The other day my mouse was causing enough frustration to cry out to social media about the issue, and then spend the rest of the re-arranging furniture. I wound up taking enough out of the room to move stuff around and then put most of it back. Gone is the big desk--most of its space hasn't been utilized since we got the recliner to use as a computer chair. Instead we found in a second hand store an old wooden CD tower, which we bought, took home, and while I moved furniture and prepared the space, he took out the old plastic sliders for the CDs, re-glued the join on the back wall, and sanded it back to bare wood. Then he took a leg from a narrow trestle table/tall bench thing that had been in his dad's office and attached it to one end of the wooden box.

We took the top part of that table/bench and mounted it on the wall next to my recliner for holding water bottles and other things that I want in reach when working, and made a computer station out of the former CD tower, which is now oriented horizontally, one end attached to the wall, the other supported by the trestle leg. We have attached the monitor on top, and my laptop sits in the inner area when not in use, and on my lap when it is in use. This means that I am once again able to type on the computer itself, instead of a normal keyboard, and I like it better (I have small hands). Since I sit in a recliner my legs are under the desk/monitor, and I am comfortable.

The only issue was getting in and out, but we knew that would be temporary. Now we have obtained some large hinges, and some wheels, so the box supporting the monitor is now attached by hinges, and the leg sits on two wheels, so when I want to get up from the computer I close the laptop, slide it into the shelf, and simply rotate the whole works station out of the way. I am pleased.

I have also ordered a computer tray on sliders that we can mount into the shelf, so that the computer can be supported on that, instead of sitting on my lap (well, on the little bean bag bottomed table top thingie, which is directly on my lap). If we can get that set up as I envision it, it will be possible to then leave the laptop open when I rotate my workstation, which is good for things like telling it to run backups, and then leaving, or for doing yoga during a zoom call and being able to see the call.

In thesis work progress on the lit review means that I have finally obtained sources that I either didn't look for, or didn't find back when I first saw mention of them. One of these I have already blogged about--the one where it mentioned artefacts that wound up in the Gothenburg museum, but the museum web page artefact database didn't have any of that information, so I told them, and now it does.

The down side is that I hadn't previously had that museum in my chapter of artefacts in Swedish museums, so I am now adding another section to that chapter, and, since they have a fair bit of steatite, it is taking time. Keldor suggested just ignoring that museum, but there is enough there that the collection seems significant, so here I am, adding more artefacts to the thesis chapter, as you do.

It looks like I will be submitting an abstract to a conference in Gothenburg in January, which runs the Wednesday-Friday before 12th Night Coronation in Germany, so, if that happens, as I will already be half way to the event, I may as well attend it...

Today during my yoga session I learned that while I am strong enough to get my legs off the ground for pendulum pose when they are crossed in a full lotus position, if my cat places only her two front paws on my thigh, that is enough additional weight that I am promptly sitting on the ground again!

I am still writing in chapter 3, with some detours in to parts of chapter 5 that hadn't been done yet, now that I have come to artefacts that were found very near source quarries. I really need to wrap this up and get on to chapter 2 and the discussion and conclusion chapter as soon as possible. But I am enjoying it--engaging with the artefacts, even virtually, is fun, and learning the geography of random corners of the country where they were found is also fun. So is making the figures. It is only the looming sense of overdue deadline I am not so fond of.

I am not doing much else right now. Well, on Monday when Keldor got home from work he suggested I take a break and join him in the forest, there being plenty of chanterelles to pick just now. I went along, but while he walked here, there, and everywhere picking lots of mushrooms, I stayed surprisingly near the car picking blueberries. 1.5 hours of squats later and I had more than 1.5 yogurt buckets worth of berries picked, and he'd filled his huge waist pack with mushrooms. We dried the berries (about 0.5 liters dried) to add to muesli later, and he cooked up the chanterelles straight away in butter, most of which to freeze for future meals, though he's eaten some already (I am not a huge fan, so I save them for those who are).

My Swedish is noticeably better these days. Funny how much it improves when one actually uses it. Nowadays when I write to museums for more information, I just do it automatically in Swedish, without even thinking about it and do most of the editing and grammar fixing myself, before I toss it into google translate to see if I missed any typoes that happen to be some other word.

