Ask me anything

[kaberett]

I understand I'm not always great at explaining what I'm up to here, so -- if you have questions about how things are going for me or what I'm doing or how exactly my life fits together, please feel encouraged to ask. <3

(Today on my way home from work I saw: (1) someone busking with a tuba that belched flames every time they played a note; (2) a cavalcade of police motorcycles, blues flashing, who as far as I can tell were learning how to halt a busy junction in the rush hour. It was kind of endearing.)

Comments

[calissa]

I don't have any questions at the moment, but I've been enjoying reading your poetry. I've been trying to write some myself lately and it just doesn't seem to be working.

Wait, no, I do have a question. What's your favourite hot beverage?

[kaberett]

Thank you so much for saying. ♥

Favourite hot beverage! Well, I'm caffeine hypersensitive, so I normally end up drinking redbush tea. (Or hot chocolate with a shot of hazelnut syrup, or warm milk with some vanilla, or [more rarely] Misc Herbal Nonsense...) I have a slightly alarming collection of ~interesting~ redbush (Earl Grey, apricot-and-jasmine, green-with-plum, chamomile nighttime wossname...) But - while it's not necessarily my favourite, certainly my default is just redbush :-)

[calissa]

Ooo... some of those redbush blends sound yummy. My favourite redbush blend tends to be vanilla (pieces, not flavouring).

I'm not sure whether you saw my entry but I was thinking of you the other day and managed to acquire myself a ginkgo sapling.

[ghoti]

What's your PhD research going to be about?

[tamouse]

it's going to be VOLCANIC! of MAGMAtic proportions! :)

[calissa]

LOL.

[kaberett]

;)

[kaberett]

UNDERWATER VOLCANOES.

-- no, wait, let's try that again. I'm possibly pitching this a bit high - I've completely lost track of what level of understanding non-specialists have of plate tectonics - so if you have clarifying questions please feel encouraged to ask ♥

There are (currently understood to be) three major kinds of volcanism on Earth. Type the first is associated with destructive margins, where one tectonic plate is subducting beneath an other - think the Pacific Ring of Fire, including Japan and the West Coast of the US. Type the second: constructive margins, where tectonic plates are being created -- mid-ocean ridges (the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, e.g., which you can see beautifully in Google Earth).

Type the third is "weird shit" (normally referred to as Ocean Island Basalts) - it's intra-plate, rather than anywhere near a margin, and understanding how you get magmatism through the thick overlying plate. Hawai'i is pretty much the classic example - the Hawai'i-Emperor seamount chain shows a very clear age progression (oldest furthest away from current active volcanoes!), consistent chemical behaviour, etc - and is the basis of the theory of mantle plumes - the idea that the mantle is convecting, so some of the time you'll get hot upwelling streams (like when you boil a pot of water and get an obvious rising column).

But not everywhere looks like a plume; in addition to a higher temperature, you can also get increased magma production if you're melting a bit of the mantle that has a lower melting point than usual (because it's a slightly different composition). Working out which is going on is a major ongoing debate.

What I specifically am going to be doing is looking at the ratios of stable isotopes in OIB samples - for a particular set of elements, which occur naturally in several different forms depending on their number of neutrons (think radiocarbon dating versus the kind of carbon we're mostly made of, except I'm going to be using metals) to try to work out:

- where the stuff that's melting came from (is it mantle that's been around for ever/melted multiple times, or can we "see" evidence that sediment that's gone down in subduction zones has been mixed in?)

- why it's melting (T vs composition), in at least some cases

- what this means for how the mantle convects (does it all go in one big lump? is it layered? how do subducted plates get stirred back in? how efficiently is the mantle stirred?)

... which suddenly got super-technical, sorry, but -- yeah, six hours' sleep; again, please do ask if you have questions <3

[hilarita]

Of course you're investigating the 'weird shit' volcanic locations ;)
Way cool. Er, way hot. Oh, you know what I mean. :)

[worlds_of_smoke]

someone busking with a tuba that belched flames every time they played a note

oh my god that is awesome. XDDD

[kaberett]

I thought the Internet might appreciate knowing that snippet :D

[azurelunatic]

Hammering the internet until candy fell out resulted in the facebook account "firetuba" and firetuba.

[forestofglory]

How is living at the hostel going? Did you get my most recent postcard?

[kaberett]

I did! I meant to write and thank you for it, because it is gorgeous and really cheered me up.

Hostel continues to surprise me with how well it's going; people insofar as I have to interact with them are generally lovely. But... I still really want my own space and my own kitchen and a bed I can have other people sleep in if I want to; so I am very torn between "somewhere cheaper and Independent and My Own" versus "somewhere I don't have to clean and I get cooked two meals a day"... trade-offs are hard. :-/ Especially because location on this is pretty much ideal (5 minutes from an accessible tube stop, 20-30 minutes into work past a bunch of gorgeous buildings; ground floor) so... yeah. And they want me to have made a decision last week as to whether I'm staying next term (and I am hiding in a major way from the e-mail about that, but should really respond).

[glass_icarus]

Tell me about your comfort food! :D

[kaberett]

COMFORT FOOD.

Varies a bit from winter to winter, but last year I was having lots of thick tomato-based stews, usually with pearl barley or similar in, with cheese-and-herb dumplings. Stuff From Home ditto: Grenadiermarsch (onion, leftover boiled potato, leftover pasta, egg, cheese, black pepper, optional rosemary & garlic, all fried up together) and Tiroler Groestl (potato, carrot, green bean, onion fried up together). Ludicrously thick-and-dark hot chocolate. Trifle (preferably raspberry, preferably raspberries from the garden). Blackberries picked straight off the bramble. Courgette and sweetcorn fritters with bread and salad. Thick vegetable soup.

... and so on, heh :-) How does that match up with you?

[shanaqui]

Here is a question to get at something that I wish people asked me: what would you like people to be curious about, about yourself?

[calissa]

Ooo... good question!

[kaberett]

Where I come from, I think. What I love and how it's woven into my life. I increasingly feel like I show a lot of myself to a lot of people, but something that doesn't often come out in public is the precise, playful relationship I have with my mother and with language both, and it feels like a huge part of me that most people never get to see.

[fyreharper]

I so want to know how they got the tuba to do that :D

(...asked it nicely?)

[kaberett]

IDEK! Over on the LJ version of this post, though, another friend posted a link to a Youtube video name of "Tuba Mova" I think? Which might be a useful search term? (I haven't had brain to link-follow today...)

[swaldman]

"Today on my way home from work I saw: (1) someone busking with a tuba that belched flames every time they played a note; (2) a cavalcade of police motorcycles, blues flashing, who as far as I can tell were learning how to halt a busy junction in the rush hour."

I miss London...

[kaberett]

There are certainly aspects of this city I'm finding it easy to fall in love with (they write, from sunny Didcot...) :-)

[jjhunter]

If you don't mind feeding a parched mind before she plunges back into another pressure cooker of a work week - tell me about three words you love, and what those words mean to you.

[kaberett]

Die Petersilie. Because what's the smell of parsley (Under Milk Wood): because it's the smell of my Grossmutti's garden and my Grossmutti's food and it slips quietly and gently from the tongue and tastes very much like its referent.

Adoration is one I keep coming back to this evening, because - it is a thing I am doing, at the moment, and a thing people are doing about me, and I have such a sense of delicate wonder about it, and - yes. (Relatedly: tender, and its meanings.)

And instead of a third word, have two words for the same reason - ocelot and polyspaston. Both remind me of friends I've drifted from but retain affection for, and... so on and so forth.