2012-02-14

everything except the task at hand

Once again, Schiminovich and I were at our undisclosed location to work on GALEX time-domain projects. Instead we had a wide-ranging conversation about upcoming projects. We discussed the GALEX photon list project, and the kinds of things we will be able to do with a trillion time-tagged photons. We discussed joint NYU-Columbia advanced astrophysics lab courses that would have the students building and operating autonomous telescope hardware on NYC roofs. That project could beautifully combine teaching and research. We discussed what Popper calls verisimilitude: Are our well established models of the physical world literally true? Uh oh, weren't we supposed to be writing a paper? We discussed dispersed integral-field spectroscopy but also spatially dispersed to drop the background levels.

In the airport (on my way to Lund, Sweden) I had conversations with Foreman-Mackey about the arXiv and Lang about jobs.

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