Alaric’s 30th Birthday (by sarah)

Saturday the 4th of April is Alaric's 30th birthday - hopefully we have managed to catch everyone and inform them but I have been made awear of a few gaps in the invitations.

It is Logan's Run theme and me and Alaric at least will be in costum (but you can come as you if you want!).

It's a bring your own BBQ and as always we are happy to recieve people on Friday and loss them what ever time they want to go home even if thats on the Monday!

We've got a marquee for outside.

Al is making people hand crystals so sort of needs to know whos coming and how old you are!

Here's the form to fill in.

I'm going as Box the robot and have been papier maching away like a mad things so I hope you all appreciate the effort!

Accomidation wise there is plenty of room for tents - there is limited floor space or there are BnB's in the area.

Though I am petrified of being 30 Alaric is looking forward to it but then he runs into real problems with people not respecting his ideas as they think he is too young (doesn't help that he often looks a decade younger than he is!).

The Crows of Penwood (by sarah)

Today me and Alaric spent the day sitting in a freezing cold hut surrounded by mad crows that shred wind screen wipers surrounded by wiered plastic torso's that you can peel the skin off of.

We were shown lots of gory pictures of festering wounds of various types and shown how to strap people up. Disembodied faces littered the surfaces and strange thumps and crashes echoed through the desolate hills that surrounded us. Screams of help filled our ears.

Then one by one we begain to disappear - off course this was to go and by lunch from the near by supermarket and we were in fact just at a first aid course but really there where mad crows and resusi-anni dolls can be really scary looking before their faces are attatched - not that they are exactly friendly with the faces.

Still we enjoyed the course - though Al went all weak from the pictures of blood and even though we have both done alot of first aid courses and training in the past we are still learning stuff like I didn't realise that 8 yrs old is the cut off for the child/adult boundary for treatments.

Hardness in the belly can be internal bleeding and erections can be symptomatic of spinial injuries in men.

In exchanging stories I found I have actually had to do a lot of actual first aid on real people which I had sort of forgotten about. We got some free bandages, a mouth sheild and a menigitis card out of it.

At the end we were trapped by a rain storm which added to the strangeness of the setting too - so I think I shall be writing one or two stories about the place 🙂

Catch Up on Dr Things (by sarah)

I went back to the Drs Tuesday morning leaving Ella and Oliver asleep on our living room floor - they'd come up to visit us which was most excellent.

On the plus side the impetigo is clearing up and I have got alot more movement in my jaw - and I'm feeling alot better. Bad side is that I still have lots of fluid in my ears and she found another skin infection.

This time its a fungal infection that's probably cuased by the stuff that cuases thrush - this means I'm not to use perfums and have yet another creme to apply - joy 🙁

I have been over doing it and have gotten myself really run down apparently hence I have mouth ulcers again etc... she told me there's a spray I can have for them if they continue and if I don't start to feel better soon I have to go back again.

But I am happy that things are responding to the medication. I'm abit worried that I have ended up with skin infections at all though. To be far the fungal one feeds off of perfumed soaps and things including the skin lotion I'd been using 🙁

I have also been moaning about this far too much for what it is aswell - its not made me really sick just uncomftable :/

Using the Electron Mircoprobe (by sarah)

Today I went into the lab once more and place the lunar sample into the machine - this time instead of blasting it with x-rays to get element maps I was picking out specific points to hit with an electron beam and see what they are made off.

First off we picked a selection of elements that I wanted to get proportions of and then I picked the points I wanted to know about specifically. From the element maps and the back scatter image I had taken previously I knew that I apparently had several minerals (I had trudged through four large tomes of mineralogy and lunar/planetary stuff to find out what sort of things I might have lurking in the sample. I had then taken the element maps and compared them - drawn faint scetches of them and then working out what elements I had in conjection where drew on mineral areas with coloured pens onto a printout of the backscatter image. (He told me this was actually an x-ray map just not element specific so I need to check whats what with him I think).

They seemed quiet impressed that I had done this but it seemed like the only way to make things clear to me personally. I was becoming frustrated that I couldn't work out the actual proportions and therefore the exact minerals from the elelment maps and that I could only narrow things down. Fortunatly this is what today was actually about so I worked out how many samples I wanted and were to take the measurements - unfortunatly becuase there is a bad polish on the sample I had to be careful and was highly restricted in where I could take measurements.

But I selected 101 points each point was going to take about 9 minutes to analyse but I specifically went in early to get it all going and as it turned out had plenty of time.

