Siliceous and Delicious

No post yesterday, and not much progress. Had been hoping to hear back from Sébastien and be able to talk to him about how to proceed, seeing as I’m pretty well stuck with the shape extraction algorithm. Thankfully, I had DSA to help me step back half an inch and see there’s another thing I can be productively working on in the meantime, namely consolidating the character list.

Now that I’m working on a fairly detailed generative (?) morphospace for the outline, I’m noticing that I’ll probably need fewer characters to describe the outline shape. For example, I won’t need a descriptive discrete character for presence/absence of a central swelling. When it comes to the apex shape, I’m less sure. Will I be able to capture the difference between a rostrate and sub-rostrate apex with the Fourier modes? I think so.

But even leaving this out, rolling the notes I’ve assembled on the various characters together into a coherent character set is tricky. How to integrate a long list of descriptive terms and phrases lumped under “valve face topography” with transverse vs. longitudinal sulci, and the canonical list of terms for the “girdle view outline” shape?

Got stuck and overcome by a deep desire not to work. Not sure why. Frustrating.