ask me anything
Apr. 21st, 2013 01:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberetthello everyone I am sad and lonely and writing my lit review (actually that's untrue - I'm kind of stressed but basically feeling okay about it, and what I'm going to achieve, and I am neither especially sad nor especially lonely) BUT it would be nice to talk to you all! Hello! Feel free to have general conversations in comments, or if there are things you are WONDERING pls feel free to ask them. Anon comments will shortly be enabled if they aren't already. LET US GO FORTH.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 12:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 12:58 am (UTC)where is your icon from?
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Date: 2013-04-21 01:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 11:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 12:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 12:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 01:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 01:48 am (UTC)We look at lava flows, which we can date (using radioactive elements), which are rich in magnetisable crystals/particles like magnetite. As a flow cools and solidifies, the magnetisable particles in it will align themselves, as far as possible, with the Earth's magnetic field. So you can find a suitable lava flow anywhere in the world; unfold it, if it's been folded up by making mountains or similar; measure the declination of the magnetic particles in it; and work out what latitude the landmass was at when the lava flow erupted. :D
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Date: 2013-04-21 02:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 11:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-22 06:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 01:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 01:46 pm (UTC)One of these days I am going to get around to doing the My Top Five Volcanoes post (every volcanologist has one ;)
And thank you also for the compliment regarding the explanation! I am always very very open to being told I'm using too many technical words, and to use some less technical ones, please, though -- so if anyone would like further on the above please do just ask ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 01:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 02:02 pm (UTC)(1) Magnetic North shifts around by a few degrees in a pattern that doesn't have create huuuuuuge problems, because we're dealing with a lot of other error too, and that can just get folded into it - it's not huge motions.
(2) Pole reversal (so the South Pole becomes magnetic North, and so on) is something it's very easy to account for, over the past ~250 million years, because of oceanic crust! Oceanic plates are being continuously generated through volcanism at mid-ocean ridges (like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge - Iceland's part of the MAR, and is a place where it becomes subaerial because the mantle underneath Iceland is especially hot, but mostly mid-ocean ridges are submarine). So: you've got this continuous volcanism, on both sides of the ridge, and it's kind of like ticker tape. When you look at "residual magnetism" in the oceanic crust (the magnetic anomaly relative to the current field), you end up seeing positive and negative stripes, approximately symmetrically on both sides of the ridge. These have been tied very conclusively to pole reversals, and are how we know (a) when reversals happened, and (b) roughly how long they take. And once you've dated a lava flow on land, provided it's recent-ish you know which way round the poles were, and so factor that into the model!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 03:50 pm (UTC)Thanks for explaining.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 03:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 11:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 04:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 09:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 11:36 am (UTC)I am so glad you think each others' snoring is adorable (snoozl)
I only nearly strangled you both in your sleep
EXOTOLEEDZ xx
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 10:31 am (UTC)Basically, photographic technology had got to the point where more people could afford to do it, and groups of people all over the country decided they were going to use this to document their local areas. There were two main types of people involved: people interested in photography, and people interested in history. It wasn't just middle-class people doing it, and it wasn't just men.
There was no main countrywide centralisation of this, just lots of groups doing similar things at similar times in different places. Some of the resulting collections have survived — the Surrey one is a notably good and complete collection — but others have vanished. One of them (I forget where) was saved when it was pulled out of a skip!
Her interest was in the people as much as the photographs, and she's uncovered a lot of stuff about who was involved, and why, and how they went about it. One anecdote she told was about a particular photographer who she eventually realised was photographing things within cycling distance of stations on a particular railway line. Another was about people who would print their photos using two different technologies — silver-based to bring out the detail, and platinum-based so it would survive for posterity.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 11:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 10:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 11:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 11:49 am (UTC)Yesterday we met a 91 y/o mathematician and she demonstrated she could rock the Times cryptic crossword in nine minutes ... and learned that doing it in under twelve was pretty much an entry requirement for work at Bletchley park during the war.
