Are you shitting me? Because I am shitting myself.
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I am experiencing a definite bout of non-acute, low-grade, chronic time-is-ticking-freakout. I decided to stay away from the office this morning, after yesterday’s multifarious distractions, and instead worked at Darwin’s with Kati. Made decent progress of a sort, delving into how to calculate the next measure of morphospace occupancy—but in the process found myself quite paralyzed at the sheer scale of the task. I figured out how to calculate and plot the alpha shape of a point cloud in 3D (which looks very cool, by the way):
I could not, however, figure out how to save this to a movie (it’s very cool in its spinning glory), for presentation purposes. More importantly, I also couldn’t figure out how to automate generating a large number of these plots, since I’m going to have to inspect many different alpha shapes for different alpha values for all the time bins, in order to (manually and subjectively) pick the most appropriate ones. It’s very tricky because the package that does the alpha shape calculations uses RGL, an OpenGL implementation for R, for all of its plotting, which has its own set of graphical parameters that are largely unrelated to R’s base graphics (or indeed to grid, the other graphics layer I’ve been using). To really delve into this, cool as it would be, is going to take way too much time. So I’m going to have to brute-force this by hand and plot each combination of alpha values and time bins manually.
