light echos

I hung out in the office while Tom Loredo (Cornell), Brendon Brewer (Auckland), Iain Murray (Edinburgh), and Huppenkothen all argued about using dictionary-like methods to model a variable-rate Poisson process or density. Quite an assemblage of talent in the room! At lunch-time, Fed Bianco talked about light echos. It is such a beautiful subject: If the light echo is a linear response to the illumination, I have this intuition that we could (in principle) infer the full three-dimensional distribution of all the dust in the Galaxy and the time-varible illumination from all the sources. In principle!