Heard today that one of my friends in Tasmania has died. She is one who was at least as old as my mother, and didn't look at all young when we met, in 2003, so it isn't so surprising that only 20 years later she's gone, but it is sad. She had a facebook account but literally never posted anything on it, and I don't think she ever saw the chat messages I tried sending to her (she never replied), but she was delighted to see me when I was down there for a conference in 2015 or so, and she often pressed like on my FB posts, so I know she hadn't forgotten me. I hope my adventures brought her some amusement, and that her friends and loved ones are comforted with happy memories of time spent with her.

I had finished up the writing, entering the data into the csv file, and first the draft figures for the Swedish Historical Museum steatite artefacts for chapter 3 of my thesis, so there was only importing the csv file into google earth to get the location symbols showing with the correct colour and shapes for each of them, then copying the improved version of the maps into the figures, and write up the figure captions left to go. Sounds easy. (or, at least it did to me)

So this morning I sat down to do that, and worked quickly through the first few. Then I hit a snag.

The csv file had a problem with a handful of the data--it looked like a chunk of samples got their location information copied over another chunk of samples, but not in a predictable sort of pattern, so I have no idea how it happened. So it took a big chunk of today to look up the ones that were plotting in the wrong place, copy their correct location info into the csv file (I still had the original google earth locations saved, so I could just make that layer visible to go get the numbers) and then do the other above mentioned steps for those regions.

Now I think I am past the problem area, and have made it through most of the figure caption writing. But now it is closing in on 23:00, and I have put in a nine hour day on this, so the last few figure captions can wait till tomorrow.

While I did that Keldor made some progress on the outdoor cat area in progress, which is coming together really nicely. I would have loved to have helped with that project, but he is able to do it himself, and he can't help me with the thesis writing, so we split up and conquered the day.

I did manage to get the nettles I had picked and put into the dehydrator yesterday packaged up. Now we have one full glass jar. I would like a couple of more before summer ends, to be certain we have enough to last till spring.

The thesis chapter I am working on right now is a summary of the steatite items held in Swedish museums. A tedious task that any AI (ok, probably one that will exist a couple of years in our future) could compile and make a pretty presentation of in about a half an hour, while I have been working on it for many weeks. The process would be faster if all of the old info recorded on the originally handwritten museum catalogues for the Swedish Historical museum, and on their old typed card-catalogues had been entered into the database, in addition to being scanned. Much of that old information is, in fact, in their database, so if one clicks on an artefact on their web interface for their database, you get all the info. However, a number of the older items (especially those obtained in the 1800's) haven't yet gotten that information entered into the database. This means that if you click on an item, and it doesn't include anything in the way of a description or measurements, there is a chance that if you into the old version of the database web interface and click on the information symbol there, and look at the old scanned catalogues you might find out more:

http://kulturarvsdata.se/shm/object/362802 is from the older database, which opens the catalogue view https://catview.historiska.se/catview/index.jsp for that inventory number, if you click the little brown book symbol on the "more information" section of the first of those two links.

https://samlingar.shm.se/object/D042FB9F-A914-4155-934A-DAA6DA9451B7 is the link to the new database version for the same artefact as above.

Taking the time to check those old catalogues for each item is part of why this project takes so long. There is also the part about finding the coordinates for the location, so I can plot each artefact on the map, which is super easy for some items, as that is in the database, along with a link to information about the archaeological excavation that provided the artefact. Other times there is just a name of the province or, perhaps the parish, in which it comes, and then I have to look up coordinates for that.

Then there is making the figure, with all of the items for a given area shown as dots on the map, with photos of the artefacts themselves, and arrows to show which photo goes to which dot.

So, yah, not quite to the point where technology could do this for me, yet.

But I am very, very aware that the time is coming, and soon (we have the pieces--the "can write good paragraphs" and the "can read scans of 1800's handwriting", and the "can make good art using supplied photos" and the "can search multiple databases"), so it is just combining them, and persuading the AI to stick to the facts), and I know that this may well spell the end of this sort of thesis chapter for students, and so I wonder what next? What will students do when an easily report of every object of a specific material and time period, in every museum, everywhere, can be generated in seconds? Right now we are encouraged to focus and narrow the scope of our research to keep the project feasible in the time period available for it. That is going to be a big game changer, and I am really glad I have the chapter on geochemistry to give the thesis more value than my artefact summary will have when such things are created in seconds...

