The author does indeed do that via their definition of the volume equivalent sphere radius r_s.
279 karma · joined April 11, 2020
It's not clear to me whether moving this role to the lowest level of government is a good idea or not: citizenship is one of the key responsibilities of the federal government, but it probably is better facilitated via new immigrant welcoming programmes which are usually community based. However, it seems pretty clear that if that is being done then we need to provide the resources to do so properly.
Also libraries are great.
Sometimes I find it impossible to believe that @coleifer is just one person. Peewee has 2300 issues and 500 PR's none of which are open and outstanding, and almost all of which he has personally responded too in a genuinely helpful way. He pipes up on Stackoverflow for peewee questions too.
It means homepage (constructed from hejmo = home, and pago = page)
I give a lot of credit to whoever put together the Duolingo course, there's a lot of amusing innuendo with Adamo kaj Sofia and apt sentences like "Li trinkas bieron, cxar li estas malfelicxa".
There are some good arguments for keeping leap seconds, but I don't think research astronomy is really one (it might be more useful for amateurs), particularly on ~100 year timescales where you don't expect things to slip that much. I think this sentiment is shared by most of my peers, particularly those who actually have to implement data acquisition and analysis pipelines!
I pretty much moved over to a 12.9" iPad Pro + Pencil when they first came out. It replaced my "system" of doing derivations on the blank side of the leftover cover pages from the department printer. They were then "filed" into a giant pile in the corner of my desk.
Some part of the chaos of this system was deliberate - unbound sheets that you only write on one side of are great for derivations as you can lay out many of them on a desk to see what you wrote a few pages ago. Still the iPad is a vast improvement for me, even if you can't see everything at once.
Also I don't think the iPad Pro would improve things for you, it's great if you're used to the wonderful Bic Cristal, but you definitely won't get the precision of a super fine pen, though maybe the newer generation is better on that front.
Thinking about it now makes me a little sad that I've switched entirely onto an iPad instead of paper and pen.
Although it's gotten a little maligned here, I've actually switched to Readcube Papers recently, it supports everything I list above, and has been pretty good for everything else. It's a closed source and subscription which isn't ideal, but in the end I'm willing to pay for something that supports my workflow. I do worry a little about getting locked in, but ultimately, provided I'm willing to ditch any annotations, I think I can just export everything as bibtex and import to something else.
In my case I'm currently finishing up a paper where the raw data it's derived from comes to 1.5 PB. It is not impossible to share that, but it costs time and money (which academia is rarely flush with), and even if it was easy at our end, very few groups that could reproduce it have the spare capacity to ingest that. We do plan to publicly release it, but those plans have a lot of questions.
Alternatively we could try to share summary statistics (as suggested by a post above), but then we need to figure out at what level is appropriate. In our case we have a relevant summary statistic of our data that comes to about 1 TB that is now far easier to share (1 TB really isn't a problem these days, though you're not embedding it in a notebook). But a large amount of data processing was applied to produce that, and if I give you that summary I'm implicitly telling you to trust me that what we did at that stage was exactly what we said we'd done and was done correctly. Is that reproducibility?
You could also argue this the other way. What we've called "raw data" is just the first thing we're able to archive, but our acquisition system that generates it is a large pile of FPGAs and GPUs running 50k lines of custom C++. Without the input voltage streams you could never reproduce exactly what it did, so do you trust that? Then you're into the realm of is our test suite correct, and does it have good enough coverage?
I think we have a pretty good handle on one aspect of this, is our analysis internally reproducible? i.e. with access to the raw data can I reproduce everything you see in the paper? That's a mixture of systems (e.g. configs and git repo hashes being automatically embedded into output files), and culture (e.g. making sure no one things it's a good idea to insert some derived data into our analysis pipeline that doesn't have that description embedded; data naming and versioning).
But the external reproducibility question is still challenging, and I think it's better to think about it as being more of a spectrum with some optimal point balancing practicality and how much an external person could reasonably reproduce. Probably with some weighting for how likely is it that someone will actually want to attempt a reproduction from that level. This seems like the question that could do with useful debate in the field.
The GPU boom is causing big issues. Future projects are targeted at where we think GPUs will be in a few years, but you can never predict the crypto induced demand, and at the moment the price and availability is causing issues.
We already do make a quick full sky image, but unfortunately it’s not public. It’s actually a way easier problem than it is for MWA. Our antennas are on a regular grid, so it’s just a dense 1D FFT in each direction and we’re done. As the CHIME FoV is so narrow we tend to actually show just one column along the meridian against time, and that produces a lovely quick map of the sky.
The FRB boom has definitely helped the funding for everyone, and it’s been very successful for CHIME. Next stop, real time localization!
Anyway, it's a cool website, nice work!
I use it frequently (via https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/) to help plan backcountry trips around here, as it's great for seeing the local snow conditions.
However, lots of interesting plasma physics effect occur between us and the FRB. The dominant thing that happens is that low frequencies arrive later than high frequencies (as they travel slow in a plasma). This causes the FRB to be smeared over many seconds rather than a millisecond. There's also multi path interference effects and an whole bunch of other stuff that happens. So actual the temporal structure of the burst tells you much more about the intervening medium than it does about the source.
This paper was submitted to Nature as it would be fairly high profile, and Nature does now allow you to put in on the arXiv at submission, which was done in January. Since then it has been going through peer review, and being queued up to get published in the journal which finally happened on June 17th. However, during that whole time there is a press embargo. So although you may have seen it back in January, that was because a few outlets picked it up by scanning the arXiv themselves, and no one within the collaboration has been allowed to talk about it to the press, and no universities to publicise it in the intervening time. That embargo has presumably just been lifted which is why this is all coming out now.
Because of the embargo you wouldn't have seen quotes and comments from people involved in the initial coverage back in January, and even if I'd noticed it getting posted to HN back in January I would have not been allowed to comment on it like I'm doing now.
I'm not super involved on the FRB side of CHIME, so I'm not 100% clear what is public and what isn't. But you can an idea from public info around the internet. I think the last total number made public was over 700 in March this year, and the previous one 30 in October 2018 (https://aasnova.org/2020/03/13/chime-detects-even-more-repea...).
The most useful follow up has been for repeating FRBs. What happens there is that the discovery telescope tells you were it is roughly, and you know it repeats, so you can point a high resolution radio telescope (something like https://www.evlbi.org) to get a more precise location and then you can follow up with other telescopes.
One thing telescopes like CHIME are trying to do in the near future is to build their own long baseline station to give much higher resolution, such that they can get localisation on bursts which don't repeat, and do better follow up.
Also agree that it would make sense to replace the link with the actual paper, or an article about it. University press releases are mostly there to play up their own contribution.
I guess he probably didn't talk about this because of the press embargo though.
I don't think either needs to be a black hole though. What I consider the most plausible candidate for emission is probably magnetars (i.e. neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields), and there's no reason the companion would need to be a black hole either, you just need a companion that gives a 16 day orbit and that's very easy to do with another star or neutron star.