Oh Canada

This week I visited just about every University in Canada. It was a trip! Some initial issues were encountered (did you know you need a visum? that you pay for online? Like Australia and Disneyland, it's better to order online well before going... I hadn't). So some stress getting to the plane. No bourbon brought along for my Canadian friends.

Monday

I forgot Queen's University isn't in Toronto. Google lady tells me with great authority that it is downtown and so I am late to my own talk. Swell. My host, Stephane Courteau is gracious and improvises a very nice visit. Beautiful place. Fun group and astronomers. I talked about overlapping galaxies. Stephane egged me on to publish the dang results already. The place comes highly recommended. Next time he organizes a conference, I should go. Back to Toronto I drive (2.5 hrs...)


Tuesday

York suffered a catastrophic electrical failure. I blame squirrels. The black ones that are everywhere. So there was some more improv and a giant generator truck and I managed to give a talk anyway.
Adam Muzzin was a solicitous and entertaining host. Wonderful visit. Interesting discussions (mostly with Adam, some reminiscing of Leiden times). My talk was about super-8s and M-dwarfs.


Wednesday

University of Toronto. The Dunlap institute. Clearly one of the flagship places of Canadian Astronomy. Renee Hloszek was my host and in between a clearly very hectic schedule she managed to get me where I needed to go and I got to talk about LADUMA.
I managed to chat to Brian Gaensler (score!) and I had a wonderful lunch. One of the other astronomers pointed out that Margaret Atwood was sitting right behind me. Sure. ok. NBD.
Then came the drive to LONDON (Ontario). Canada is built to a different scale people.
There I met up with Pauline Barmby and her charming family. She has a whole teenager now. Tried to learn something about managing that while at dinner (poutine! I have heard much about it).

sidebar: I had heard so much about poutine that it had been built up in my imagination. There is also a brown sauce Dutch people put on fries, the Thai Sateh sauce. Yep fries and spicy peanut sauce.
I may be biased but I like Dutch brown sauce much much better than poutine. I may never be able to enter Canada again after posting this.


Thursday

Talk at Western University. So many people to talk to. So much interesting science ideas to kick around. We chatted about the UGC 2885 project with Hubble. Plan to write All Teh Papers. I talked about Super-8s and M-dwarfs but considering how many people worked on nearby galaxies, I should have given a talk about overlapping galaxies. Ah well. Next time.
I chatted with Els Peeters, who I know from her Groningen Days. Her postdoc was working on something with PAHs (surprise! no surprise) and I may have a science idea there too. Hotel was a 1925 venerable building with lots of quirks. Like another power outage. Fun.
Chatted to several of the students. The astronomy and physics building is a lovely renovated old building with a cover courtyard. Very nice.


Friday

And on Friday, I drove to Waterloo, parked, walked 15 min to the Perimeter institute (why did they tell me to park here?) and then walk right back after I realized the talk was at the physics department. Part of the physics department had been burned down. And now they are getting a new building.
Maybe something to suggest to my physics colleagues. How inflammable are their experiment anyway?

Gave my talk about overlapping galaxies. Donna Strickland wasn't there but I think I spotted her at the Perimeter institute. Chatted to Brian McNamara who had been a postdoc in Groningen. And he informed me that Prof Strickland is now a full professor. All done with proper paperwork. Should have been a short discussion with the Nobel Prize in Physics and whatnot.

Then it was on to a quick maple syrup purchasing stop and Toronto airport, drop off car, navigate the check-in/customs/etc fly to Atlanta, sprint across Atlanta airport to make the connection in 20min, fly to Louisville and sleeeeeeep. Oh and I managed to write up three science cases for CASTOR.


This was a hectic week. Talk to someone, think up new stuff, talk to another person, try to be interesting and engaging, keep logistics in check, not forget power brick etc, move to the next topic.
It was fun and exhausting. Very happy to have visited and very happy to be home.

DotAstronony Thoughts

This year it finally happened! I was accepted into dot astronomy. The cool kids club. dot astronomy always seemed like the mysterious, creative, interesting gettogether where the thinking was free and the surroundings...well...cool.

Like all middle age people I crave to be a little cool? Plus I desperately need to update. Or so it felt. I cannot in good conscience teach people tools of the last generation (IRAF? C’mon). The face of astronomy is changing. Rapidly. And I - the perennial late-adopter- wanted to be part of it.

