Thompson, knowledge, star catalogs

Todd Thompson (Princeton) gave a great, thought-provoking talk (with lots of lively audience participation) on the possibility that all star-formation (especially in starburst galaxies) is limited by radiation pressure acting on the dust mixed in with the cold gas. Interestingly, the hypothesis is hard to rule out directly, and gets a lot of the order-of-magnitude calculations for galaxies right.

Quintero and I virtually decided that his paper is about the information that galaxies know about their nearest cluster; we adjusted some of the wording to get this accross.

After a conversation with Sam about the memory limitations on his side of the astrometry project, I re-wrote the USNO subsampler to rank its output such that the user (Sam and Dustin and Keir) can simply truncate the catalog I give them and they will still get a uniform, all-sky catalog. This was not hard, of course. I am re-building the catalogs (yet again).