making fake RV data

I spent the day hacking away in notebooks to make fake but realistic radial-velocity data, and to test that maximum-likelihood and cross-correlation are good methods for measuring the radial velocities themselves, given the data. In cross-correlation the issues are subtle: If the templates are not normalized absolutely correctly, things can go badly wrong. But I can now empirically justify my theoretical claim that cross-correlation (with suitsbly normalized templates) saturates the bounds guaranteed by maximum-likelihood estimation.

This, by the way, is not new: I, and many others, have done all this previously. My previous work here was with Megan Bedell (Flatiron), and indeed I am hacking around to resurrect some of our past results.