2016-06-28

optimized photometry and etc.

I finished the zeroth draft of my philosophical paper on Dawkins. I sent it to a few friendlies for comments, and some of them gave fast responses which make me think I need to do massive revision! So it goes!

I had a long chat with Dan Foreman-Mackey about current projects and ideas. We discussed the sensibility (or not) of publishing the results (with Dun Wang and Bernhard Schölkopf) on using ICA to find or perform photometry on variable stars in crowded fields. I want to publish this, because it is so simple (and maybe contains some insight) but we can't see how this generalizes or wouldn't be demolished by even a simple forward model. We discussed a generalization of The Cannon that simultaneously fits a physical model and then a data-driven model for just the residuals away from that physical model. If we could get away with a linear model for the residuals, we could explicitly marginalize out a bunch of stuff. Foreman-Mackey reported on work by Benjamin Pope (Oxford) on photometry that connects to the OWL, my unpublished (and, really, dormant-to-dead) project on optimal photometry in bad imaging. I resolved to drop Pope a line.

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