the fractal nature of review articles

I thought I was mostly done with this paper weeks ago. Nope. My sketchy first draft was a pale shadow of what it needs to be. At that point, I had read n other papers, so I knew what I was going to say in my paper and had written a shortish version without references. Then I went to fill that out -- putting in the citations should be easy, right? Ha. I had to read approximately n more papers for each section of the paper to figure out whom to cite where (and why). And then I went to the paragraph level and found that I had to read n papers for each of those! Maybe this is different if you have read the important papers in a field for years and years. Anyway, I am still working at paragraph level but I feel safe in saying that this fractality bottoms out at sentence level, where the largest number of papers I've had to read per unit has been three.

( Mentoring maundering )

My awesome news for the day is this: I found a begonia with grouped but functional stomata! Yes!! (A book has a photo of groups of 3-4 stomata that are still functional, but the credit was just Begonia and I need to take original photos for this article. I've been on an epidermal scavenger hunt since, and because there are a zillion kinds of begonia and the book's author died recently, I wasn't at all sure I'd find this.) PI was preoccupied, but I showed both postdocs and then PI came and admired it too. Yay! The problem now is that the epidermis is very bumpy so hard to photograph, but I can cope with that one way or another.

The big winner: Rex begonia "Roberta" (looks similar to "Shamus")

Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to make a celebratory apple pie with clustered steam-vents.