These things were all part of my dreams last night, none of the details of which stuck with me, but which left me with an overall feeling of redundancy.

In writing up the Swedish soapstone artefacts in the Swedish History Museum for my thesis I discovered a handful which had a location number that didn't match the written information as to where they were, so I emailed my contact at the museum asking for clarification. He replied today thanking me--the number was in fact wrong in the database, and now they have fixed it. Even better, I had guessed correctly what the correct number ought to have been.

This was very inspiring, and I have just plowed through writing up about 30 artefacts, so there are only 40 more to go for this region. The end is starting to be in sight!

I did get off to a slow work start this morning, because I re-did the arm rest on my work recliner. When we bought this chair the arm rest wasn't wide enough to hold the computer drawing tablet (which I use as a mouse pad when not using the computer pen), so I improvised something involving an empty plastic tray for paint rollers, some scrap fabric to pad and cover it, and some nylon webbing strapping to tie it to a chunk of wood, tied to the arm of the chair. Today took that apart, took the arm off the recliner, removed the upholstery, added an angle bracket to support a chunk of wood to make a base for the drawing tablet, and then used the same sticky-backed ventilation insulation that Keldor uses for helmet padding to build up the arm rest to what I hope is an ergonomically good height.

If I don't get that funding I applied for, and I have to do this degree as a Master's thesis, the goal is 50,000 words. The document just past 25,000 words. This makes me feel better about the plan to stop doing data processing and writing up of sample results as of when we depart for Double Wars next week, and putting in something about how the data collection phase had been too ambitious for a Master's, and that further data processing is beyond the scope of this project, but the list of analyses run is retained to make it clear where one can pick up with "future work".

I did a quick poster today introducing my research to the Durham University Mass Spectrometry User Group, which will be having its first meeting next week (I will zoom in). ( It is behind the cut, because it is huge )

Yannick was nice enough to meet with me on zoom tonight, and showed me how to fix the minor technical issues that had been bothering me with yesterday's version of the video, and I even added a little end credit music, so now I think it is ready to submit. If you want to see the new version, it is here: https://youtu.be/QBggT4eOrPk

later today*, when I turn in the application I will delete the old version (and replace yesterday's link), so
that when the evaluating committee goes to look at it, there are no other videos in my channel to look at.

*I actually wrote that last night, so it spoke of applying "tomorrow", but this morning I saw that it hadn't posted, so I pushed the post button, and it offered to restore a draft. I guess I never actually pushed the post button. Tired? yah, a bit

Given that our shire hosted Drachenwald's Coronation in January, none of us felt up to also running our normal annual spring event JMB (short for Jungfru Maria Bebådelsedagsgille, which google translates as "Virgin Mary Annunciation Day party"), which typically has 20 to 40 people spending the full weekend at a site a half hour or so inland. But neither did we want to do nothing at all, so Keldor suggested that we do a JMB lite event here at our house, and created a FB event for, it and we even dropped it on the Kingdom Calendar, on the off chance that anyone who isn't on FB might go looking to see if we are doing something.

Between deciding to do that and now I got that tuition bill from the university, which, even though we worked out that I am correct, I do, in fact, have till the end of spring term before my funding runs out, nonetheless put me into panic thesis mode, trying to finish all of my data processing and write all the words for the thesis as fast as possible, so that I don't have to pay £2,500 a term (which, given I have no income just now, is not something I wish to do). Due to the limited amount of funded time available my thesis advisor and I agreed that, rather than doing the degree as the PhD we had originally planned, I should just down-grade to a Master's, which is a more easily achievable thesis format in a short time.

Then I saw that ad for funding, aimed at supporting two individuals who are in their final, otherwise unfunded, year of writing up their PhD results, and I dared to start dreaming again. An entire year to finish up converting all of data to a thesis would make it possible to get that second PhD after all, and would be fun, and, I think, my contribution to the science is worth the higher degree.

The funding application is straight forward: turn in a 2 page CV, a 500-word Thesis Summary, a 750 word General Interest Pitch, and... a three-minute video introducing myself and my research.

