Siliceous and Delicious

The time has come to lay this project to rest—at least for now. After yet another attempt at overnight automation, the system got stuck on the first fossil’s polishing step again. Not to mention that the power supply to the lens was faulty, so there was no getting a steady SEM image at voltages below 22 kV, so no clear imaging. But in any case, the basic milling operation took from 6:40pm to around 3am, and the polishing (had it worked) was scheduled to take another 7 hours on top of that. So, basically, one fossil per night is what I was looking at—if I could iron out all the problems with automation. This is not good enough. I need to be able to do dozens of fossils, quickly, and hundreds of fossils to get a meaningful number out of this project (273 fossils in my proposal from May). This is clearly totally impossible at this stage, so I’m better off giving this project the axe.

Got together my shit for the trip to DC tomorrow—slide boxes, boarding pass, list of samples to get, etc. Futzed around a lot and put off starting work. I don’t know why, I know exactly what I’ve got to do, and I know this is basically my only day of uninterrupted work this week—but somehow it all just seems like a monumental waste of time right now.

I eventually rallied and got back to what I’ve been meaning to do for the whole week since I got back from Germany—plug away at listing characters for the diatom morphospace using the references from the Farlow. Funnily enough, getting cracking alleviated much of the negative energy and aversion that was keeping me from starting…