Roger Blandford

I spent all day today at the meeting in honor of Roger Blandford, which I played an embarrassingly microscopic effort in organizing. The meeting was incredibly well attended, with many old friends in attendance from all over the world. There were talks across the whole electromagnetic spectrum and covering a large range of astrophysical processes, all of which I enjoyed. In particular, Maxim Lyutikov (Purdue) gave just about the perfect description of Blandford the advisor (Lyutikov and I are coeval). Chris Kochanek (OSU) described a brute-force generative modeling of microlensing light curves that made my Bayesian heart sing. I spoke about model selection in cosmology, in a general way; I put my remarks on the arXiv here.