Me the Astrotweep

Last week was the third trip in a four-week series. I was the astrotweep and a TON of other stuff happened (Lunar eclipse, the Martian came out, water on Mars etc).  So. Business as usual really.

the astrotweeping by yours truly is compiled here. Some of it is quite flow-of-consciousness. Hope everyone liked it!

see here for the full storify of the week!

Data - Bespoke&Clean or Big&Messy?

I'm reading a book Robin got me about Big Data (in Dutch!). It's very interesting and has plenty of examples in Industry and Government on both the ethical and non-ethical use of all that data. The first thing that stuck out for me was the following premise:

The old way is to get high-precision clean data, the new way is to get LOTS of data with much greater uncertainties. To me that spells out an information-theory issue (I don't know a lot about this so this may be a completely solved issue): is there as much information in a small data-set with small errors as there is in a big data-set with huge errors. I am guessing that the first question will be "how big is big and how small is small". Okay your mileage may vary.

But this brings me to the project my Bachelor students have been doing. They have been doing a very clean sample, small errorbars, nice fit project (hey Bachelor students... can't give them horrible data, that is just mean...)

But I think their project can have a follow-up as a Big Astro Data pathfinder project. Go into the archive, get ALL TEH DATAS and then model with enough slop.

this is taking up mental CPU now. I need to email people and make it their problem...

Student Return

This is the summer of student science returns. First my LEAPS student, Alejandro, submitted the results of his project to A&A. Nice to finish that paper. Two pairs of Bachelor students are also presenting their results soon. Both did excellent work and I am pretty confident we can turn their results into one or two papers. Much excitement. Another LEAPS student, Guido, published the results of the work he did with Rychard (and me a little) on high-redshift galaxies. It's an exciting result. A z~8.6 candidate galaxy! More z~8 results to come too.

It's fun having students work on your ideas. Good to see that initial work on defining the problem (harder than it looks) pays off in student returns (finished on time, enjoying the project and possibly publishable results). I really enjoy that part of academic work (now go hire me as an assist prof to do this all the time...).

The Last Deadline

sooo. ESO deadline, ERC proposal deadline, VICI proposal deadline, HST deadline (3 as PI, bunch as co-I), and last Thursday was the ALMA deadline (1 re-submission and 4 as co-I). And the paper that just took way too much mental time was finally accepted and done (no joy there just a gentle lifting of pressure inside my skull which is the same in Academia I'm told).

That was it. I'm done. And you can stick a fork in me. oof.

Final Runs on multiple papers and HST proposals

After the acceptance of the GAMA paper (yay) and now a very favorible ref rapport on my paper on the sizes of z~9 galaxies (much older version here), it is time to work on HST proposals.
I have another paper on supernovae (with Katie Mack...totally riding her fame coattails...). That needs finishing. Ref rapport was good and not unfavorable... last check involved emcee. Like so many things to these days...

Right HST proposals. April 11 deadline. I have two at the moment: a super-high-redshift one with Rychard and one based on the GAMA paper. Of course I have ideas for more. But let's get these two done first.

GAMA paper accepted.

The GAMA blended spectra paper was accepted last week (ADS and ArXiV). Woo! Onwards to a new HST proposal based on this work. It was surprisingly easy and with AUTOZ becoming an spectroscopic redshifter standard, it'll be even easier to wheedle out blended spectra out of future surveys (MUSE, 4MOST...)

cool. cool. cool. People wrote me nice emails about it too! nice!

2015b is in the bag. I've got referee rapports to reply to and SO MANY drafts to finish...ugh.

Deadlines Week

This is the week of the ESO deadline (3 proposals) and VICI pre-proposal deadline. The VICI is a giant grant and with the current trends basically being "just give the big grants to people who already had grants" attitude, I am not hopeful. Yet I have a great idea (STARSMOG) and I would not mind focusing exclusively on occulting galaxies for a few years. Let's see if anyone agrees. Wouldn't it be cool if they did.

twitter is ever more becoming a weird mix of whimsical (LEGO spaceman) and actually very useful connections with cool people around the globe.

In other news, the house is clean, lot so DIY done and hopefully I am recharged enough for this week. It's going to be a doozy.