not the best working day

[kareina]

The morning and early afternoon were spent on useful, non uni tasks. Whilst cleaning the loo, scrubbing the hard-to-reach part of the floor behind the toilet, it occurred to me that housework is a form of conspicuous consumption. Just as some Medieval fashions used oodles of extra fabric, just to show that they could afford it, so many human

Comments

[bianca_di_bari]

How important are those minor elements? If it's within errors bars, let it ride and go back to the writing! :)

As for the house cleaning... there is a third possibility- one can't afford a large house so they have something tiny enough, with few enough possessions, to make it so there's nothing to get dirty! Granted, that'll never be me; such the packrat I've been trashing stuff lately just to relieve the feeling of clutter and yet there's still plenty there to not notice the amount trashed *doh*.

Have fun hiking!

[kareina]

Alas, the bit I described yesterday is only the first step needed to *start* doing the calculations. I'm calculating phase diagrams for specific mineral compositions. The Phase diagrams calculated for some of the samples based on the whole-rock composition obtained via XRF didn't predict garnet of the composition that is present in the rock. It is possible that there are local inhomogeneaties in the sample, and therefore the portion of the sample that got crushed for XRF analysis doesn't have the same composition as that of the thin-section of the sample which was analysed in the Microprobe

[celsa]

"housework is a form of conspicuous consumption. Just as some Medieval fashions used oodles of extra fabric, just to show that they could afford it, so many human cultures have prided themselves upon having a clean house--for to have a clean house requires either 1) the finances to pay someone else to clean it, or 2) the time to do it yourself."

I agree with you, but I also think there are other influences at work. I rambled in another blog, describing some ideas about the origins of our culture's idea of ideal housekeeping. It ties in with your observation in that we appear to be saying, in different ways, that people often really do have better things to do with their time than compete in the house cleaning Olympics. :-)

[kareina]

Oh, that (the other blog) was well said!