers feel good at home). However, I then had to face a related challenge. One I am aware of, yet still get caught up in now and again. The dreaded “must work/can’t work” mentality often, for me, leads to “work” becoming a vague, nebulous, undefined thing that I “should” be doing, but am not. My first full day in Scotland I spent visiting friends, helping my friend get settled into his new flat, and baking bread and cookies. All with the vague sensation in the back of my mind that I “should” be working, but without any specific thoughts about what “work” means. I find it difficult to actually sit down to “work” when I don’t have a specific task in mind to accomplish.

Fortunately, late last night I took the time to actually open my files, see the list of tasks I have accomplished recently, and what more still needs doing, and I found a specific, identifiable task that needs to be done next. At that point I was much too sleepy to do it, but that is a good thing—this morning, when I woke up, I woke up thinking, for the first time in weeks, about work. About the specific things that need to be done next, so that I may compare the data I’ve been generating with the data that has been published in the literature. In short, I have re-found my motivation. So, with that I leave you and depart to my spreadsheets for an afternoon of fun with data…

today’s vocabulary lesson

While reading my 1000 words of geologic literature today I encountered the sentence “However, these data may be the result of sampling mixtures of discrete fabric elements. Thus, the age of the older event is equivocal”. Since I was doing “active reading” (typing up a summary of each paragraph in my own words), I decided that I’d best actually look up “equivocal”, since while I *thought* I knew what it meant, I wasn’t willing to swear to it. So I checked the on-line Oxford English dictionary:

equivocal, a. and n.

A. adj.

1. Equal or the same in name (with something else) but not in reality; having a name, without the qualities it implies; nominal. Obs. (dates back to 1643)

2. Of words, phrases, etc.: Having different significations equally appropriate or plausible; capable of double interpretation; ambiguous. (dates back to 1601)

b. Of evidence, manifestations, etc.: Of uncertain bearing or significance. (dates back to 1969)

c. nonce-use. Of a person: Expressing himself in equivocal terms. (dates back to 1601)

3. Of uncertain nature; not admitting of being classified, ‘nondescript’. equivocal generation: the (supposed) production of plants or animals without parents; spontaneous generation. (dates back to 1658)

b. Of sentiments, etc.: Undecided, not determined to either side. Chiefly in negative sentences. (dates back to 1791)

c. Music. equivocal chord: one which may be resolved into different keys without changing any of its tones. (no date given)

4. Of advantages, merits, etc.: Dubiously genuine, questionable. (dates back to 1797)

5. Of persons, callings, tendencies, etc.: Doubtful in character or reputation; liable to unfavourable comment or description; questionable; suspicious. (dates back to 1790)

B. n. An equivocal word or term; a homonym. (dates back to 1653)

I find it fascinating that a word which comes to us from “equal” means “uncertain” (which, from the context, is the best match in this case).

My Dream Location

The August Scientiae Carnival asks “what is going on in your life right now? What will be happening in six months or a year from now? What are your goals? Are you looking forward to the next year, or dreading it?”. This is a good time to be asking these questions of myself, since I have only six months remaining of my 1.5 year contract. I am starting to see jobs advertised with January start times, and have been re-vamping my CV and sending out applications and letters of enquiry. I’ve also been looking into the process of applying for funding, with the thought that while it is certainly easier to simply accept a job that is already funded, if I were to do my own funding application I would be able to work in a place of my own choosing doing a tasks that I want to do.

Where do I want to be in six months time? If I could have *everything* I want in life, I’d want to be doing research at a University located in a large town (or small city in the mountains). Someplace with a moderate to cold climate, and a winter where it not only snows, but the snow stays on the ground all winter. I’d want there to be plenty of hiking and cross-country ski trails in easy access from my home. I’d want an indoor rock-climbing gym at the Uni, located reasonably near my office. I’d want there to be a locally active branch of either the SCA or some other Medieval Reenactment organization that hosts camping events in the summer and has lots of music/singing/dancing at their winter events. I’d want my research to involve both field work and laboratory work and involve interesting metamorphic rocks that are pretty and have lots of information to convey. Does anyone know where this dream location is?

