I had a great lunch today with the graduate students at Penn State. What a great group of students, many of whom are doing things that are sophisticated along directions of computation, hardware, and inference, all of which I love! After lunch I had many conversations, one highlight of which was Alex Hagen (PSU) and I ranting about "upper limits" (argh), and another of which was Runnoe (PSU) showing me very exciting results on possible black-hole–black-hole binaries. She has a set of systems where the broad line is shifted far from the narrow lines, and appears to have a relative acceleration over time. That's exactly what we were looking for with Decarli and Tsalmantza a couple of years ago!
Late in the day I gave my seminar, which was my new one about data-driven models and The Cannon. The questions were great; PSU is a place where the crowd knows all about hardware, statistics, and data analysis! A theme of the questions and answers was that we should be thinking about spectral representations that respect our beliefs about how spectra are causally generated (by absorption lines of finite line-spread function) rather than the straight wavelength-pixel domain. After the seminar, the conversation over dinner with faculty ranged around the modern research university and it's effective love—hate relationship between faculty and administrators!
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