There were many topics and the organization is quite...free-flowing. I understand that is part of the appeal. To not be constrained by a strict format. But it also becomes a bit disorienting and tricky to contribute to. I wonder if i was the only one suffering from the “did i just miss that?” Feeling.

it started with day 0: introductions and stating goals. Everyone stand up (eek!) and say what you’re here for. There were several mentions of now finally being with “the cool kids”. And some pushback against that perception etc. But that is pretty on the mark. This was organized by a select group and this “brain trust” is a little social circle that is hard to follow and interact with. I totally get it. This is the one time these people get to see their friends and most important peers. But have a day -1 or +1 for the brain trust. The space (stsci) would have allowed a much larger crowd rather than the ~50 people present. Add to that there were lots of stsci people (that kept disappearing to their day job) this was a much smaller gathering than I thought it would be. I heard about the selection code. It is a small randomizer to ensure a mix of new and returning participants, early and late career. And worryingly, weighs your abstract using a text analysis. That seems like a great way to inadvertently select for native english speakers. I would like to test that worry.

The focus I had was on building class material, not tutorials. I noticed the focus of .astro is very much on research and outreach, and much less on education. And yet, training the next generation is absolutely key. Want to change astronomy and how it’s practiced? Teach it that way in thr classroom. Proper attention to contributions by women, start everyone off on Python 3 and Jupyter Notebooks from their first day. etc etc.

An exchange that stuck with me was about attaching Jupyter notebooks to publications (great idea) and how referees should referee this as well. The comment was that “everyone should just be able to read Python” which resonated with me because that’s the anglocentric argument that “everyone should just be able to write English”. Every non-native English speaker has stories about how referees scolded them for improper English (not their job) and people equating poor grammar to poor science. This could add a whole other layer of snobbery. No thank you.

But most of the time I really was there to learn new and interesting things. Jarita Holbrook gave an enlightning talk about how students of color perceive their interactions with Faculty. In both the US and South Africa. And having participated as a WMW (Well Meaning White) in both these places it was interesting to see her take on this. Another highlight was Lauren Chambers’ talk. Funny and informative. No need for me to talk. Go look at her thesis for more: http://www.stsci.edu/~lchambers/Chambers_ADifferentKindOfDarkEnergy.pdf

A big emotional moment was when there was a talk about the gender balance in science at the same time as the testinonies were before the senate. The overall feeling of things heading the wrong way at speed was pretty prevalent and maybe that colored my view of the week a bit too.

Oh and I needed to finish and submit ESO proposals and a SWIFT proposal. Didnt manage the SWIFT proposal. Ah well.

But I made some interesting new acquaintances. Some useful chats with people and I was encouraged to hear people liked my idea of a 100lvl coding, 500lvl astro class. That verbage was from Kelle Cruz. Her idea was to have a repository of different astronomy code repositories. That is the most tangible project for the future. I want to build a 100/200 level and 100/500 level classes.
And I ended up with a whole pile of ideas.

So I am calling my DotAstronomy a success. Didn’t get any cooler. Hardly talked to the Cool Kids[tm]. Not sure what to expect going in but I am calling this a win.

We all need a win.

Deliberate

A new semester and like a new year, I start with all the best intentions. After 18months in this gig I am feeling the stress from no upper limits to work, only vague instructions as to what is needed for tenure etc. but mostly: everything started to blur
together. Refereeing papers while taking small people to swimming lessons, sort of picking at my laptop while watching netflix etc.

And over the summer I read the book “rest” on how productive and creative people build in periods of deliberate rest into their schedule.

I did not latch on the rest part per se. A lot of the examples were people in the British aristocracy: they could take a break or a long walk or what have you, all the chores were being done by servants. Pwish!

But the deliberate part resonated. No more blurry lines between work and downtime. Delibrate downtime! No open laptop and watching “making it”! (Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman are National treasures!)

Deliberate breaks, deliberate parenting, deliberate work.

I mean the first week of the semester was still filled with starting issues but hey. I dod them deliberately. Ahem.

