Working Weekend

 Making the most of a working weekend, doing minor edits as suggested by the editor in chief at the journal Taxon, for the second paper to come out of the diss. This one will cause a ton of consternation in the cactus world, and I wonder to what degree our proposed taxonomic changes will be adopted in general. It is likely that our paper will be one of those where the rationale is solid, the results suggest a major change in a popular genus, but the general public and even many scientist botanists will just ignore the new arrangement. That's fine by me, honestly. As a mentor of mine joked once, "Do you know why plant taxonomy causes so many feuds, hard feelings, and bitter rivalries? Because the stakes are so low."

The phylogenetic tree appearing soon in Taxon. Those of you who know how to read these can see the clades and the necessary changes. 

The day yesterday was only in small part aimed at addressing the editor's suggestions. The rest of the day was spent trying to work my way through the data submission portal at the NCBI's GenBank SRA upload site. I understand why uploads need quality control and a ton of identifying and meta data, but I'll never understand why the help resources are so shitty for these sites. Just take like an extra 5 minutes and post samples of exactly what the fuck the portal needs. Easy. But no, I guess because fucking scientists with zero communication skills set these things up, it takes forever to figure out how to format everything so that the actual upload can proceed. It's cool that all science publishing these days requires the data one used to be deposited in a public online repository. I'm in favor of that, big time. But they sure do not make it easy or even intuitive. Meanwhile, having launched the actual file upload last night at 9, it is still running this morning at almost 9. 

Peak Sunday morning excitement

Today's work involves getting started on narrative comments that I have to write for my students. These are due a week from tomorrow and involve about two or three paragraphs per student, based on the basic categories of: positive, stretch, concrete goal. I recall writing narratives for students at Wildwood Secondary, where I taught also here in LA. The idea behind these narrative comments is that they provide legitimate, personalized assessment for each student. It's been odd trying to get to know the students during remote learning. Some, of course, stand out for either glaringly positive or negative reasons. But I feel like about half are just not very "visible," really, in this distance learning arena. I am going to set up meetings with all of my mystery students this week, and that means writing the comments for the ones I know better, this weekend. 

Meanwhile, meditation and work out and darkness, later today. Food and sleep now. Heavy longing to be out in the wilderness. A range of strong yearnings, of all different kinds, all futile. 

Moonrise, Bahía de Los Angeles, BCN