Siliceous and Delicious

Yesterday, while I wasn’t on top of my game and didn’t feel like I produced much, was a bit of a turning point—I finally finished my list of characters! Huzzah! It consists of a list of 130 characters, each with anywhere between two and eight character states. Some (but not many) of the characters have explanatory notes and/or images; I intend to add such notes and images to most or all of the characters as I start making passes through them for each of the taxa.

I didn’t send them out for review yesterday—I wanted first to read through them once to check for consistency, and craft a short introduction to explain the philosophy I’ve taken in putting them together. Kate got sick in the afternoon and I aborted work early to go and pick her up so she wouldn’t have to trudge through the freezing rain. This morning, the distractions continued—I had to gather up and mail the last remaining (I hope) documents for the immigration case. What a time-consuming pain in the backside that whole experience has been.

Reviewed the characters, made a couple of small changes. In some cases I’m still not sure if this isn’t too fine-grained an approach. Maybe I’ve wasted my time in going into so much detail. On the other hand, my last attempt at doing this was criticized for its focus on taxonomically crucial characters, so I have tried to respond in the best way I can by using characters that describe frustule morphology as completely as possible. I tried to explain this in my email to Andy, Jacques, and Charles, and sent it off. Somewhat of a relief—though I await their responses (Charles’ especially) with a fair bit of trepidation. On the other hand, I don’t even care that much anymore. The worst that could happen is that Charles waxes eloquent about how stupid the whole exercise is, in which case I shall smile and nod (or whatever the email equivalent is) and continue to do what I planned to do anyway, because I know it’ll be reasonably interesting to three or four people, and I need to get it done so I can graduate. More likely in any case is that Charles won’t reply at all, and I’ll end up taking his silence as implicit approval, and move on. Safe in the knowledge (or hope) that this will be some sort of insurance against him acting up before my defense and refusing to let me graduate because he thinks my work is garbage.

I also emailed Wiebe Kooistra, as per Andy’s suggestion, to ask if he would look over my characters as well. He emailed back within a couple of hours with two names of more appropriate reviewers—one of whom, David Mann, I emailed with the same message I’d sent Kooistra. He’s one of the authors of the Diatom Bible (“The Diatoms” by Round et al.) I’ve been using, so if he’s not the guy, I don’t know who is.

Feels good to get something done, in spite of the worries that it might all be rubbish. The task now is not to lose momentum, but to press ahead with the next step. What is the next step? I consider my possibilities: throwing myself into the mathematical morphospace (with Sébastien), or getting started on the radiolarian lineage project. My feeling is that I ought to do the mathematical morphospace, because I’m afraid it’ll wither and die if I don’t pay it attention, but that I want to do the radiolarian project, because it has the same promise of unimpressive do-ability as the character-based morphospace. I know that if I sit down and work at it, something will come of it. The mathematical morphospace is quite a different beast, and I’m scared of it—scared that I’ll throw three weeks, two months, goodness knows how much time at it, and get nothing out of it.