Siliceous and Delicious

In spite of a full night’s sleep, and my first go at mindfulness meditation this morning, I find myself sitting down at the office feeling exhausted and run down. Head achey and clouded, throat sore,… I fear that there is a bug trying very hard to break out. I am trying my best to ignore it and keep it down.

Had a hard time, again, trying to figure out where to start. Saw Andy who cheerfully suggested that January ought to be the month to complete the morphospace project. I winced, managed to smile (I think), and affirmed that this was in fact my plan. Went to the botany library to pick up a reference which I had hoped would provide a starting point for the phylogenetic comparison, i.e. comparing the proximity of taxa in a family tree based on genetics to their proximity in the morphospace.

The problems are 1) the tree in the publication does not show distances, only the topology of the tree, and 2) I don’t know how to compare phylogeny to morphological distance. I have a measure of distance in my dataset in the pairwise distances between genera. But the tree doesn’t allow me to make that comparison directly, because it only shows the topology, not the distances themselves. But even if I had the distances, how would I compare them? Yikes. This is a more complicated problem than I anticipated.

I forced myself for much of the rest of the day to work on the “skeleton” of the paper, trying to get down something, anything, on the page, so that I can bring something to Andy to work with and hopefully gain some direction and momentum for my analysis that way.

I managed to do some writing and sketch out a bit of a structure for the paper, but I must admit that I got demotivated at several points during the day. The old “I can’t do this” loops of thinking crept back, and the feelings of inferiority skyrocketed when I started looking to other papers for inspiration in structure—I just kept thinking, “there is no background, no purpose, no why to this study…”, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to get myself back out of that rut.

Fortunately, it’s an enforced early end to the day today, because Summer, Gabe, and Anna are here tonight. Tomorrow they all leave (Kati included) until the weekend, so it’ll be an intensive few days of work after tonight. Provided, that is, I can keep myself healthy and stop the headache and sore throat from spreading into a full on bout of sick.