redid init. need to do some more stuff to make dataset loading work. part of plan is to have all params in the dict params for the object. this doesnt go thru venture unit and so people need not look up that code to understand birds
big changes. new params in function make_params. type checking on params is done in that function as well as some additional asserts. commented out some stuff in the class definition that used old param names concerning loading observes from file, which we want to do in a more uniform way. rewrote store_observes to use the long_name param which is also generated automatically in make_param with the intention of being unique. maybe we need top actually ensure uniqueness by adding some numbers to the end (we could check for duplicate names and add suffixes if necessary. good to have some syste that makes it easy to find all identical-param datasets