March Shitness Day 27
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I have been trying, but every step just seems to be met with a branch in the face. I have been working on code since yesterday to calculate the morphospace volume occupied by individual lists, a sort of “alpha disparity”, but it keeps crashing on me (as in, just quitting R). I can’t figure out what’s wrong. It just makes me seethe. The code is the least, the tiniest of my problems. Yet it alone, at this point of almost complete demoralization, seems capable of defeating me.
Spent HOURS trying to debug this fucking code. Was able to eventually narrow it down to a call to the function that calculates convex hull volume, presumably because it is passing short lists to the function (i.e. it is failing when trying to compute the 3D hull volume of a point set of only 3 points). This is a real arse of course because if I have to reject lists with 4 or fewer taxa in them I’m clearly going to overestimate morphospace occupancy. Fuckity fuckity fuck. God, I hate this shit.
Anyway, that hack seemed to make it work, but the results are neither expected nor really clear.
So, actually it looks like this measure of “disparity” at one location is going DOWN with time, if anything. That is not what I would have expected, neither from the overall morphospace pattern, nor from what’s out there about diatoms in the abstract. Things should have evolved to a greater diversity of forms, even in one location, not less.
So does the list length (number of species at a location) go down with time, to explain this? No. Of course not. That would be too fucking easy.
So it looks like, if anything, list length goes up. Although, really, list length is basically constant. This makes nothing clearer to me, nothing at all.
