a major breakthrough

Years ago, while I was still in Italy, my then boss encouraged me to consider the result of my experiments in terms of the assemblages present rather than looking at how each individual mineral phase changed from one pressure and/or temperature to the next. The problem with this suggestion was that, at the time, I simply wasn't seeing any pattern--which phases were with which other phases in any given experimental run just looked random.

Today I finally had time to sit down with the comments he sent me (last week) on the last draft of the paper (which I had sent him some months back). In those comments he, once again, reiterated his advice on thinking of assemblages rather than individual phases, but this time he included a couple of examples and included a +/- symbol to show what other phases might or might not also be present. . Now, I have always known that we geologists will often group things together in lists that name a handful of minerals that are always present, plus a few others which may or may not be there, but, somehow, I never took that detail into account when looking for patterns in my experimental results before.

Today, looking at the same data I have gazed at so many times since doing those experiments years ago, I suddenly saw patterns in which minerals appear with which other minerals. Finally, at long last, I am able to approach the organization of this paper in the way he suggested I do in the first place. What a relief. After some hours of work I now have a new, vastly improved, figure showing my results, with little circles showing which assemblage groups occur at which pressures and temperatures, and I have new paragraphs of text explaining each one. These have been emailed off to Italy for comment. With much luck he will have time to look at them very soon, and will get back to me straight away--it would be so nice to get the paper from that project done and submitted...

In other news, our houseguest, L, arrived yesterday for the holidays. She and I took a break at lunch to go for a walk in the forest, but we spent most of the day working on our research (she is a theoretical physicist, so she was doing calculations). However, she reached a breaking point in her work quite a bit ago, and she and lord_kjar are in the other room chatting. I think it is time to put down the computer and join them...