Maha Gets Back in the Game
ø
Bit of a slowdown today. My desktop at work started slowing to a crawl yesterday, and I’ve spent the whole morning battling permissions errors in Disk Utility and OnyX, trying to bring it back to life… Things seem to be improving but it’s not over yet.
No word from Jacques yet, but I made an appointment with Andy to present my morphospace ideas tomorrow afternoon. He reported from a conversation with Maha—the math professor I had tried to recruit to help me with the morphospace the first time around, with entirely uninspiring results—in which Maha claimed to have solved the problem of representing complex shapes in three dimensions, and professed a great interest in using the technique to model morphologies of diatom frustules! Now, I can’t actually decide whether I’m excited that Maha is finally interested, or frustrated that my own work and the progress of the last few days (the culmination of work over many more months) may be overshadowed by the great man’s contributions.
What I said to Andy, and what I hope will be the outcome if Maha’s ideas go anywhere, is that having a generative, mathematical-geometrical 3D morphospace would be a good complement to the discrete-character morphospace I’m working on at the moment. I’d hate to see what I’ve done now thrown out in favor of some brilliant, elegant solution. Just because Maha brushed me off initially but suddenly, over a year later, found he was actually interested in what I’m doing. In any case, there’s nothing immediately happening, because Maha is out of town, then it’s Thanksgiving, and then Andy goes to India for a week. So if anything happens, it’ll happen at a time when I’ve already pushed my approach ahead somewhat further than it is now.
Hopefully.
