Melvyn Davies (Lund) upbraided me for not bringing a jacket and tie to Lund for tomorrow's PhD defense event, where I am a very important person. After he finished haranguing me about my jeans, we discussed the possibility of ever imaging or detecting directly free-floating planets. The conversation was discouraging!
I gave my seminar, and in preparing it I realized that there are a lot of simple themes connecting the crazy array of seemingly disconnected topics I work on. I was able even to classify my projects: Those that involve data-driven models (Tsalmantza quasar, Bovy quasar, and Fergus high-contrast projects); those that involve probabilistic classification or mixture models (Foreman-Mackey calibration, Lang Comet Holmes, and Koposov GD-1 projects); and those that involve moving away from catalogs and down towards rawer (pixel) data (Lang faint-motion and my own crazy large-scale structure projects). All this pleased me, because those are three ideas that can (in principle) be put into a one-hour seminar. I failed today, but it is a process, right?
By the way, one of the nicest conclusions of the Holl (Lund) thesis is that forward modeling is the best way to deal with Gaia's charge-transfer inefficiency issues. That's good for my brand
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Give a hearty "hello" to Melvin, Sofia, and all the Lund-ites for me! I thoroughly enjoyed my time as the "faculty opposition" there last spring.
ReplyDelete- Scott