Blogging on geologic timescales

Sorry about the quiescence. To make a long story short, work and family has been keeping me busy, and if that wasn’t enough, I have been trying to tidy up a manuscript I rough drafted over Christmas break.

Of course, this happens to everyone who keeps blogging after grad school, but in addition, the December-January period saw a large number of inquiries about instrumentation at work. Without going into details, this consists of questions from scientists around the world, who want to know something about how ion probes work. Inevitably, these questions result in me digging through a bunch of papers, synthesizing the results, and writing a brief, accessible explanation to their query. And with about 2500 SHRIMP papers and 750 from our competitor’s instruments, reading and memorizing everything isn’t an option. This rapid-turnaround science explanation process should sound familiar to anyone else out there who writes science blogs. The point being, that my explain-technical-science-on-short-notice fix has been coming from the office. Or the manuscript. So motivation has been low.

But, the manuscript is in, and work might be getting back to normal, so hopefully I’ll have a bit more to say in the near future.

In the mean time, I recommend reading the systemic blog for first impressions on the Kepler data release.