Siliceous and Delicious

Against the backdrop of an emotionally exhausting and not particularly restful weekend, a Monday morning of some vague hope that I can wrap up this morphospace nightmare before the calendar year is out. Had a bit of a freakout this morning, realizing just how little time remains before 2011 turns to 2012.

Anyway. There’s some character cleanup I need to do before I can be satisfied that my matrix is at least internally consistent. I think. I’m actually really uncertain about whether to invest the day it will take me to implement a consistency check on the matrix… I’m just so fed up with it already.

Small detour to avoid making that decision. Eliminated character # 72 (“domed areolae”) because it was a duplication of #76 (“velum topography”). Not that it matters, since #76 (now #75) is an “axed” character in the cull that removes characters with too many “?”, “v”, and “n” values.

Next small detour. Summing the values of each column, kind of like the axing cull just mentioned, but looking at just how many of the valid character states are actually non-zero. There are some good candidates for further axing here (I’m not including characters already axed by the above-mentioned cull).

• #4, only 2
• #6, only 1
• #7, ony 3
• #14, only 2 (topographic sectors)
• #36, only 5
• #37, only 4 (ridge, spines on mantle)
• #44, only 5 (rays)
• #54, only 3 (setae)
• #56, 57, only 2 each (spinules, hair-like filaments)
• #58, 3 only (collar or carina)
• #76–83, between 2 and 5 only (Pore structure identified as pseudoloculate, Alveoli, Porelli in between pores, Passage pores, Bullulae, Hypocaust, Pseudonodulus, Ring of specialized openings)
• #81, Hypocaust—none! Deleted!
• #106, only 1 (macrorimoportulae)

The best candidates for immediate removal are characters #6 and #106, because they are singletons (only one non-zero or invalid state). Although #4, #14, #56, and #57, and #79 also just have 2. Is that the threshold? Or 3… or 5…? Yech. I don’t know. What to do?

Move on again. I also need to get these Cretaceous (Crustaceous?) occurrences into my Neptune file. Maybe that’s what I need to do. OK.