I had a nice meeting (in person, gasp!) with Alberto Bolatto (Maryland) about his beautiful results in the EDGE-CALIFA survey of galaxies, and (yes) patches of galaxies. Because they have an IFU, they can look at relationships between gas, dust, composition, temperature, star-formation rate, mean stellar age, and so on, both within and across galaxies. He asked me about some difficult situations in undertanding empirical correlations in a high dimensional space, and (even harder) how to derive causal conclusions. As my loyal reader might guess, I wasn't much help! I handed him a copy of Regression and Other Stories and told him that it's going to get harder before it gets easier! But damn what a beautiful data set.
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