I have never edited a video in my life, and have almost never filmed video, so why not try? (I have filmed some acroyoga training, as it is a good way to look at what we are doing, and figure out what is going wrong and what we need to do different to make the pose work, and, when it does work, it is fun to have a record of it.)

Yannick of Normandy, in Insulae Draconis (he who did the wonderful trailers for Drachenwald's On-line Kingdom University Event), was kind enough to give me a two hour zoom call wherein he taught me the basics in using Lightworks, by having me edit together a couple of random segments of two of my acroyoga films, so that I could learn how to add film clips to a project, how to move them, how to select a subset of them, and discard the rest, how to overlay one over the other, with a dissolve transition from one to the next, and how to zoom and pan, and how to add a title. The result was a very short film using all of those skills, but, because it was randomly chosen bits, wasn't worth keeping.

Then I went to Luleå for my last week of work, working long days, so I practiced none of those skills directly after learning them. On my bus ride home, after doing filming of me in front of a greenscreen talking of my thesis reading a script, talking of it without a script, and even reading both the Thesis Summary and the General Interest Pitch (which gave me 45 minutes worth of film, in which I hope I have enough for the three minute film), I started thinking of the whole pan and zoom thing Yannick taught me.

I had always assumed that the panning and zooming in the yoga app videos was done by moving the camera, but, now that I have learned the skill, I understand that it is probably just video editing. However, I felt that this tool much be good to call attention to specific details in graphs or maps in my research. Then I suddenly felt inspired: GoogleEarth! That program has wonderful fly-in to your chosen location feature. But how to get that from that program into the video editing program? So I asked google, and sure enough, there are tutorials to do just that, and, it turns out, I didn't even need to use a third-party software for the screen recording, Windows has a built-in low end model, that works well enough, if you are willing to use the editor's zoom into the part of the screen you want, rather than selecting that portion before recording.

What does all this have to do with the mini SCA event at our house, you ask? Well, I got home late Thursday evening (where "home" = Keldor's dad's house in Skelleftehamn, since that is MUCH closer to the bus stop than our place is). Friday Keldor went to work, and I set to work transcribing all of my films I had made the day before, including noting where I stuttered, and if I added hand gestures, so that when I get to the part where I add me to the film, I can quickly grab the correct film to pull the words I need from. (In an ideal world I would have had a complete film plan and script done in advance, so I could have just recorded the words that would be used, in several takes, rather than needing to also record lots of additional stuff, as I just don't know yet exactly where the film is going. Apparently, I grow film projects in the same, barely planned organic way I approach most of my sewing and embroidery projects, with a strong "I will figure it out as I go" component).

I got all but one of them transcribed before he finished work for the day, and we packed up the cats and did the 35 minute drive home and got everything unpacked and put away. Then I settled to the computer with that final transcription, till time for the zoom meeting for the Drachenwald 30 Year songbook project, where I confessed that I had accomplished nothing for the project since our last meeting, due to thesis focus mode, and we delegated parts of the things I had hoped to do to others (thanks others!). As I listened to the meeting, I went to the web page where they are collecting the bits that are done, and tested pulling the list into Scrivener, copying in the plain lyrics, and adding clickable links to the various versions of each song (phf, sheet music, with chords, midi) where they exist. The meeting lasted long enough I got as far as the Ms. Then, as the meeting wrapped up, I exported the result to an epub, and sent it to the others, wondering if they think it is worth also doing an epub version of the song book. Then, at events with poor internet access one could still have the songbook in a format that is easy to read on a phone or a tablet, and, if the access is good, one could click through to the web page.

I have been wanting an epub songbook for ages, and haven't taken the time to sit down and do it. It really isn't hard to do, and would be fairly fast to just drop the old word doc for the Oerthan songbook into scrivener and convert it. It is just finding the time. The only reason doing the Drachwneald 30 Year songbook takes longer is the part about coping in the links to the other version. No one has replied to that shared file yet, so I have no idea if it is only me who likes the idea of epub, or if the idea is worth pursuing.

