I barely put pen to paper—and when I did it was on merging galaxies—but a lot happened today. At group meeting, Zolotov spoke about her project to measure the properties of dark-matter halos using stellar tracers, either stellar tracers of the potential or of the configuration. Wu spoke about her project to look at the star-formation histories of galaxies as a function of their group environment. Both of these projects have a lot of different places to go.
The Computer Science Colloquium was by Ronen Basri (Weizmann), speaking about fast lookup of nearest neighbors in databases, but where the data objects are linear subspaces and the queries are points. His talk included some great example problems, but also some beautiful linear algebra. I spent some time after the talk thinking about the linear subspace issue; it is a great one. I don't think it has anything to do with Astrometry.net. After the talk I spoke with NYU CS's Yann LeCun and new faculty member Rob Fergus, both of whom have interests that partially overlap mine.
The Astro Seminar was by Bob Rutledge (McGill) and on the physical properties of neutron stars. By improving the modeling of their emission, he has greatly improved measurements of the mass–radius relation and can plausibly rule out some reasonable equations of state. If Constellation X never flies, Rutledge may have the last word on the subject!
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