It was Fisher-information time today with Bedell (Flatiron), where we looked at whether or not spectro-perfectionism can deliver full radial-velocity precision from the 2-d spectrograph data to its 1-d extraction. The answer is unclear. There are two steps to s-p: The first is a least-square fit, which is definitely information-preserving, but the second is a smoothing back to natural resolution, which might be lossy. We are still working on it. My linear algebra is pushed to its limits.
Ruth Murray-Clay (UCSC) was in town, and we discussed exoplanets at lunch, and she gave a great talk late in the afternoon. At lunch, a highlight was discussing how we might update the expectations for exoplanet discoveries in the Gaia Mission; the papers on this are now way out of date (I think?). In her seminar, a highlight was a very simple, high-level picture of what current theory says about exoplanet formation, and some very simple ideas about critically testing this high-level model.
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