The Dust in Nearby Galaxies Workshop in memory of Chad Engelbracht

This week I went to Tucson for the workshop on "Observations of Dust in Nearby Galaxies - a workshop in memory of Chad Engelbracht" (link).

It was organized by Joannah Hinz. She's cool. She invited me to give talk! My first invited talk on dust in galaxies, a topic I've been working on since grad school! So. very. cool. For the longest time, I was scrambling to get the finances for the trip. Then Karl Gordon ok'ed to pay for my flight using our NHEMESES Herschel program's NASA funding! Wooo! I got to go!! Flying in just after Thanksgiving and I got back in time for Sinterklaas. Joannah even let me stay with her! Told you she's cool.

The reason we had the workshop as dust in nearby galaxies was the topic Chad Engelbracht was most interested in. He worked on the Spitzer Space Telescope and produced a lot of very good work with it. Almost everyone had a funny Chad story in their talk. Often involving Quake.

So this was the guy who got Tim Pickering so hooked on that game that he installed it on the UNIX system in Groningen...

I met Chad a few times and we worked on two SINGS papers together. Like most people at the workshop already said and I will reiterate: he was a kind and competent person. I remember him being encouraging on a paper that was slowly turning into a bit of a monster. I presented the results at a conference in Rome (where I met Joannah for the first time as well) and I used the "spherical cow" example. Someone used it as well at the workshop! I immediately wanted to find that talk and specifically that slide. It's not on my laptop. too many computers ago.

He was a kind person (well except in Quake) with a sucky disease. Chad will be missed.

Chad Fest Day 0

The conference in memory of Chard Engelbracht is happening tomorrow.
Thoday is T-0. I visited Steward observatory and chatted to people during beer+pizza at the infamous 1702 restaurant. Now I finally know what Fish is on about.

Met up with Tim Pickering again. He was one of Chad's friends in grad school. In general the meeting has a bit of "boys back together" feel to it.

Meanwhile Joannah Hinz has been awesome in helping me. For example, she dropped me at El Target for my US shopping! All the while picking up people from the airport and organizing this conference. Oh and I get to stay in her guest bedroom too! Awesome.

Arxiv to bibdesk

A long time ago (in a Baltimore far far away), I met a summer student named Jonathan Sick. He is a very good Python Programmer and he made a script that allows one to add a astro-ph page or ads page to the bibdesk program. It's clever.

I never got it to work.

Then I saw another tweet by him today and gave it another go.

oh myyyyy how have I been getting along without this?
Smooth ingestion of everything I wanted to save on astroph. Much easier bibliography work.

*staples fingers* eeexcellent

Hubble Cycle-26 TAC results

Thoughts on the Hubble Space Telescope Cycle-26 results.

The results on the HST cycle-26 are out and there has been a lot of hay made of the improvement in gender balance in the results. It made me think about how the decision process in groups goes. I was reading how in times of stress (say a <3 day decision making process) people fall back on “what everyone knows” and “common knowledge”.

The argument was that people let some rote or authoritarian argument sway them if they are overwhelmed. And I think that is a decisive factor in the imbalance in previous cycles. When overwhelmed, consciously or unconsciously, go with the team you’ve heard of. Not necessarily your mates etc but people you know.

So I think it’s great that the information is now not being passed on to the TAC. Other organizations are similarly exploring double blind evaluations. ESO did an experiment with crowd sourced TAC. Interesting and much improved feedback (in my experience). Though no double blind yet.

Oh and only if funding agencies would do the same. They still ask for massive amounts of personal information. Resume, letters, publication lists etc etc. why? Why not simply focus on the science? And just that? I would be *very* interested to see if that would change the gender balance of NASA, NSF and ERC rewards.

But I also want to see what the next Hubble TAC result looks like. This cycle was...a mess. An experiment...perhaps successful...but massively oversubscribed. The experiment needs confirmation.

z~8 galaxy sizes

Got sick of struggling with SED fits of dwarfs... so I worked on z~8 galaxy sizes. I had done *much* more that I remembered. The paper is 80% done?

And it was Robin's first day at work with UNAWE! woo!

Trip to Tucson is approved and booked. Only now to have a get my talk together.

All I so far is Scrat images... those will come in handy.

Clearing the hopper. Co-authors! C'mon. Going for a personal best

latest draft of a small paper on the link between morphology and normalized specific angular momentum with Danail. Email with Australia. so. 24hr cycle.

Trying to figure out what is going on with my SED fits of Brown Dwarfs in CANDELS.

Proofs of second-ever Supernova paper are in. Third supernova paper needs to go back to MNRAS.
(waiting for co-author).

Trip to Tucson is coming down to the wire. hope someone will book me a flight (likely to be through Novisibirsk at this rate...) soon...
I would like to give my first ever invited talk.

Preparing talk. So far I have a lot of images of Scrat.

How I thought of the Philae lander. Yeah that tweet got more retweets than *everything I've done before*. Go scrat...

IAU invite

Sooo. I got an invitation to speak at the IAU in Hawaii next year.
This is nice. I hear Hawaii is a nice place. All is good.

End of announcement. Back to paper writing.