Marie Curie Conference

I first heard about the post-doc position I now hold from an e-mail to the geo-metamorphic email list, and it wasn’t until I received a copy of the contract that I found out that by accepting the position I was becoming a Marie Curie Fellow. Since my very favorite book when I was a child was my copy of a children’s version of Madame Curie, a bibliography written in 1938 by her daughter Eve, I was quite delighted to find out that my funding is associated with such an amazing woman. Spending my childhood reading (over and over) about her love of learning, and how much she sacrificed in her youth to be able to attend University was probably a factor in my own love of learning and drive to attend University.

One of my favorite glimpses into her personality takes place after she has, after years of hard work, managed to isolate the element radium from pitchblende ore. Soon after that accomplishment was published she and her husband, Pierre, who had abandoned his own research to assist her with hers when he realized how important her work was, received a letter from a fellow scientist asking them to please share with him the details of the process so that he, too, could obtain pure radium for his studies. She and Pierre discuss it, acknowledging that since they invented the process they could charge people money to share the details. Had they gone that path they would have likely become quite rich thereby. However, they both agreed that in science it is far more important to freely share knowledge than to sell it—selling ideas was simply not appropriate in their minds.

I very much agree with them on this point. Consequently, the couple of hours of lectures at this week’s conference for Marie Curie Fellows (held in conjunction with the EuroScience Open Forum) which focused upon questions on intellectual property and the process of obtaining (and selling) patents rubbed me the wrong way. While I have no doubt that if Marie could know that there are 1000’s (I guess—there were over 400 of us at the conference) of people who are receiving funding to do research in other countries in her name she would feel honoured and delighted that so many talented scientists were getting such good opportunities, I also feel that she would not have approved of the message presented by those two speakers or who seemed, to me, to be equating science with an opportunity to gain financial profit.

potential calamity averted by a careful change in the erosional surface orientation

My most recent experiment is one I’ve long been looking forward to analyzing—this is the highest-pressure run I’ve done yet. We gave it nearly 500 hours in the piston cylinder, while I was busy with lots of travel and a minor bout of food poisoning. Once we finally downloaded it and I rescued the capsules from their nest I discovered that they were stuck together. We always run two capsules (2 mm diameter gold tubes, welded shut around the experimental charge) in every experiment, with different compositions in each.

Usually it is enough to set them in the palm of my hand and rub them back and forth a bit to cause them to break apart before I carefully break off the last of the MgO, salt and graphite that clings to the capsules. This time they stayed stuck together no matter what I tried, so I consulted with my boss, who suggested that I try carefully grasping each with jeweler’s pliers and seeing if I can break them apart that way. Alas, they did not separate, instead one of the two capsules started to tear open.

Therefore I stopped trying and instead we put both capsules into a single epoxy mount. Knowing that it would require a fair bit of luck for the capsules to be oriented within the mount such that it would be possible to expose the insides of both capsules when I went to polish them I put off the task and spent the weekend visiting with friends. This morning I finally decided to look at the mount and try my hand a polishing them. When I looked I determined that the important ends of each capsule were not on the same plane with respect to the surface of the mount, but it looked like if I were careful to put more pressure on the one side than the other it might be possible to change the dip of the top of the mount such that both capsules were intersected. Much to my delight I managed to accomplish exactly this task. I now have one mount with two capsules, both exposed, all polished and turned in to be carbon-coated in preparation for tomorrow’s microprobe session.