After the meeting I finished my transcription and got ready for bed, glad that we didn't have a normal JMB, as I would have missed all of the Friday night part of the event for work. The event announcement Keldor had done said that the event would start at 10:00 on Saturday, by which time I was sitting at the computer, happily experimenting with recording GoogleEarth fly-in to a quarry location, and fading from there to a photo of the rock from the quarry, fading to a photo of the crystal from the rock that I analysed, fading to the maps for each of the interesting elements for that crystal, one at a time (gee, it is GREAT to see the maps replacing one another like that--one very clearly sees the difference in distribution of each element!!!!).

As a result, when the first guests arrived, I don't know how much time later, I waved hello from the computer, and kept woking. A while later I was hungry, so I went out, chatted briefly with the first two visitors, accompanied them and Keldor on a tour of the house, ate some lunch, and went straight back to the computer to work.

At 15:00, I finished my first short sample film clip, which you can see on google drive here, or on FB here. So I put on some SCA garb, my hearing aids, and went out to the kitchen to discover that a number of others had arrived, so I shared with them my short film, had some dinner, during which I took of the dress I had put on, because it was too warm, and just the linen undertunic, to which I added my cotton flannel Thorsberg trousers, was more comfortable.

But as soon as I had finished eating, I returned to the computer to see how much time film # 2 would take, now that I know how to do it. That first film took five hours, the second, which you can see on google drive here (or on the same fb link, since I just edited the first post to add the next), took only 3, so clearly I am getting faster. Now I wonder how I can automate this? It must be possible to set up a template, and just drop in the sample photos and stuff from a folder, so that every sample has the exact same approach, making it easier to play the films side by side and see the differences.

When I came back out to the kitchen it was full! Well, ok, there were only 9 people, including me, and two dogs (our cats declined to join the party, but stayed hidden in the bedroom), but the kitchen is small, making it seem like a larger event than it really was. I hung out with them, and then gave Helena a tour of the house, then Lena and I did some yoga in the living room, and there was more hanging out and swapping stories.

Then I felt inspired to finally cut the fabric for a much lighter weight pair of Thorsberg trousers. I have a really light weight white cotton fabric, with a blue print that looks rather 12th Century in motief, that we found at a second hand store ages ago, and I thought at the time it would make some lovely Thorsberg trousers for wearing under a split-skirt bliaut, but I hadn't gotten around to doing anything with it. Because the fabric is so thin I wanted to line at least the square but panel and crotch rectangle with another fabric, but I didn't have anything in my stash that was an appropriate weight. So I looked in the mending pile, and saw an old light weight black cotton skirt that has been languishing waiting for someone to sew shut the rip in the fabric for ages, and saw that it was exactly the same weight as the blue printed white cotton fabric. Having survived for months without the skirt, I decided that it would make a great lining, so, since the party was just in the kitchen at that time, I claimed the living room floor for fabric cutting (and was able to cut out all the pieces without help from the cats, who were still keeping to the bedroom for reasons of people, and probably especially, dogs, in the house).

I got the pieces cut, and, since the fabric piece wasn't, quite, long enough to go from waist to ankle, but was wide enough to have extra fabric over in the middle after removing the butt and crotch pieces, I added an extra wide waist band. That chunk of extra fabric was wide enough to line up the pattern exactly, so at any distance at all, one won't see that there is even a seam there. So I started sewing the first waist band to the first leg, and left the other pieces spread out over the floor, so I wouldn't loose track of which side was up for the other leg and waist extension, and took my sewing to the next room to be sociable again.

Of course, this was around the time that some people were deciding to head home, so instead of joining folk in the kitchen, I stood, stitching in hand, talking in the entry area, as they got ready to go (and shouted twice "don't step on the sewing project on the floor!" to Keldor and the guy he was showing off all of the swords, spears, and axes that line the living room wall with. (Really, with no one, not even cats, in the room at all, it had felt safe to leave it spread out during the short time I sewed those two pieces together. Nope.)

I got the first two bits sewed together during the time we were doing goodbyes with the first group departing, and started the next set as we hung out with the last couple of folk. After they, too, left, I put down my sewing, and did a bit more tidying up after company (the guests had helped with dishwashing before departing, which was truly appreciated), crawling into bed just after 01:00. As I was setting the dawn light to get up at 06:00 for my fortnightly call with my sisters, Keldor reminded me that it was the night for the change to daylight savings, so we would soon "spring forward" an hour. So I reset the clock on the dawn light to show that it was already 02:00, and went to sleep.