I had also narrowed down the minerals really far more accuratly that I thought I had and I had worked out stuff about my 'dirty' quartz that that does seem to be correct which is very cool and makes me feel like I might just have a chance of doing this.

The only thing is I found myself baulkin at the interface of data and computers - there are situations that I just see no reason not to have a computer automate and I think they should be relatively easy to implement and yet there is nothing! This keeps happening every where I turn in geology and earth sciences there is just huge gaps that computers could feel reducing monkey work and increasing the amount of research that can be analysis in depth!

Other issues that I have had is finding information barred to me - this is painful when I would happily pay say £10 for an e-book of the phase diagrams I needed or even just the chapters I needed - then and there I may even have gone up to £20 but it is only avalible as a book and at around $300 which sucks big time.

Can anyone tell me what the restrictions would be on me finding data in papers and ploting my own graphs/diagrams and then putting them on the internet for free so that people like me don't get stuck like this? I just needed a guid to see if I was on the right path. The question of science on the net has been interesting me alot in the past year and I wonder lots about hwo things are going - I like sharing info and I think it helps move projects and science as a whole on but there are those who tell me that I sholdn't talk about my projects and ideas incase they are published by other first.

Also there is the question of funding and where the money is coming from to do the research - I find myself pondering over the wole peer review system and how a nice fast version could apply to articles on line - making the turn around of science much faster without loosing the reliablity.

It is a thorny problem and I feel slightly swamped in it.

Oh well I'm sure I'll sort it all out eventually 🙂

The only scary thing about todays stuff was that if I want to go out of the lab I have to remember to press a button that puts an alunium or copper block infront of my electron beam so that it doesn't burn a whole in the sample - this made me quiet nervous!

Ada Lovelace Day – A Review (by sarah)

Yesturday me and Alaric took part in the first ever Ada Lovelace Day which was a day of international blogging about women in tech who have inspired you or that you admire.

He produced two posts and I produced two:

For this blog Alaric blogged about his Aunt Barbara who pioneered the use of computers in translation.

For Web-Empire he blogged about Grace Hopper the origonator of the COBOL language.

For Salaric Craft I blogged about Mary Dixon Kies the first woman to be awarded a patent in her own right - she had invented a weaving techniques for straw hats.

And last but in my mind not least I blogged about Monica Grady on my Astronomy blog.

There were also lots of fun things happening yesturday like Ada appearing at the Science Museum 🙂

There has even been a webcomic produced for the event 🙂

However, there are some sinister things that I came across whilst trying to encourage my friends to take part in this event - namely that my male friends were far more enthusiastic and my female compatriots are all disillusioned with the world of science and technology.

This is a subject on which I have posted before and I have several drafts I am working on - about glass ceilings that I really hadn't thought were there until I hit them.

But there is another issue - one friend after doing her PhD with a bad supervisor felt that women in science were bitches and this I have to say is something I personally have come across. My biggest hinderance wasn't the letcherous old guy who thought women should be at home but rather other women who had it in their heads that in order for them to help you, you had to be twice as good as the men/boys around you.

Help offered freely to them was denied and an active discuoragement took place - I don't know if this was being done in a 'kind' way with the idea that women have to be tough to survive the field or what.

But like the early feminists found - the biggest barrier to women succeeding does appear to be other women.

This is a sad sad state of affairs and one I hoped was unique to my own experiences. It was so refreshing for me when I went to the Natural History Museums Mineralogy department to find that they just went out of their way to enable everyone reguardless of gender, dissability or anything else that could act as a barrier.

I have seen and am seeing several friends leaving the world of sciecne that they worked so hard to get into becuase they feel so deflated with all of this. In some ways this is probably a bigger issue than getting girls interested in the first place - how do we retain them within the science and tech sectors?

The other thing I didn't appreciate until I tried to do stuff in the 'coporate' world was just how much stupid prejudice still exists. I am in a heavily male subject but as the head of UCL's earth science's himself said to me - this is changing - they did a drive (around the time I was choosing what to do at university) to get women into earth scientists. And slowely the girls from that drive are filtering in to post docs and he hopes with eventually end up in the facalty staff.

My year was the first 50:50 split year ever and this trend is following the year as it progresses. So I am hopeful that things can change with time as long as we can stem this hemorrage of females leaving.

I could write reams and reams on this and I probably will but right now I need to go and read up on lunar mineralogy for tomorrow!

I just thought this was an issue I should raise.