Siliceous and Delicious

Today I’ve plumbed new depths of unpromptness, after an unspeakably hot and sticky night that left me struggling to get out of bed, and struggling even more to get through 8 miles in the already stifling heat of the morning. By the time I finally got to work, having also tackled some long-due chores (haircut, rent check) along the way, it was close to noon…

I got an odd email from Dave Lazarus in Berlin, which gave me a bit of a start this morning. He had emailed me to let me know that the latest version of the Neptune database, Neptune Sandbox (NSB) was reaching usability, and whether I wanted any further information. I replied saying that I’d love to be registered as a user once the tool reached that stage, but that until that point I’d appreciate a full dump of the database so I can do some of the fun database work I’ve been doing in the diatom diversity/E-O project. The response was surprising—Dave refused to send the file, explaining that…

“…your initial request for a flat file of all occurrences for all taxa with supporting info is essentially a complete dump of the whole database – which I do Not want to just hand out in it’s entirety (nor would the Oslo folks be happy with this).  Nor do you really want to open an Excel spreadsheet with >500,000 rows x ca 30 columns.  You need to be more specific about taxa and time intervals.”

Of course, I’m not going to be doing anything in Excel at all, since I’ve been doing all my analyses in R, but that’s not the point—I was under the impression that the Neptune database was a publicly accessible tool, since it had been offered (at least theoretically, since it never seemed to actually work very well) through both the Chronos and the PBDB websites. Clearly, this is not the case—the Oslo folks (whoever they are) apparently don’t want other researchers to have full access… This doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me, but what I’m even more concerned about is that I might have stepped on toes here by requesting it! I’m really not sure how to respond…

Anyway, that threw me for a loop, but I do need to get going and do something today. My plan for the next three-day burst is to finish up the morphospace characters, and I think I need to schedule that push right now. This week is too far gone for three days of anything, Monday next week is a holiday, not to mention booked for setting up the FIB for another overnight run, and Tuesday is Beau’s last day, so I’m looking at Wednesday through Friday for the next big push.

You’d think I might get something done today. But then Nick Tosca, formerly postdoc in the Knoll lab, stopped by for a chat, and the next thing you know it’s 4:20 pm. Fuck it. Not today. I’m out.