And one more deliberate thing: off my phone and one morning a week to sit down and write. Not at work of course. Far too many interruptions. Undisclosed location (coffee shop)

Student projects

my brain is pretty good at thinking up student projects. Losts of small projects and lots of instructive data-sets. But how does one keep them organized? This has been something I am struggling with. I have an Evernote notebook with ideas. But how to share effecricely with students? I need to think up a system. So kids can check them out and contact me.

Suggestions welcome.

The Dark Matter lacking Galaxy vol3, the Memes

After the Twitter/FB storm, the astro-ph reactionary papers, the memocalypse has arrived for the Dark Matter-less (oh sorry -lacking) galaxy.  

It's the same meme, based on the American Chopper series. And all of them mock the number of data-points, the statistics debate and the fact that someone is mumbling "MOND" every so often.

Fine. We're done now right? Time to get more data on more galaxies. 

Thanks to @jegpeek @astromeara and @MiaDoesAstro for the memes.

The Dark Matter Lacking Galaxy, vol 2

The dark Matter Lacking galaxy is certainly good for some more controversy.

various astronomers have weighed in, and now also on astro-ph:

Thanks to Justin Read for this quick summary:
https://twitter.com/ReadDark/status/984800166027776000

Three papers on the galaxy lacking DM:

Measured and found wanting: reconciling mass-estimates of ultra-diffuse galaxies


https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04139  
With 10 tracers, there should be a factor ~10 error on the mass...

Current velocity data on dwarf galaxy NGC1052-DF2 do not constrain it to lack dark matter

https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04136 

Where Nicholas Martin made good on his twitter thread (threat?) and generated a paper on the statistical treatment used in the Nature paper.

MOND and the dynamics of NGC1052-DF2

https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04167 

Of course the MOND people had to weigh in, mainly with the point that this isn't the stake to the heart of this theory. Apparently you have to cut off its head too. Or something similar.

and this has prompted Pieter van Dokkum to post more information and material on his website:

https://www.pietervandokkum.com/ngc1052-df2

Especially, the actual table with redshifts and positions of the Globular clusters are posted here:

http://www.astro.yale.edu/dokkum/outgoing/ascii_table.txt

That does not sound like a big deal but to me it is. If you are being completely open in science (as we should be) then you make the reproduction of your approach and the test of other approaches as simple as possible. If I had one major gripe about the van Dokkum Nature paper, it was the lack of this table.

This allowed me to devise a rather simplistic homework assignment to calculate the mean redshift (systematic redshift) and the mean radius of the globular cluster distribution in kpc. One then takes the standard deviation of the distribution around the systematic velocity to obtain: 10.5 km/s and a radius r=3.6 kpc.

Yes that is just using Numpy's mean and std functions.

One can use this as an Jupyter notebook exercise for students to plot the data:


and the now infamous histogram:



Using our textbooks we get:

M = 7.5 {\sigma^2 r_h \over G}

and compare that to the stellar mass inferred from the Sersic fit and we find that this galaxy is lighter than the stars imply: something is definitely up.

So this is now a Dark Matter assignment in a new course I am building.

But that brings me to the current issue with this class of galaxies. We have way too few kinematic measurements of them, only done by one group and the implications are rather far-reaching. So, hopefully we'll see more data on these things soon. Because N=2 science in current circumstances is just embarrassing. 

Still not one of the most grumpy-old-man response I've seen: 

https://twitter.com/EricMamajek/status/984841037519708160

 #MamajekYourselfBeforeYouWreckYourself...

GAIA DR2 is coming soon!

So the GAIA satellite has been quietly plugging away, as it was designed to do, getting the astrometric distances to a billion stars. I played some with DR1, which mostly needed Hipparchos as a first epoch to get distances. Nice but nothing quite as amazing as a billion stars.

I heard a talk by Adam Riess at the AAS this winter on how they got astrometric distances to the long-period Cepheids in the Milky Way with much finagling on Hubble.Yeah. no worries. Now you can simply get the astrometric distance to the Magellanic clouds. The main uncertainty in the cosmic distance scale then comes from the lack of overlap between Cepheid distances and Supernovae.

Go figure. Three steps and that is the distances throughout the entire known Universe! We've come a long way! (literally!).

So why is this important? Because we're seeing the first pebbles shift in what promises to be a bit of a landslide in cosmology. Maybe. It's early.

