Siliceous and Delicious

Completely neglected to post yesterday—it was a slow, distracted day but I still got a few things done—mostly assembling bits and pieces of the R routine to read the ImageJ “pipe” file into R and create the SQL INSERT statements.

In the course of thinking that through, made a minor design change in the database. Rather than storing the complete name of each measurement type in the relevant column of the “Measurements” table, e.g. “Length from top of shell to base of ante-/postcephalic chamber”, I thought it might be prudent to store just an integer ID related 1-to-1 to a measurement name. Wrote a quick look-up function to return the full name for each integer ID so that the original design can be easily recovered with a function call. The rationale was that once I have finished collecting data and am at the data analysis stage, it might be very clumsy to formulate the mathematical models in terms of SQL queries including those long labels, and that the volume of a sphere, for example, would be more neatly described as “π x (1)^2” than “π x ‘Width of outer medullary shell’^2”. This might be daft and overkill, but I had a horror vision of running into problems with that and decided to do it this way instead. I think, given that SQLite is so forgiving in terms of data types, it would also be quite easy to revert to my original design and replace the measurement type IDs with the full strings quickly.

Anyhow, that was yesterday, and today is today. For the morning I’d like to get the bits and pieces together and get the interface up and running.