Immigration Immersion
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I haven’t written anything for the last couple of days, because they have been filled to the brim with entirely tangential, yet completely urgent activities relating to the wedding/visa situation. Now it’s Tuesday afternoon and it seems I’m finally ready to return to what I was working on a whole week ago, when I left work to hang out with Kati’s family for Thanksgiving.
I had been making pretty decent progress after meeting with Jacques and Sébastien about the outline portion of the morphospace. While it took up a lot of time to get back into the MATLAB way of thinking (syntax, especially concerning array indices, is different from R, and confusing to switch back to), I managed to eventually figure out which built-in functions I could use to load an image, then trace the image outline (of the segment of interest) by hand, and finally save the trace as a series of pixel coordinates (an n by 2 matrix). However, I ran into trouble taking it from there to the next step, which is to express that curve as a function which plots curvature on the y axis against distance (meaning distance along the line) on the x axis. Chiefly this is due to the fact that the increments of distance are not the same from one step to the next—when going to directly adjacent pixels, the distance is one pixel, but when going to diagonally adjacent pixels, the distance is the square root of one. I have no idea how to deal with this…