Sangeeta Malhora posted a picture of a talk reviewing the tension between the distance scale(s) (there are different methods) and the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is interesting. Cool slide too. Totallywant to steal it from  Reachel Beaton who is giving the talk here. The distance scale is getting a different Hubble constant than the CMB is... that's...weird.

But some of the uncertainty comes from the very first step. GAIA is set to squash that first step's uncertainty.

I also have a just completely crazy idea (that just might work) for GAIA data as well. And maybe some ideas for student projects as well.

Sooon....

The Galaxy Without that Special Something

This month an article by P. van Dokkum appeared in Nature on one of the UltraDiffuse Galaxies discovered by the Dragonfly telescope that appears to have little to no dark matter component. The results were based on follow-up observations with the Keck telescope on the Globular Clusters of this galaxies. Getting the mass of these galaxies is very tricky because there are only GC left as kinematic tracers; these galaxies have no glowing gas, atomic hydrogen (although that is a supposition as far as I can tell), and the surface brightness is too low for a realistic stellar kinematics map. So GC it is.

Nature does a phenomenal job of getting a result across to the media and this result ran around the globe. And, like any good Nature article, it generated a lot of reactions from astronomers all over. To put it mildly, not everyone was equally convinced. The result is based on 10 measurements and we all squinted hard at that.




The plot that everyone was just hairy eyeballing a LOT.

Twitter and social media responses

Michelle Collins (an expert at low-mass galaxies and their kinematics) had one of the quickest and comprehensive twitter responses:
https://twitter.com/michelle_lmc/status/979101658352406529

her comments are:
1. GC may not be good kinematics tracers.
2. I don't get the same result from these 10 data-points
3. candidate for strong interaction, so not typical UDG.

The critical responses kind of split between the MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics, aka we don't understand gravity as well as we'd like so dark matter could be just wonky gravity) and comments on the use of statistics on those 10 measurements.

MOND

First the MOND crowd, who were quick to respond because oddly a galaxy stripped of dark matter is solid proof that it exists: if it's stuff, it can be missing. If dark matter is really a different kind of gravity, one can't take it out of a galaxy, it's an inherent property.

Marcel Pawlowski:
https://twitter.com/8minutesold/status/979154782454607873

and

Stacy McGaugh:
https://twitter.com/DudeDarkmatter/status/979133298000777218

which sums up the issue with MOND as "hard to do when other (bigger) galaxies around". So they feel this is not a silver bullet to MOND (yet).

Statistics

And then there are a number of astronomers who squinted really hard at the use of statistics in this paper. The velocity dispersion of this galaxy is based on said 10 velocities of these Globular Clusters. For one, these are hard to do because the redshift has to be determined from absorption features, not an emission line. Secondly, how does one get from 10 measurements (with high uncertainties) to a dispersion?

Van Dokkum used a technique to draw from a simulated sample. This approach was certainly something that many people had issues with (do you know the underlying population that well?)

Anil Seth commented on a FB post by me:
"Bayesian analysis and definitely get results that are significantly higher dispersion (~17-18 km/s 90% upper limit), which would give a mass ~3x higher than the limit here. You can throw out their outlier GC and get a dispersion consistent with what they get, but its just 10 data points... Its an interesting result no matter what, but the "no dark matter" seems overstated."



The figure shows an MCMC approach to the same problem, which comes up with the higher (still weird) GC dispersion.

And a little later Nicolas Martin published a Twitter thread also re-analyzing the velocities:
https://twitter.com/nfmartin1980/status/982245161735372804

It focuses on the fact that one of the GC (with also the worst errorbars) is an outlier. Remodeling this, he finds a velocity dispersion that is indeed below 10km/s but with much bigger errors?

Sam Vaughan piled on with a longread blog post (here) and a Twitter thread (here) to back it up. Nicely enough, he actually published the code to go with it (here). He points out that with such a result, the velocity data of the GC should have been tabulated. I agree with him on that.
Neertheless, using data gleaned from one of the figures, he get this PDF


Which once again points to a higher value of the velocity dispersion. And both Vaugham and Martin get this tail out to much higher values.

While this should not devolved into a Frequentist vs Baysian fight (soo done already) it is clear that the result quoted is heavily influenced by the statistical technique used.

