progress happens

[kareina]

I have made what feels like good progress on today's goal--chapter 3 now has some very good figures showing the pressure/temperature estimates obtained for the first two samples. For one of them I have estimates obtained via four different geothermobarometers, and while the numbers look different at the first glance, when one considers the errors on those numbers, they all overlap, which shows up very nicely in the figure. That one took a bit of work--Excel doesn't show errors very well in graphs on its own, but using the Isoplot add-on for Excel lets one plot results with errors showing as an ellipse, or as crosses. I like the ellipses because the slope of the elipise shows information too, which doesn't show up as clearly with crosses. However, in order to do this one needs to know what the errors are, and while one of the techniques used gives the 2σ error as part of the output, the others don't, so I had to add them myself, and also figure out what kind of slope the elipise should have (which is easy to obtain--one just puts the higher T into the spreadsheet and see what that changes the P to, and repeat for the lower T, and then see what the higher and lower P changes the T to) and then try various numbers till the elipise looks like the graph obtained with the series of dots from the last parenthetical note).

(yes, today's progress report is dreadful writing--but I want to go do yoga and get some sleep, so I'm leaving it as is.)

Tomorrow's goal: continue this process for the next samples...