Siliceous and Delicious

A day for miscellany. Started by tackling email, got a message from Dave reassuring me that I did not tread on any toes with my Neptune database request, but that it was not in fact openly available in full. Wrote most of my regular mini-progress-report for Andy, and spent the rest of the morning at the Farlow library getting my hands on the papers I needed. I got very nearly everything I needed, with the exception of one reference. Weighed down with two huge, bulging bags of books, I now have a monumental amount of photocopying (or scanning, I haven’t decided yet) to do this afternoon.

After lunch, finished writing up my report for Andy. Also found Wil and asked him about dry ice—I wasn’t sure where to get it, how long it would last, what kind of container it should go into, etc. and he was tremendously helpful. In about three minutes I learned everything I needed to know, which would have been impossible to find out any other way (of course, all of this is the sort of information everybody who does microbiology/enzyme extractions/DNA work knows how to do, but doesn’t bother to write down). I now have an appropriately sized cooler, instructions on where to buy dry ice, and how much, and what it will cost, and how long it’ll stay cold. Done!

Had my meeting with Andy at 2:30, which followed a now almost completely predictable format—I hand Andy my report, we go through it, he tells me things are looking good, and keep working. He didn’t have a whole lot in the way of feedback, although he did agree with me that Annika’s concern about the stratigraphic coverage of her Lophocyrtis was less of an issue than she suggested. He also asked a good question in my discussions of the various calculated preservation statistics I showed him (for the diatom diversity/e-o project), which made me realize it would be helpful to also plot diversity on those graphs, to see how—if at all—diversity can be explained by preservation. He also raised the point (though indirectly, and I’m not sure if it was intentional) that it’s ever so slightly sketchy to test explanations of Neptune diversity patterns by using statistics calculated from the same underlying diversity data.

After the meeting, and an extended trip to cookies with our new postdoc Walton as a reward, it was time to head down to the photocopiers and start working through the ginormous pile of literature I brought back from the Farlow this morning.