When dawn went off I might have considered sleeping, but Skaði wanted breakfast, so I got up, fed her, and sat down at the computer, where I had a great time catching up with my sisters, sharing my videos with them, and getting some edits for the funding application text, as well as working on my new sewing project and hearing what they are up to.

Then I went back to bed, and slept for three more hours, which was seriously needed, during which time Keldor took this cute photo of Skaði and I:

When I first started doing data processing for the LA-ICP-MS trace element composition maps I made from samples from a variety of soapstone quarries, I didn't really know what the chemistry of the minerals likely to be present should look like in the results. The laser shoots at the sample, ablating a small bit of the surface into very tiny particles, which get carried up the tube on a stream of He gas, till it comes tot the ICP-MS, where it gets sent through the plasma, which is hot enough to ionize the particles, which continue rushing sorta forward, each ion deflected, just a little, depending on its mass, till they hit the counting wall, where, if the door is open for the right spot for the mass of a given ion, it will pass through the door and get counted. The door opening location cycles back and forth across the various points that correspond to the the masses that the operator (that would be me) told it were interesting for the experiment. The ICP-MS happily counts all the ions of each mass that it was looking for, cycling rapidly through the mass numbers, till the experiment is done. Then it spits out a report saying how many ions of each mass it saw every second.

That is when the data processing starts--I take that list, drop it into a program designed to handle large amounts of time-stamped data, follow that with the "laser log file", which explains when the laser was and was not firing, for how long, at what strength, and what spot size, and then help the program decide from the names in both files which bits of the signal correspond to the standard reference materials, which bits correspond to the maps of minerals in soapstone, and which bits are "blanks" (the ICP-MS was counting, but nothing but He was coming up the line.

Then one applies a "data reduction scheme", wherein the program compares the counts per second results for each element of the standard reference materials I analysed with the reported composition, then uses that information to calculate the amounts of those elements in my sample, reporting it in parts per million (ppm).

Because I didn't ask the ICP-MS to count every possible element (due to how long it would take--one wants it to have more than one time through the list before the laser moves on to the next spot), and there are differences between how deeply the laser digs into each mineral and into each reference material with each shot, the reported ppm doesn't tend to add up to exactly 1 million, and my results are considered "semi-quantitative", even though they are reported to several decimal places. Even so, the information is still useful, but it needs more steps...

The next step is to figure out how many phases there are in today's sample, and what they might be. For this step I look at the maps showing the relative amounts of each element in each location across the map, like this set, which shows that the S-shaped bright white crystal has more Fe, Ti, and Mn than the grey background matrix minerals (each small photo has a scale on the side, showing that the dark reds are the lowest concentration of that element, the brighter reds indicate a bit more, the dark blues a bit more, and if it gets all the way to the bright blueish green there is really quite a lot of that element). It also shows that there is more than one type of grey matrix minerals, all of which are richer in Al and Cr, but two small areas are higher in Y, Sr, and P than the rest of the map.

Now that I have some idea of how many different minerals there are in the map I need to figure out how to define their differences. One tool for this is a three-channel image, like the one labeled a. on this set of figures, which assigns P to the colour red, Al to the colour green, and Ti to the colour blue, and lets the ppm values for each of these elements in each spot contribute to the colour of the corresponding pixel. This three-channel map makes it obvious that there are three different matrix minerals, and that the large crystal is a single mineral.

Then it is a simple, if tedious, matter to apply filters to the data, in steps. At first I decided that the big crystal is all data points that are more than 6,500 ppm Ti. Indeed stopping that filter there shows that one has just selected every data point that corresponds to that phase. However, along the edges of that grain one is going to get "mixed data", where the laser ablated both the crystal of interest, and the surrounding matrix grains. To filter out those mixed data analyses I added in additional filters, to whit: P < 500; Mg < 2,000; Al < 1,000; and Si < 5,000. Once I am satisfied that the remaining grains, which cover a slightly smaller area than the crystal itself, as in figure c. in the above linked second figure are a good representation of the composition of that mineral, I am ready to do the next set of calculations on it: converting ppm into the mineral chemical formula.

