Siliceous and Delicious

Had a meeting with Andy this morning—I had wanted to show him my disparity-diversity plots, particularly with the different story told by subsampling, and show him the interesting result from the SQS Good’s U values (being counterintuitively high through time, suggesting a major problem for the approach). The upshot was that Andy now definitely recommended splitting the paper into two parts (“everything you have plotted here should be a figure in a publication, but it’s too much to fit into one paper”), and—more importantly—that as two chapters, together with the radiolarian lineage project, would constitute a thesis.

I had to ask explicitly to confirm, though it was already clear by implication, whether this meant that I didn’t need to do the diversity project to graduate. “Yes, exactly,” he replied. Woot, woot, woot! One less project to do. Not necessarily the one I would have chosen to drop, but whatever. It’s one entire project less to do before I can leave this entire episode behind me. Hallelujah.

I spent a good while bathing in the glory of that news, and checking in with the new iPad being unveiled, then moved on to printing out thumbnails of my figures and pasting them onto index cards so I could work on how they would be arranged in these two new papers. It’s going to be a big challenge for me to figure out what the division between the two should be, and what the two narratives for the papers will be, but at least I now know that’s what I need to do.