Yesterday, Sheldon and I discussed the recent press about the definition of the word planet
, under discussion at the IAU. We agreed that this press is not good press, because it implies that astronomers are scholasticists, interested more in the definitions of words than the origins of our Solar System. Not all publicity is good publicity!
On the research front, Blanton and I discussed a problem I have been thinking about a lot lately, which came up in a talk by Dan Maoz while I was at MPIA this summer: How do you figure out the distributions of properties of things, separated by type, when your type assignments are imperfect? Maoz faces this for imperfectly typed supernovae, but this comes up frequently (for example when galaxies are placed in redshift bins using noisy photometric redshifts). Unfortunately, the correct methodology is not written down anywhere convenient to the typical astronomer.
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