For that step I prepared a spreadsheet containing the entire periodic table, showing each element by name, its atomic number, and its atomic mass. Below that I have a table set up into which I can drop the "average composition" for this mineral (which I get by using Excel's "calculate average" formula for all the data points corresponding to a single element for that mineral). Those amounts are then multiplied by appropriate atomic weight for each mineral, and then I have additional columns set up to show how many atoms of each element is present in the mineral if I set the element of interest to be exactly 1, or 2, or 3, or....

Since the main crystal in this map contains both Fe and Ti, and all of the other ingredients it contains are measured in very low amounts, the obvious choice for possible mineral is ilmenite, which contains one each atom of Fe and Ti for every three atoms of oxygen. The ICP-MS doesn't measure oxygen in the sample, so I look at the table to see how many Ti atoms are present when the total number of atoms is 2. In this case the spreadsheet replied that we get closest to a total of two atoms when there is exactly 1.1 atoms of Ti, at which point there is 0.7 atoms of Fe, and the remaining number of atoms is made up by very small amounts of Mg, Mn, Si, and Al, so my hypothesis that it is ilmenite is confirmed, those numbers being well within the reasonable range of ilmenite composition.

This approach is repeated for each of the other mineral phases, until I am happy that I know which phases are present. For this sample the defining limits I used were:

ilmenite: Ti > 6,500; P < 500; Mg < 2,000; Al < 1,000; Si < 5,000
apatite: Ti < 500; P > 2,500; Mg < 2,000; Al < 1,000; Si < 5,000
talc: Ti < 500; P < 100; Mg > 2,500; Al < 1,000; Si > 5,000
chlorite: Ti < 100; P < 100; Mg > 3,500; Al > 2,500; Si > 2,000

Once I have the list of phases, what is in them, and where they are located, I am finally ready to start writing up the sample, and finalize the set of figures for the sample.

When I first started doing this I often spent a week or more on the sample (depending on how complicated it was--some of the maps I did turned out to have more than seven different minerals). However, with my funding running out rapidly I need to get faster at this part of the project Luckily, this turns out to be possible. This morning I managed to complete several half-done other samples, and then did a whole new sample before my big lunch break.

After lunch turned out to not be so easy. The next sample on my list is one for which I failed to press the "make laser log" button on the laser before running the experiment (which, oddly enough one would have thought that making the logs should be the default setting, but that laser manufacturer doesn't agree).

Luckily, the program is still able to do a map from just the ICP-MS data, since that data comes in the form of a single row of the map at a time, with gaps of no counting in between, so it just presents the results sequentially, one row under the next. But the proportions are wrong, since it had no information of the X-Y data to work with. No problem: export the map as a jpg, and then stretch it to be the same height and width as the photo of the sample area that was mapped.

But what about the nice colour-coded maps that match the colours used for each mineral, like that in the second link above? How is that possible if one doesn't have the X-Y location data? Step one: look at the original notes from when the experiment was run, to determine that there are 17 laser lines that comprise this map. Step two look at the total number of data points exported from the program, and divide by 17. Of course it didn't come out to a whole number: 123.4 so try it anyway--in the spreadsheet number the rows 1 to 123, and then start over from 1, and so on, till you get to the bottom of the list. Call that column East. Then fill in the north column by counting each group of 123, then try plotting the data, setting the colours based on the mineral name for each row, and look at the result.

Decide that it is a mess, but it is only a bit of a mess--one can clearly see the small grain of ilmenite that looks like a cherry stem over the spinel crystal, but the two larger ilmenite grains that should be on each side of the ilmenite grain are instead between two separate halves of that grain. After staring at it and the original photo for a while, decide that he problem is that everything is offset by a few data points, which means a few the first row, then twice that many the second row, and so on till the offset is quite a bit for the last row.

But, being tired by then, my first attempt to fix it moved it even further the wrong direction.

I tried again, moving things the right way, but over compensating a little. At that point it was closing in on 22:00, and I had put in a 12 hour day. So I put it down and spent a little time with Keldor, who had just finished up his work for the day working on the sword in progress before doing my yoga and my 100 sword blows for the day, and then deciding to type up this. Now it is closing in on 01:00, and I had better get to sleep. I think I will be able to finish this sample tomorrow, and, with luck, be able to get two others done as well.