Siliceous and Delicious

Back into the office this morning (arrived via jog) after the weekend work binge. Realized in the course of pasting what I’d written so far into LaTeX yesterday that I will need to rewrite quite substantially. I want to start with a description of the morphospace plot, some general words about visualizing high-dimensional data and the plot-points-as-data approach I take in this figure. Then I can go on to the characters-vs-axes-correlation plot (which I suppose will be Figure 2, then), describe that, and then go back to the marginal figures around the main Figure 1 plot to highlight some of the characters that come out of that analysis, plus some others.

Anyway.The first thing was to finish getting myself set up in LaTeX, which ended up taking a truly ridonculous amount of time—tables are a bitch to do at the best of times, but when it’s a 123 * 140 data matrix, it can eat up the better part of a day. In any case, I’ve got my writing so far, the character descriptions, and the complete data matrix nicely formatted and ready to go. While it seems like the sort of low-priority thing you might save until the end, I think I chose well to do this now, since the aesthetic pleasure of seeing my dissertation begin to take form is having a more-than-desired motivating effect.