morsla | Time to plug in that spare brain... (Reply)

submystical mentioned a Star Wars scene last night - where Solo chases the stormtroopers down a corridor, screaming his lungs out...

...and then catches up with them, sees how badly he's outnumbered, and runs back the other way...

I think I've been chasing the results for my research project in pretty much the same way. I just rounded the corner to see that the CGI department has rendered in a lot more than I had bargained for :)

111 mineral grains... 48 data points per grain, plus corrections for standards. These are data on the major elements (Ca, Mg, Fe, etc) in the intergrowths I picked out of my samples, and I'll be trying to use them to work out what those minerals are.

Good: I have a lot of data to start working with... this is a good thing, as it's now August and I have to write a thesis on this stuff.

Bad: I have a lot of data to work with. And I'll be doubling this (or more) when I go to Canberra. I'm looking at 1-2 days of labwork, and a week of de-convoluting the data that I get back.

So, in the next month I need to fly to Canberra, learn how to use new equipment, get back to Melbourne for a workshop, fly to Tasmania for some fieldwork in the snow/sleet, and manage to juggle home/work/maintaining a pulse in the intervening spaces.

The only problem? I can't actually see any intervening spaces from here...

EDIT: make that 72 points per grain. 7992 bits of data, with more arriving soon... ulp...