{"id":1656,"date":"2011-03-09T17:10:34","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T22:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/?p=1656"},"modified":"2011-03-10T09:01:08","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T14:01:08","slug":"meeting-with-andy-after-a-quarter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/2011\/03\/09\/meeting-with-andy-after-a-quarter\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting With Andy, After a Quarter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Put together a\u00a0report for Andy<\/a> late last night for our meeting today. It was an interesting exercise\u2014made me realize a) just how much I’d actually done in the last three months, b) what a good call it was, motivation-wise, to stop working on the outline morphospace S\u00e9bastien when I did, before things spiraled out of control, and c) how incredibly useful it is to keep this journal of what I’m doing. There’s no way I’d have been able to give a full accounting of what I’d done since November without the help of this blog; in fact, when I sat down to start writing, I had no clue what I would write\u2014I couldn’t remember really having done much at all. How wrong I was.<\/p>\n

Before our 10:30 meeting (which went on for almost an hour and a half), I quickly set up my laptop and rushed to fix all the little things (application settings, macro installations, working directories, path names for file references) that would allow the RadData interface to run in the microscope room so I could demo it to Andy. Got it working just in time, though I realized in the process that there’s another couple of features I need to add to the interface. Inserting a slide with the “New slide” menu option is required before the first measurements are recorded in order to set the\u00a0current_slide <\/em>variable, but the resulting SQL INSERT fails (as it should) if the slide entered already exists. Two things thus need to happen:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The exception thrown by inserting an already-existing slide to the slides table needs to be handled so the program doesn’t crash in that case.<\/li>\n
  2. The user needs to be presented with an additional menu option in order to choose a slide already existing in the database.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Andy’s feedback was mostly of the usual kind\u2014looks great, I agree with you, do what you say you’re going to do, you’re on the right track, etc. He did have a fair few things to say about the mathematical morphospace, most of which I found elicited a “you really have no idea” type of frustration. He was quite keen that I continue on with that line of inquiry\u2014eventually, at least, since he agreed that it was smarter to focus my energies on completing the morphospace first\u2014and “not make it too complex”. He pointed out that the genius of Dave Raup’s groundbreaking work on the morphospace of coiled shells was that he was able to think about it simply, identify the smallest number of parameters that were likely to be functionally consequential, and ignore the rest of the complications. This, of course, is easily said, and is exactly what I set out to do initially when I first started thinking about this problem (over three years ago!), but I’ve come to realize that it’s na\u00efve to think that this sort of solution is possible for all sets of biological shapes, just because it’s possible for coiled shells. I wouldn’t for a second suggest that Raup is anything short 0f utterly brilliant, but he also chose the right problem to work on. It’s just the case that coiled shells can <\/em>almost all\u2014in a general and imprecise way\u2014be represented by a simple three-parameter geometric model. It’s my belief after wrestling with diatoms for the last three years that the same is just not possible for diatoms. There’s an underlying developmental process in how coiled shells are produced biologically, regardless of whether they’re clams or snails, and that process is easily captured by a model that describes a generating curve rotating through space. The developmental processes that lead to diatom frustules are fundamentally different, for starters occurring at the cellular level, mediated by the cytoskeleton, which moves cell compartments into a much harder to define array of different structures.<\/p>\n

    I voiced my concerns about the potential functional meaning of looking at just one cross-section of a complex 3D structure (i.e. the outline shape), but Andy dismissed my concerns with the argument that most of the shapes are really just flat-topped or domed, and that “the silly shapes really don’t make up much of the morphospace”. Well, I just don’t know if that’s true. Sure, many of the most abundant forms are simple in their topography, but isn’t the point of a morphospace to look at the realization of successful morphologies in a broader space of shape possibilities? Anyway. I smiled and nodded and thought to myself, “well, let’s see if I get to it, but I think I’ve tried this, and I’m probably going to leave it up to someone more genius than me to solve this problem”.<\/p>\n

    The crowning glory of the meeting was a demonstration of the RadData interface, in its first sorta-kinda working form. I was astounded by how little Andy understood of the system as I demoed it… There was a giant chasm of understanding, actually, and it made me both very proud and a little bit sad. He was clearly quite impressed, but also didn’t really know what to make of it, I think. He was nodding attentively as I explained how it worked, and I thought he was on board, but as I was demoing the live preview on the Canon camera control app he asked whether the computer knew which of the specimens on the screen it was supposed to measure, I realized just how much more basic my explanation would have to be to get through… But that’s way more than could be fit into a one and a half hour meeting.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Put together a\u00a0report for Andy late last night for our meeting today. It was an interesting exercise\u2014made me realize a) just how much I’d actually done in the last three months, b) what a good call it was, motivation-wise, to stop working on the outline morphospace S\u00e9bastien when I did, before things spiraled out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14607,13584],"tags":[16334,16243],"class_list":["post-1656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-journal","category-timekeeping","tag-meetings-with-andy","tag-rad-lineages"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1656"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1661,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions\/1661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}