I had phone calls with Megan Bedell (Chicago) and Lauren Anderson (Flatiron) to discuss near-term research plans. Anderson and I discussed whether the precise MW mapping we were doing could be used to measure the length, strength, and amplitude of the Milky Way bar. It looks promising, although (by bad luck), the 2MASS sensitivity to red-clump stars falls off right around the Galactic Center (even above the plane and out of the dust). There are much better surveys for looking at the Galactic center region.
Bedell and I contrasted our plans to build a data-driven extreme-precision radial-velocity (EPRV) pipeline with our plans to write something more information-theoretic and pragmatic about how to maximize RV precision. Because our data-driven pipeline requires some strong applied math, we might postpone that to the Fall, when we are co-spatial with math expertise in New York City.
I was pleased by a visit from Joe Hennawi (UCSB) and Fred Davies (MPIA / UCSB) in which they informed me that some comments I made about sampling approximations to marginalizations changed their strategy in analyzing very high redshift quasars (think z>7) for IGM damping wing (and hence reionization). We discussed details of how you can use a set of prior-drawn simulations to do a nuisance-parameter marginalization (in this case, over the phases of the simulation).
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