who only by moving can balance

I have been thinking a lot, lately, about how somewhere along the line I shifted from "terrified that my supervisors would know everything I was doing was wrong" to "willing to tell them they're wrong and then go find the data to back myself up"; from imagining my viva making me shut down with panic to, honestly, kind of looking forward to it.

I was scared of my supervisors -- the primary authority figures in this part of my life -- thinking poorly of me. I was terrified, similarly, of examiners-as-authority-figures thinking poorly of me.

Put in those terms, I think one facet of what's shifted is that I have, really and truly, started to view my supervisors and examiners as my equals. And from there, bearing in mind the very human need for ritual, all of a(n apparent) sudden I seem to be thinking about the viva less as an inherently hostile environment where I will inevitably be set up to fail (I don't think my trauma is terribly disguised, here) to... a rite-of-passage, that recognises and -- through a particular social alchemy -- realises that I, too, am an authority figure.

I'm very curious about how the ripples from the event will wind up affecting the rest of my self-concept and self-confidence.

-- alright. So. There is a thing that *really* annoys me about a lot of journals, right, which is that they provide negative numbers with, as the leading glyph, −. Notably, this is not -, and Even More Notably (this being the source of my frustration) it is not a glyph that is, by default, interpreted as a minus sign by spreadsheet programmes. Where, you know, I want to copy data. From tables. To wrangle.

Here, then, are my discoveries:

1. It's all the fault of siunitx; and, worse,
   
2. if you ask about this on stackexchange, you get a bunch of comments and replies earnestly informing you that this is the correct symbol, actually, why would you want to replace it with a dash, what kind of abomination--

I was linked, some time ago, to the Galen Leather writing box, a portable briefcase-slash-desk Thing made out of wood.

I have also been idly contemplating (i) the fact that I have been keeping hand-written notebooks of one kind or another pretty much continuously (albeit with variations in intensity of use) for... over half my life; (ii) while A continues to work from home, I am mostly working from the sofa, with the result that a good half of our very large sofa is covered with highlighters and seeds and printouts of papers and my notebooks various, and I have to go fishing for my pens and pencils down the back of the sofa cushions several times a day; (iii) my absolutely pointless and deeply impractical (at least in the current house) craving for a bureau (in the writing-desk sense); and (iv) my nebulous desire to get... Something... that is solid and tangible and useful and an indulgence as a reward for Finishing The Thesis.

So this afternoon I went hunting and found the term "writing slope" and disappeared in a pile of Etsy tabs and, you know, I'm still not convinced this is actually a thing I want to do but it was very pleasant to spend an afternoon staring at rosewood inlaid with mother-of-pearl.


Not unrelatedly, I also abruptly decided that the Himmelsscheibe von Nebra [wikipedia (en) | Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte] would be amazing as a notebook cover, and in particular could slot almost seamlessly into the Archer&Olive line (I am thinking, particularly, of the bee)...

... which tangented merrily off into:

(1) German copyright law (see the wikipedia page section Legal Issues for copyright and trademark litigation over an artefact that is three to four thousand years old), the upshot of which is "probably I'm not getting it on a fancy notebook until at least 2027", and

(2) when Archer&Olive say "We’re Female Owned, 100% Vegan, and all of our products come with environmentally responsible packing", they mean "A portion of sales from [the Pride collection] will be donated to the Black Trans Travel Fund"! So that's lovely.

content notes: arachnophobia, crabs, shrimp.

( Read more... )

I do not particularly care to confess to any or all of (i) how long this took me, (ii) how much longer I'm considering spending on it, and (iii) what I should arguably have been doing instead for the last several days. Nevertheless: BEHOLD.



[A graph showing Tl concentration and isotope ratios for lavas from the Aleutian arc (Nielsen et al. 2016), Mariana arc (Prytulak et al. 2013, 2017), Ryukyu-Okinawa arc [circles] and back-arc basin [diamonds] system (Shu et al. 2017), Tonga-Kermadec arc (Nielsen et al. 2017), and Central American Volcanic Arc (Nielsen et al. 2017). For oceanic arcs (left) "C." = "Central"; "M." = "Middle"; "v.f." = "volcanic front". For the CAVA (right), "C." = "Cerro". The dotted line on Tl isotope ratio panels indicates estimated average mantle ε²⁰⁵Tl (= -2 ± 1). Error bars are smaller than symbols except for low-concentration samples, where I need to look up uncertainties and edit them in, sob.]

The... good... (...) news is that the Recently-Developed Issue with my laptop failing to cope with waking from sleep isn't Just Me, and for that matter isn't just Debian, and my associating it with a kernel upgrade was Correct.

The bad news is that this means there is limited anything I can do to fix it, and also I've totally failed to track down a Debian-related bug for it, and also I very much do not have the brain to file any such bug and then Deal With People Asking Me Questions, so booting into one of the older kernel versions I've kept lying around Just In Case it... probably is, then, given how much the behaviour is annoying me.

(At the point I was aiming to be Done With Thesis by the end of Jan I was willing to put up with it and think about it Later. Now I'm... not... I decided I should have another go at investigating fixes. Unfortunately while it's now somewhat more widely reported, as far as I can tell everyone is still at ??? over the entire situation.)

I have been having the kind of day where "check what <10 papers have to say about the geochemistry of their lavas" has very much taken all day and it feels like I'm thinking through treacle. This was supposed to be skimming! I thought it would be a good light-easing-back-into-things day! It... has not been.

Maybe words would have been worse. I don't know.

I have, at any rate, managed to look up covariation matrices and How To Make A Spreadsheet Do Them, so that's one Scary New Thing knocked off the list. (Give or take actually Doing It, but that... requires me to get my head round this geochemistry, sigh.)

Looking for a reference/primer/explanation on discriminant diagrams, as one does, I stumbled upon this excellent resource, which opens:

You, too, can be a geochemist! You will never have to look at another rock or mineral again! Your only tenuous links to reality will be tables of numbers and vials of powder by post!

-- to say that I have, very unusually for me, not been managing to go through my reading page, like, at all, for... some reason... so I am not at all up to date on what is going on for you and I suspect I am unlikely to be, reliably, for The Duration.

(Absolute hard hand-in date is end-January, but I really want to get done by end-Dec.)

I am going to try some things to make it more manageable but in the meantime please know that I appreciate you and am hoping good things for you, and if there are things you want me to know comments on DW posts are currently probably the best way to get in touch, honestly, unless you know that I'm responding to IMs from you (eventually) already. (I'm... categorically not managing e-mails either, for the most part, which is somewhat awkward.)

Much affection. <3