Google, Konidaris

[I am on travel in California this week.]

I spent yesterday at Google, visiting Roweis, who is moving there for a year. Google is everything it is cracked up to be! I met various heroes of the open-source world (does the name "Guido van Rossum" mean anything to you?), and, perhaps surprisingly, talked science all day. There is an enormous amount of interest in astronomy at Google, and a lot of things going on at Google that are relevant to astronomers, including especially work on open-source development and distribution of large, public datasets. In particular, there may be some possible relationship for Google in the distribution of the knowledge generated and aggregated by astrometry.net.

Today I was at UCSC for the qualifying exam of Nick Konidaris. He gave a very nice presentation on the importance of the galaxies in the "gap" between red and blue, and their implications for galaxy evolution. He has outlined a plan for figuring out what they are, how they evolve, and whether they explain the growth of the red sequence with cosmic time. It is a great project.