Siliceous and Delicious

I have definitely been feeling a surge in anxiety over the past 24 hours. All of the uncertainty about what to do about diversity subsampling and how it relates to the morphospace, as well as the question of what to do for the diversity chapter if SQ is not applicable to Neptune data was making me very uneasy. I didn’t sleep well last night, tossing and turning, mind racing in circles, but I did my best to keep myself focused on the moment, and went out for a short run this morning even through I had trouble getting out of bed. This helped a little bit.

Walking home after work yesterday I thought that a intermediate fix for my SQS problem in the context of the morphospace might be to apply a classical rarefaction or the closely related by-list, unweighted subsampling instead. While it’s philosophically very different, the results in Alroy’s studies aren’t all that dramatically different from SQS, and crucially, at least they do *some* correction for sampling as opposed to reading observed diversity at face value. It might not be impossible to implement so that I can actually generate both the diversity curve (species level) and the morphospace occupancy data (genus level).

I also realized that I really needed to iterate back to the text of my chapter—I’ve spent the last couple of weeks focused exclusively on producing figures in R, and so I have become unmoored from the enforced linear thinking required by the writing process, which is no doubt part of the reason my mind has started swirling in these terrifying vortices.

Had a very good meeting with Beau in the afternoon, realized that I have actually accomplished a lot in the past six weeks (36 of the 50 to dos from mid-January). Seeing a slightly clearer path forward, though it’s still a little terrifying.