money, pulsars, and iron

In the morning, Schiminovich and I worked on a grant proposal in an undisclosed location. Hint: They have great coffee and great burgers. Over lunch, Andrei Gruzinov (NYU) regaled us with his strong-field electrodynamics, which is a finite-dissipation version, more or less, of force-free electrodynamics. In the afternoon, Jeff Allen (NYU) successfully defended his PhD dissertation about the composition (among other things) of ultra-high energy cosmic rays; by multiple methods with different systematics he finds 60/40 iron/protons, which is maximally confusing, at least to me!