It was a great day at Flatiron today! Megan Bedell (Flatiron) finished her paper on wobble. This paper is both about a method for building a data-driven model for high-resolution spectral observations of stars (for the purposes of making extremely precise radial-velocity measurements), and about an open-source code that implements the model. One of the things we did today before submission is discuss the distinction between a software paper and a methods paper, and then we audited the text to make sure that we are making good software/method distinctions.
Another thing that came up in our finishing-up work was the idea of an approximation: As I like to say, once you have specified your assumptions or approximations with sufficient precision, there is only one method to implement. That is, there isn't an optimal method! There is only the method, conditioned on assumptions. But now the question is: What is the epistemological status of the assumptions? I think the assumptions are just choices we make in order to specify the method! That is, when we treat the noise as Gaussian, it is not a claim that the noise is truly Gaussian! It is a claim that we can treat it as Gaussian and still get good and useful results. Once again, my pragmatism. We audited a bit for this kind of language too.
We submitted the paper to the AAS Journals and to arXiv. Look for it on Thursday night (US time) or Friday morning!
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