human classification

Schiminovich came down and we classified by hand the eclipses Lang and I put together yesterday. Most of them are not eclipses, but there is a good sample that are. We have enough for a publication, for sure, but we have to make some decisions about scope and follow-up and testing and discussion. At the end of the day, Finkbeiner (Harvard) came and gave our colloquium, on the WMAP and Fermi haze results. He now thinks that these are not likely to be created by dark-matter effects, on morphological grounds. Just as I was leaving the building, Foreman-Mackey told me that he has implemented Hou's affine-invariant ensemble sampling method in pure Python, which has some chance of making us infinitely powerful. Indeed, he says it has sped up some of his code by enormous factors (as it does for Hou too). For me, one of the things I like most about all this is that the ensemble sampler has almost no tunable parameters; that is, very few choices. I am against choice.