not the best working day

[kareina]

The morning and early afternoon were spent on useful, non uni tasks. Whilst cleaning the loo, scrubbing the hard-to-reach part of the floor behind the toilet, it occurred to me that housework is a form of conspicuous consumption. Just as some Medieval fashions used oodles of extra fabric, just to show that they could afford it, so many human cultures have prided themselves upon having a clean house--for to have a clean house requires either 1) the finances to pay someone else to clean it, or 2) the time to do it yourself. Alas, with my current schedule, we only manage a fraction of the cleaning that I would wish done. clovis_t and I have an agreement--one week I clean the loo and he does the vacuuming, the next week we swap. (the other bathroom & toilet room (two separate rooms) are used by the other two housemates--I don't enter them, and I literally don't know what sort of agreement they may or may not have on who cleans them and how often, but presumably, whatever it is suits them). The kitchen counters stay clean all the time, but, alas, that is about the extent of it. Someday I'd like to be able to afford the conspicuous consumption of a truly spotless house. Imagine, one without an accumulation of dust!

I've already posted about the most fun bit of non-uni work for the day, I adore baking!

Once I'd done all of that and finally settled in to Uni work this evening (sigh. Evening. One would think that when I get up in the morning, I'd get to work earlier in the day!) I managed to compile a list of all of those pink-highlighted notes in my thesis saying what further calculations and other tasks I want to accomplish during the next week or so before I return to serious writing. Gee, that list looks longer than can be accomplished in a week or so. Particularly as when I went to do one of them, I then lost the rest of the evening on step 1) working out a reasonable estimate of what the percentage of the sample is for each mineral present, and from that and the composition measured for each mineral, calculating the whole-rock composition. At the end of the day I have a whole-rock composition which looks not unlike that obtained for this sample by crushing it and having the lab analysing it (XRF) in the major elements, but quite different in the minor elements. Step two will be to do the main Perplex calculations and see if they give any better results than I obtained with the XRF whole-rock composition as a starting point. Alas, it is now 23:00, and I've got to be awake tomorrow for the birthday adventure hiking up the Lost World Trail (which, I just found out from the link provided, is a place to do bouldering as well as hiking, which is all we'd had planned).

Comments

[bianca-di-bari.livejournal.com]

How important are those minor elements? If it's within errors bars, let it ride and go back to the writing! :)

As for the house cleaning... there is a third possibility- one can't afford a large house so they have something tiny enough, with few enough possessions, to make it so there's nothing to get dirty! Granted, that'll never be me; such the packrat I've been trashing stuff lately just to relieve the feeling of clutter and yet there's still plenty there to not notice the amount trashed *doh*.

Have fun hiking!

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Alas, the bit I described yesterday is only the first step needed to *start* doing the calculations. I'm calculating phase diagrams for specific mineral compositions. The Phase diagrams calculated for some of the samples based on the whole-rock composition obtained via XRF didn't predict garnet of the composition that is present in the rock. It is possible that there are local inhomogeneaties in the sample, and therefore the portion of the sample that got crushed for XRF analysis doesn't have the same composition as that of the thin-section of the sample which was analysed in the Microprobe.

Therefore I'm trying "plan B"--work out what the relative % of each mineral is, take the compositions of those minerals, and multiply by the % to obtain a composition for the thin section. Then calculate phase diagrams for the sample base upon this newly calculated whole-rock composition. I *want* this to be different than the composition obtained via XRF--if it is the same it still won't work. However, it wouldn't surprise me if the major elements are still somewhat close to the same value (I don't think the inhomogenaties are *that* severe, if present).

However, when estimating mineral% for a sample, there is a certain margin for error. Therefore I've set up a spreadsheet which does the calculations of the whole-rock composition based upon the cells in which I enter amounts for each mineral, and have tried playing with it, bumping one mineral up, or another down. Strangely, changing them by a little doesn't seem to make much difference in the phase diagrams calculated, but they still don't predict garnets of the composition in the sample...

I think I was speaking of the *cleaning*, not the clutter--removing dirt, mold, dust. Some people have lots of clutter, but it is all clean and shiny clutter (I've a friend in Fairbanks, AK, who's living room looks much like a store selling knic-nacs, and never a speck of dust in sight), others have both clutter and dust/dirt, apple cores, mouldy sandwiches, etc...

The hike was fun!

[celsa.livejournal.com]

"housework is a form of conspicuous consumption. Just as some Medieval fashions used oodles of extra fabric, just to show that they could afford it, so many human cultures have prided themselves upon having a clean house--for to have a clean house requires either 1) the finances to pay someone else to clean it, or 2) the time to do it yourself."

I agree with you, but I also think there are other influences at work. I rambled in another blog, describing some ideas about the origins of our culture's idea of ideal housekeeping. It ties in with your observation in that we appear to be saying, in different ways, that people often really do have better things to do with their time than compete in the house cleaning Olympics. :-)

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Oh, that (the other blog) was well said!