talking

I spent an irresponsible morning talking non-stop to (at?) Iain Murray and Jo Bovy, about our various inference projects, current and future. Murray and Bovy have spent the last week figuring stuff out about our Solar System project, and are producing a much deeper (and more useful) paper; it shows that different parameterizations of phase-space distribution functions lead to different results, but (a) not very different, when stated in terms of reasonable probability intervals, and (b) you can put all possible parameterizations into the model and marginalize over them, without harming the results. What a pleasure it is that I can count hanging out all morning discussing such niceties as performing crucial functions of my job!

At lunch time, Jeff Allen (NYU) gave a status update from the Pierre Auger Observatory for ultra-high energy cosmic rays. There are now conflicting bits of evidence about their sources and composition, which is tantalizing, although the GZK cutoff did really appear is it had to.