Sunday, June 27, 2010

Goldschmidt paleoblogging- the science

As a commercial exhibitor, I spent most of my time in the booth, fixing the internet and talking to potential customers. And when I did go to sessions, they were generally directly related to ion probery. I was disappointed that more SHRIMP labs were not present in the technical development sessions, but many of the talks there were “These are the challenges, anyone got bright ideas what to do about it” type talks, so I didn’t feel that we were being excluded in any way.

I did manage to sneak into some speciation talks, a bit of early earth stuff, and a sulfur session, but I missed the planetary talks I wanted to hear due to customer demand. Notable talks included the use of an ion probe to find Japanese eel breeding grounds in the Pacific. This was great because the Japanese speaker managed to express how incredibly exciting the result was without informing any of the (mostly) western audience *why* anyone cares about eels. There’s nothing like good science combined with complete cultural ignorance.

Because the booth was busy during the poster session, I did not get to attend the posters while the authors were present, and I only manned my own poster for a few 20 minute stints. However, the feedback I got while there was great, both from gurus in the planetary composition field and crazy postdocs who have some of the absurd reduced phases I talked about from a theoretical standpoint around carbon stars in natural terrestrial rock.

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