Pieter van Dokkum weighed in on a FB comment thread when I was posting on this and wrote a blog post to elucidate.

https://www.pietervandokkum.com/ngc1052-df2

The TL;DR version of all of this is that the result is model dependent. With 10 (uncertain) data-points, that is hardly a surprise. There's a remedy for that...

Nature Paper

Now to be completely fair to van Dokkum et al. The straightjacket that is a Nature paper does not allow one to completely explain and publish all the analysis or data for the result. Hence the extensive post-publication analysis by others and rebuttal needed on other media. I would point to this paper if anyone asks me what a major flaw in the Nature publishing model is. I would also point to it to show how one best can draw attention to a result. In that respect it worked wonders.


One of Pieter's supplementary plots. Honestly think this should have been in the paper instead of that histogram... Still think the data should have been published as a table (although this is close) for ease of replication...


Special case?

Nicholas Martin was quick to point out that the half-light radius and velocity dispersion fits well on the Navarro-Frank-White halo profiles: 


Which is great but how would one then explain the only other UDG with a kinematic mass from van Dokkum+ 2016 (link)? Similar size, much higher velocity dispersion (~50 km/s). A little easy to call it a win just yet.

Future

In my view the way forward with these UDG is clear: we need to measure the kinematics of these in (a) more of them, since this has really been an N=2 (galaxies) discussion so far, and (b) using tracers other than Globular Clusters (tricky).



Links to papers:

"A Galaxy lacking Dark Matter" - van Dokkum, Nature, (2018)

Paper on the Globular Cluster population of the same galaxy (link) - van Dokkum+ (2018b)

A High Stellar Velocity Dispersion and ~100 Globular Clusters for the Ultra Diffuse Galaxy Dragonfly 44 - van Dokkum+, (2016) (link)

JWST delay and my best tweet yet

This week, the astronomical community heard that the James Webb Space Telescope was delayed by a substantial amount of time. More importantly, the deadline for proposals was also delayed by a good 11 months.Considering that most astronomers submit to HST like this:

One could assume only a few people really gotten started and not much time had been wasted anyway...

Given the fact that I am typically one of those people that submits a first version at the beginning of the x-axis of this plot...I... wasn't happy. Neither were most of my collegues who pretty much all had been working hard on science cases and teaching themselves how to talk JWST instrument for the last few weeks.

Which brings me to the --according to Bill Keel-- uncharacteristicly Zen tweet of mine. Delays in JWST remind me of one of the best talks on instrument development I have ever heard during "400 years of the telescope" at the ESA's ESTEC by Bob O'dell:



The x-axis is a decade and a half. There are 9 separate delays in this plot. All of them genuinely unforseen issues with Hubble. The mirror deformation isn't even in here! So if you are building a space telescope, a Zen attitude helps. Probably.



The delays for both were helpfully graphed and frankly...given the fact that a servicing mssion is impossible, we are par for the course. It is what it is. I know for certain that STSCI made that difficult decision as soon as they could. Proposals for time are taken very seriously.

At least I got my most popular tweet of all time (K. Mack mid-range!) out of it.

Keck Observing Run

This week was my first Keck Observing run, thanks to Joanna Bridge’s work on bright z~8 galaxies.

It has been an emotional rollercoaster: MOSFIRE appeared to have conprehensibly broken only two nights before ours and the weather had been atrocious. It did not look good.

But we trekked out there and first we were going to see the summit. That was amazing! We all geeked out over the beauty and conplexity that is a modern telescope. And the trek up the mountain is ansolutely stunning.

And then! MOSFIRE’s issues was a cable, not a broken cool head. It could be repaired. The weather cleared up more.

And then! We were on sky. Getting photons. One half night hammering one object.

And then back to Louisville! 4 flights...

Mis en place

There is a technique in professional kitchens that is called “mis en place”. Like most things, I learned this through a kids movie (ratatouille). It is the habit by kitchen staff and chefs to set out everything the night before. This is what I do for breakfast with the kids. Coffee machine is timed to wake up and ready, table is set, everything set for smoothie making the next morning. 

Phyiscaly setting ingredients and the workspace in readyness plans the project in your head. It is easier in cooking but I beleive it works well for science projects.

Data set up. 

Links to relevant papers. 

