Siliceous and Delicious

From the beginning of the day:

A fresh day, a fresh start. Dark grey skies and heavy “wintery mix” falling outside—perfect conditions to hole up and work hard. Where to start today? I’m torn between working on the rarefaction/UW subsampling, so that I can finish off the disparity-diversity comparison plots, and working on the “all characters” through time plot, or the associated exercise of picking a few characters, and the associated exercise of figuring out which characters are actually responsible for increases in morphospace area expansion, which would address the looming question of what the biological story might be. The latter is more important in some ways, I think, but it also has the most potential for going off the rails (in the sense that I’m going to need to do a fair bit of reading). So let me start with the subsampling, and get it done, and then move on to the character-specific story.

From the end of the day:

A very brief report, because there are no results yet—but I am getting close—from what I’ve been working on today. On account of the gruesome weather and a desire to focus, I stayed at home, and it was a good day. Put in a very decent effort and made some serious headway in adapting the existing code for generating the diversity/disparity plot so that it will perform by-list, unweighted subsampling for the morphospace. The whole thing isn’t working yet, but a tantalizing glimpse of the subsampled values for convex hulls and alpha volumes looked like the curve flattens out completely under subsampling—suggesting that the increase over time might be an artifact of sampling.