So many things. I love Wednesdays. Here's one: I spent a lot of the day working with Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron) on our issues with The Joker. We found some simple test cases, we made a toy version that has good properties, we compared to the code. Maybe we found a sign error!? But all this is in service of a conceptual data-analysis project I want to think about much more: What can you say about signals with periodicity (or structure) on time scales far, far longer than the baseline of your observations? Think long-period companions in RV surveys or Gaia data. Or the periods of planets that transit only once in your data set. Or month-long asteroseismic modes in a giant star observed for only a week. I think it would be worth getting some results here (and I am thinking information theory) because I think there will be some interesting scalings (like lots of things might have precisions that scale better (faster I mean) than the square-root of time baseline).
In Stars & Exoplanets meeting at Flatiron, many cool things happened! But a highlight for me was a discovery (reported by Saurabh Jha of Rutgers) that the bluest type Ia supernovae are more standardizeable (is that a word?) candles than the redder ones. He asked us how to combine the information from all supernovae with maximum efficiency. I know how to do that! We opened a thread on that. I hope it pays off.
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