Latex document with bits and pieces collated. 

Clean desktop. 

No 500 tabs open.

What else would one set up in advance?

Hustle

Ok I am not sure if this is a US thing or a pre-tenure thing but it really feels that I have to hustle to be on time and on target. All the time. Like. Do not get sick or sit down.

I guess part of this is that most academic work are a perfect gas: they fill the space alotted on the clock or calendar perfectly. One can always prep even more for class, edit the code or paper one more time etc.

But some of it seems to be that people (myself included) plan with fair weather in mind. No schedule has snow days or sick days built in. It still feels like a grave error to plan that way. As soon as anything does not go well, you gotta hustle.

So then people give up and everything is an emergency. All the time. (Narrator: “it isn’t”). So the real trick is to plan realistically: Built in 10-20% time for mishaps etc.

and hustle. Gotta hustle.

A PhD is an honest 9-5

The title is something my advisor Ron Allen said to me during my time at STSCI. Now a comment like this needs some unpacking. For starters it is to instill in a grad student the clear understanding that a phd is really just a whole bunch of work. Not massive creative insight or A Brilliant Idea. But work.

Secondly, it serves as a guide for both student and supervisor to keep an eye on the time and effort spent and where to spend it. The occasional week where there needs to be a push (deadline...) or things are going Really Well may top out well over but 40hours per week on average that is realistically where the research part of a phd should be.

There are many reasons why that will not happen and it is the job of the supervisor to keep an eye out for them.

1. Side projects and distractions. It is research! The student is a creative person. There are ideas to follow up and consider outside the main drive of the thesis. Oh boy did I do that! Identify and store for later (Evernote!). Too easy to get sidetracked. For anyone.

2. Institutional overload. This is trickier. As it turns out, the supervisor is not the only boss here. TA duties, departmental citizenship and all those tasks that “the phd students can do”. Sure. Some. Not all.

3. Real life. Ah yes pesky real life getting in the way. An occasional low productivkty week is normal. When either supervisor or student loses sight however because IRL there are many more demands than can be reasonably met...its time to reevaluate.

4 Lack of logistical ortechnical support. This is pretty squarely on the supervisor. It is the supetvisor’s job to get the student set up. Choice of system is often up to the student. But guiding the student to a system is the supervisor’s job. Overleaf document for the papers and thesis. Dropbox place for data and figures. Clear version control. Bibdesk for papers and bibliography (or a completely different system but be consisten!). All that can be set up together. A student should not keep compiling python distributions. None of that will make it in the thesis.

So with the project set up, regular contact and guidance from the supervisor and reasonable focus on the thesis, it should be an “honest 9-5”.

Does not hold for professors obviously, as the annual work plan clearly abandons the idea of a 40hr workweek as the norm. But this is for phd students. Not the professors. If anyone knows how to make a professor job work in 40hr/week I am all ears.

A Social Media Fast

Several people I know occasionally remove themselves from social media for a self-imposed time. For example, not tweeting during ramadan or lent. Or simply taking a break right after realizing that the experience turned toxic.

And this toxicity seems to be a feature rather than a bug of social media. Misinterpretation of statements both too quickly written and read, is commonplace. I have certainly messed up once in a while.

So I try to only be positive, not comment while I have low bloodsugar or feeling low.
Social media is for little BBs of encouragement. Everything else is noise. And lowering the noise sometimes is good.

Inbox 0 and letting it go

Just before the start of my faculty job I implemented inbox 0. Yep. Archived everything older than *three weeks* and divided the remainder into five categories. These are called “today”, “this week”, “this month”, “someday”, and “waiting”.

The idea is to sort emails in these categories if they take less than 2 minutes to deal with. “Waiting” means I have done my part and I am waiting for a response. Go through this list occasionnally to remind someone. See the potjies project entry last week... The labels are to be taken with a healthy helping of salt. And it is critical to remember that there are two ways for emails to retire out of their categories: they are done and dealt with OR they age out. Comments on a paper from 6 months ago? Too late. Better luck next time. Deadline passed? Ok fine. That is not great and feels worse but it an integral part of it.

So deal immediately, sort, deal with in order of urgency and then -critically- let it go. Sing the song if that makes it easier.

