I’m definitely coming down with something, I realized when I woke up at 3 this morning with the distinct sensation that I must have swallowed several razorblades since going to sleep. This convinced me that a prudent course of action was not to get up at 6 but see if a lie-in might help\u2014and it did. A few hours of more sleep, several courses of salt water gargling, gallons of tea and vitamin C later, I do feel much better and ready to face the thesis.<\/p>\n
Picked up with the writing I had left off on yesterday, feeling much more confident. Why did I cull the data? Well, because a lot of the genera and characters I had chosen had almost no valid states in them. That’s the truth, and that’s what I’m going to write\u2014if the reviewers don’t like it, I can always change the story later. But I decided that I’m going to (mostly) write this up as it is, not try to completely hide the process in some hyper-abbreviated, airy-fairy way. I started with 123 characters and ended up with 74 after an arbitrarily chosen culling threshold\u2014and that’s what I’m going to write, end of story.<\/p>\n
Spent what was left of the day happily typing away, very slowly, but feeling good about it. Diverting from writing to bits of the analysis I had said I’d do, but hadn’t gotten to, like comparing the sparseness of my data matrix to that of a couple of Foote’s matrices. This approach is working well for now, and I’m going to stick with it and see where it gets me for the next couple of days.<\/p>\n
Tinker also made a valuable suggestion\u2014to choose the 5 or 6 essential figures to include in the paper, and craft the text as an explanation of and segue between each. I think I’ll try the first approach on the methods, then switch to the second? In any case, a better day today. Focus is good, motivation is improved, and I’m on my way. It might be creepingly slow, but I am <\/em>writing. It has begun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m definitely coming down with something, I realized when I woke up at 3 this morning with the distinct sensation that I must have swallowed several razorblades since going to sleep. This convinced me that a prudent course of action was not to get up at 6 but see if a lie-in might help\u2014and it […]<\/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":[16233,6277],"class_list":["post-2042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-journal","category-timekeeping","tag-morphospace","tag-motivation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042","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=2042"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2045,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042\/revisions\/2045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}