Siliceous and Delicious

Decided to take it easier today. Jogged in for an early morning squash game, and trundled to work later than usual.

Didn’t really feel like going back to either the review of Dave’s paper, which really got me down yesterday, or tinkering with R, which I wasn’t enjoying as much as usual, but instead felt the urge to finish the task I’d been making the most progress on last week—the morphospace. There’s a whole stack of papers next to my desk now, just waiting to be turned into characters for the morphospace, and that’s what I want to be doing right now.

Dug up the remaining references from the Cabot science library (one was not there—a Hungarian journal for which the subscription seems to have lapsed before the issue I need was published) and made a trip to the Farlow for another. That one turned out to be a fantastic resource I wish I could have had at the beginning of this morphospace exercise, though I’m grateful at least to have it now. It’s a proposal for a standardized terminology for describing diatom morphology—including a bunch of illustrations, and a glossary for the French, German, and Latin equivalents of the terms used. That would have come in mighty handy in understanding some of those genus descriptions, but it’s also going to be of tremendous help in assembling the character set and states I’m aiming for—because this list of terms essentially defines the possible range of morphologies described by diatomists. Would have been nice to know about this document earlier, but at least I’ve got it now.