obituaries done, merger rates measured

I finished my two obituaries for Sam Roweis, one for our high school and one for the American Astronomical Society. You can read the submitted version of the AAS obituary here (PDF). I also spent some time writing in my much longer reminiscence, which I am hoping will be a document that captures what I learned from Roweis in a professional and personal way.

I also spent a long time talking to Tao Jiang, the student who is following up Masjedi's work on merger rates, but now in the full SDSS Main Sample, and thinking about what to do with SDSS-III. I am pretty excited about our results which have very high signal-to-noise.