Mike Kesden (NYU) gave the brown-bag talk today, about black-hole–black-hole binary population synthesis in preparation for gravitational radiation detection with advanced LIGO. The principal pathway for making LIGO-relevant BH–BH binaries is an insane combination of mass transfer, supernova, common-envelope evolution, supernova, and inspiral, but hey! Kesden argued that it really is likely that advanced LIGO will see these.
In the morning I met with Oded Nov (NYU Poly) and Claudio Silva (NYU Poly) to discuss possible funding proposals related to engineering, science, and citizen science. We came up with a kick-ass idea for using smart phones and angry residents to map the audio response of the city to car alarms (really any noises, but car alarms are nice standard sirens
for calibration). The project would look a lot like the (non-existent) Open-Source Sky Survey but build a three-dimensional audio-response model of the city. Cool if we did it!
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