refereeing

By my own rules (see sidebar), I can't count what I did for most of the day—refereeing a paper for The Astrophysical Journal—as research, but I can count giving extremely detailed comments to Quintero on his nice paper on how the distribution of galaxy properties depends on the distance the galaxies are from the centers of rich clusters. He finds some great results, but (like me), no direct evidence that there is anything exciting happening in the infall regions. I think his most interesting result (though perhaps the hardest to get across) is that he confirms, very clearly, the information theory result from Blanton et al (2005) that morphology-like properties of galaxies are only related to environmental density through their relationships to star-formation-history-like (SFH) properties. The morphology–density relation is actually just a morphology–SFH relation painted onto a more fundamental SFH–environment relation.