Cosmic Coherence

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  • Are rich people kinder?

    In the movie Parasite, the poor family going through a tough time is sitting together talking about the rich family they just interacted with: Ki-taek: She’s so naive and nice. She’s rich but she’s still nice.Chung-sook: Not “Rich but still nice.” Nice because she’s rich, you know? Hell, if I had all this money, I’d…

  • Replace “using AI” with “using computers”

    When cloud computing was a new, cool buzzword thrown around that no one understood, a shortcut was suggested whether it is the right solution: In any sentence, replace “in the cloud” with “on another person’s computer”. “Computing on the cloud” becomes “computing on another person’s computer”.“I backup my data to the cloud” becomes “backup to…

  • The hero of your story

    If you try confronting wrong behaviour, you are in trouble. When people hear they did something wrong, their mind first goes into the question of whether they are a malicious actor, then immediately rejects that idea as unfathomable, then rejects anything else you say as coming from a unreliable source. Understanding and working with the…

  • Publication time in astronomy vs statistics

    After submitting a paper to an astronomy journal like MNRAS, ApJ, A&A, PASP it is quite typical to receive a referee report within 1-2 months. A search of my emails confirms this – green, orange, blue histograms are astronomy journals: For statistics journals, the waiting times can be much longer in my experience. For Statistics…

  • The top and bottom halves of data analysis in astrophysics

    There are two approaches to analysing data, which I will call the bottom and top half. Bottom half Look at images and data by eye. Discover anomalies and outliers. Argue primarily qualitatively. Potentially preprocess the anomaly-finding with machine learning. It’s a good approach for junior scientists to start looking at data (a) and understand its…

  • Reliability

    Three decades ago, the word was “four nines”. Internet providers and company server administrators would take pride to deliver a service that was working 99.99% (four nines) or 99.999% of the time,. In German and Swiss culture, reliability is highly valued and this has been a differentiating factor, for example for automobiles and watches. Chains…

  • The meaning of life

    Creating something is a form of expression. You put a piece of yourself into it. Effort, time, but also a piece of your craftmanship and thinking about how something should ideally be. For many artists, the act of creating their art is so important that giving it up would give up an essential part of…

  • Garching

    Today, we walked 100 meters from home to the park, set up a inflatable couch, leaned back and watched the Perseid meteor shower 🌠 . It was beautiful. Garching is one of the very few places on Earth where you can see the night sky clearly, and work as an astronomer. Garching is a small…

  • An open door policy

    The saying goes that those who keep their office door open have a better career. I do not have hard evidence supporting this, but I know that some people shut themselves off in their offices and have then not had a lot of exposure or opportunities. Chance encounters are quite powerful. “Just a quick question…

  • Eye contact in academia

    Eye contact is important when giving a talk. If you find it unpleasant to look people in the eye, you can look just above the audience and will achieve the same effect of the audience feeling seen, and you not just bumbling to the screen. Eye contact can be unpleasant to give but also to…