This makes me very happy. I did not like the alternative, which would have been polish enough to expose one of the two, analyze and photograph everything in it and then polish it away to expose the other one for analysis. This way we will be able to go back and re-analyze anything we want at any time, rather than having one of them cease to exist in order to reach the other.

play with the data long enough and it becomes possible to find a way to see patterns in it

One of the things I’ve been struggling with in my current research is how best to communicate the results from the various experiments I’ve run. My experiments have thus far yielded a total of ten different phases, with as many as seven of them appearing in a single experiment. I use two different capsules at each pressure and temperature at which I run experiments; each capsule has a different bulk composition. Therefore I’ve been displaying the result graphically, by using 8-pointed stars divided into an inner ring for one of the composition types, and an outer ring for the other. The resultant triangles representing the phases present are either left blank if it isn’t present or filled in with colour-coding if it is. One phase, quartz, is always present (save for when we reduce the starting SiO2 to eliminate it), so it doesn’t need a triangle of its own, and another occurs only in one high-P run, so it appears as a different colour triangle replacing one attached to a low-P phase; this is why I’ve been able to get away with using only eight points for the star.

However, there are times when it is necessary to communicate with text or a table, rather than with an illustration, and this is where I’d been stymied. I simply wasn’t seeing much in the way of a pattern with my data in terms of mineral assemblages. A mineral assemblage is the group of minerals which are all stable at the same pressure/temperature; they would have been the products of the reaction(s) which produced the assemblage. (When doing experiments we talk of phases rather than minerals—a phase is a particular composition of a mineral (many minerals can have more than one possible compositions, so may be considered a family of mineral phases)—in general only one phase within a family will be stable at a given set of conditions) .

Today I finally discovered a way to organize my data so as to see patterns in the assemblages. This required using colour coding and playing with the data, combining them into groups until I was able to determine that the “important” phases of the list of 10 are talc, garnet, and biotite. The others are either ubiquitous (quartz, chloritoid and muscovite) or only show up in a few of the runs and can be considered "minor" (zoisite, lawsonite, kyanite, carbonate). Once I’d worked that out, I was able to split the data into four groups each of which are +/- the minor phases and + the ubiquitous phases.

However, it was also necessary to consider each of the two bulk compositions separately to see the relationships between the groups, and I had to draw circles around the stars on my original P-T diagram to see how the groups relate to pressure and temperature. (I love having a drawing program which lets one draw circles on layers that can be made visible or invisible, so that one can see only the circles relevant to a single composition at one time.) Once I had all of the groups for each bulk composition circled it was easy to see that:

The experiments using the metagreywacke composition only have groups A, B, and C thus far. These groups plot on diagonal trends for this composition such that with respect to temperature B is less than both A and C, but with respect to pressure C is less than both B and A.

The experiments with metapelitic composition have groups A to D which plot in a grid such that with respect to temperature B is less than A while D is less than C and with respect to pressure C is less than A while D is less than B.

Now that I can see these patterns I shall really look forward to obtaining the results from future experiments to see how they relate to this overall pattern.

Anorthosite and asphalt

I spent two days this week on a field trip in western Norway, where our guide assures us that the world’s best (ultra) high pressure rocks are located. It is my plan to do a proper field trip post, including photos, but in the mean time I’ll share with you a snippet of information I learned about one of the rock types we drove past, but did not stop at.

Near the town of Florø, Norway, there are a variety of white road cuts which are made of anorthosite. The primary (only?) mineral in anorthosite is plagioclase feldspar. In this area anorthosite is often quarried and used for making asphalt. Why? Several reasons:

* White colour of anorthosite makes whiter asphalt = better visibility for driving at night or under cloudy conditions.

* Plagioclase hardness (~6 on Mohs scale) makes for more durable, and therefore longer lasting asphalt.

* The plagioclase cleavage planes means that as cars drive on it and break it down the crystals maintain their edges, which provides better traction, even when wet.

Alas, I didn’t manage to get a photo of any of the anorthosite outcrops we passed—my camera has too long of a delay between pushing the button and taking a photo, which means that by the time I saw the outcrop it was too late to photograph it at the speeds our bus was traveling. But I was able to find a photo on line of an outcrop down near Bergen, which appears on this web page.