I also discovered a shade of eyeshadow/lip tint called 'Nick Cage raking leaves on a brisk October afternoon' exists, and am tempted to reverse current policies wrt: makeup because this is so very perfectly wrong.
(And as a final note, should you see a news item about an unexpected outbreak of public objects covered in eyes in Cambridge this summer, It absolutely has nothing to do with me and was definitely not inspired by you on facebook I deny all knowledge I'm innocent guv honest :D)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 12:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 04:40 pm (UTC)We dropped into the computing museum too, for 1980s UK Schools computing nostalgia feels - I wanted to love and hug and keep and take for walks every day and feed and call it george their little LOGO turtle :D.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 06:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 12:32 pm (UTC)... yeah that also sounds like kinda amazing make-up, huh.
(EYYYYES)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 04:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 06:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 06:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 06:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 06:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-22 07:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-22 07:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 12:03 pm (UTC)Hope the lit review goes well :)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 12:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 01:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 01:10 pm (UTC)Part of what I'm doing, this year, in terms of my word - reclamation - is integrating the whole; refusing to split myself up for others' convenience. I get to occupy all of this space, at once; I am tired of having to decide whether it's more important to me to be correctly pronouned or to be able to actually get into the labs I need to work in. I am tired of making myself smaller, and I refuse to do it any more.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 01:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 06:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 06:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 06:53 pm (UTC)I have been doing local history recently, and there are a lot of people who come to the local studies library to do family history. Some of them have told me some interesting stuff they've found out, so in the spirit of
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 09:13 pm (UTC)My x3, x4 and x5 great grandfathers (my maternal grandfather's line) were watermen on the river Thames during the 1700s and 1800s and lived close to river in appalling conditions. Charles Dickens used to tour the district to research his books. Oliver Twist was thought to include details of the slums he saw. They each served a 7 year apprenticeship to become watermen. The painter J.M.W. Turner executed his famous painting of 'The Fighting "Temeraire" Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up' in 1839 when x3 great grandfather would have been living by the river and working every day on it. I like to think that he and the family saw the ship as she went past or maybe even Turner painting it.
I went to London to 'walk in their footsteps', visited where they had married, had the children baptised, been buried and visited the street they lived the longest, now not a slum but a desirable place to live on the Thames path with a view of Tower bridge. x3 great grandparents had at least 13 children, six survived until adulthood. Their parent's gravestones were missing from the churchyard as it had been landscaped but when I was at the London Metropolitan Archives I found a notebook into which someone had transcribed the graves in the churchyard a 100 years ago. I found Maria's (my x3 great grandmother). The gravestone had been inscribed with...
"In Memory of Maria, wife of Mr Samuel Evans of this parish who died 15th December 1840 aged 45 and also 7 of their infant children"
Isn't that sad?
My icon is a photo of my x3 great grandfather Samuel Evans, a waterman who died in 1845. The younger orphaned children were taken in by their married elder brother and sister. They were lucky, so many children ended up in the workhouse.
I've rabbited on, sorry. I'm a bit addicted to my ancestry ;) I have no idea if this is what you were after :)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-23 09:50 am (UTC)I love that someone transcribed the gravestones to make sure the information wasn't lost. I'm involved in providing contemporary materials to the Croydon Local Studies Library and Archive — I take in flyers and takeaway menus, all labelled with the date. In a hundred years' time, someone will find those useful! (I wish there had been someone doing this 50 or even 20 years ago, for my own research...)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 02:36 pm (UTC)(And yes, I know my more-than-usually-insane schedule is partly at fault here. Normal service will be resumed. Maybe. Almost certainly not before you move to a different city, at least once. Sigh...)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 02:38 pm (UTC)xx
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 07:05 pm (UTC)Also, hi! I already said that.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-21 07:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-22 11:30 pm (UTC):P
YOU HAVE ONLY YOURSELF TO BLAME
Date: 2013-04-22 11:40 pm (UTC)I don't claim to have done a NEAT job of it, but via one pocket knife and one tube of superglue, it's now the right length :D
Re: YOU HAVE ONLY YOURSELF TO BLAME
Date: 2013-04-22 11:57 pm (UTC)