exoplanets are hard to find

I sent the title of this post to Utah as the title for my seminar there. Now, on the airplane I realize that I have nothing to say about this! Well, not nothing, but it is a stretch. In preparation for this talk (which is tomorrow) I worked on making these arguments: (a) Software is as important a component as hardware, and has to have contributions from extreme experts (just as, say, optics does); from now on you won't be able to write your software with part-time people (like students whose real work is something else) and in the evenings and weekends. (b) Hierarchical inference will make it possible for us to discover exoplanets that would be invisible without it.