Potjie Projects

Academia works on short, high intensity burns: hack day, proposal deadline all-nighter etc. And while it can be tremendously rewarding seeing something coming to fruition, that is rarely how it really works. The hack day project’s logistics and elements were gathered beforehand. The idea has been ruminated over for quite some time. And so I have an alternate to the afterburner-on project: the potjie project.

Potjie is a way of cooking in South Africa. Start with a witch’s cast iron kettle on a tripod, add veggies & meat, stew over a small coal file, and cook for ages.
And meanwhile, drink wine. The trick to a good Potjie is to keep a slow-buring coal fire going. So check in occasionally and lump a coal on.

That is a potjie project. Low rpm, long-term, check occasionally (email) and do some edfort. It is very possible that it will end with a Sprint but not how it is set up.

First day back

First day back at the office. The wxpected chaos of sorting paperwork/passwords/homework/syllabi/student projects etc etc.

The kids had another snow day. Envious.

But Postdoc and me managed to get some productive work done. Contributed slightly to a paper. And student back on the rails. The paperwork hydra is one head down. And it looks like we are heading for Hawaii in March for observing. Kewl. I mean right before mr M’s birthday but kewl.

Tomorrow is the first day of classes. My first class of 2018.

So prioritizing and knocking down a long and very mixed list of todo items is the trickier things I need to do as a professor. And it feels like there is only just enough time to do each item. In such an environment procastination abounds (“oh not right now”) and there is little or no return for planning or working ahead. Except lower anxiety. That’d be great.

Off to AAS

Thisnis my first AAS in 5.5 years. That was a bit of a shocker. As a grad student I would go regularly. Winter meetings were de rigeur as that where much of the new results and job interviews were at.

So I am plunging in. As opposed to most other meetings, my goals are nebulous for this meeting. So here goes clarifying them a bit:

- meet people I have met on Twitterz in real life.
- meet with a potential graduate student
- present poster (eh)
- get a feel for US astronomy again.
- gently point out that I am back in the US now again.
- see old friends and go yay at their accomplishments
- see how Renske’s press release is going to go Wednesday. Cheer on.
- collect as much stickers etc as anyone will let me for outreach purposes. Great for school visits.
- look at STArtorialist’s booth for presents for the three birthdays happeing soon.
- see what LUVOIR is all about.
- work out some JWST proposal ideas.

Part of the anxiety for this AAS is that this same week the sester starts here at UoL. Why you ask? Because Derby. Our entire spring semester is structured around the Derby. So this week will pretty much never be part of the winter break. And I plan to go to these winter meetings more often.

Brewing Thoughts

So while I am waiting for the water to warm up for the third (!) batch of brewing here are some thoughts on the first year of teaching, winter break and more.

First off the winter break was awesome. I did very close to nothing. Close because I did go to a JWST workshop on proposal preparation and that was awesome. Brain fizzing (or should I say brewing) with ideas right after that. So much so that I hammered together the bulk of the first proposal in the plane home.

And then rest. Glorious nothing. Lazy parenting. No email. Sleep in (thank you kids!), 41st birthday and christmas. Yay.

Day after christmas I got a baffling referee rapport. I guess some issues are to be expected when venturing from one subfield into an adjacent one. It is sort of amazing to read what some people comsider important or what they have never heard of. Time to edit and send to another journal. Eh

Sent the first STARSMOG paper round to the collaboration. Curious to hear what everyone’s thoughts are there.

And I got my monthly/weekly/today emails down to below 20 each! For the first time...eh since starting inbox 0! Last year!

So now the kids are back in school and I am nominally back at work. But not really because the heat is out in my building and it is -13C outside. So still working from home.

This semester is going to be the one of proposals. JWST! ALMA! ESO and NASA Keck time. I have some ideas for SWIFT as well! Too many really.

But I need to be careful with the amount of energy I realistically have to spend on everything. Teaching eats up a lot of mental cpu and I was so tired at the end of last semester I put down some paperwork and now I cannot find it again for the life of me. There were many indications that I had redlined myself and so I want to make sure I do less of that this coming year.

Funny enough I have only one resolution for the coming year that is work related: write every day. That should ensure some progress on grant proposals, papers and telescope time proposals without the late night stress fueled error fest.

And as far as writing goes...
This blog counts right?