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Tuesday, March 08, 2005

string lens - final word

So, some discussion about CSL-1, the potential cosmic string lens discussed below.

There are hints of emission lines in the low res spectra in the paper, but impossible to tell from the published data. Chandra observations are still of potential interest. HST ACS imaging would also be useful, nail the photometry and see whether the isophotes are really undistorted or just smoothed by the low signal and resolution.

But, here's the naughty bit - the paper does not give the location of the object! The survey field is RA 12h DEC -12 or so, but it is 1/2 sq deg, and the finding chart is useless unless you have a comparably deep field. The object is hidden (and not id'd in the catalog paper for the field, and is not in the followup paper on candidate other lenses, as far as I could tell). So, no one else can follow this up.

This is not science, and the referee should never have let the paper through in this state. If they were not ready to publish a refereed paper, then they should not have published.


Non-science:

couple of years ago I was involved in a NASA press conference. Did well, made the cover of the Washington Post (which is what HQ cares about), and then the usual, NYT, PBS, ABC, BBC etc etc

What surprised me is what was ranked 2nd most important - we made the Daily Show with Jon Stewart - link is to google cache, ComedyCentral uses dynamic pages which expire!

Well, that wasn't very good here is a better copy, provided as a "fair use" archival copy

This was back in the good old days when they actually did fake news and made jokes about them, "stolen from the headlines" as it were, funny too. (My second time on the Daily Show, I'm in a short video clip they showed the year before, laughing at an inappropriate moment...). Nowadays they're all serious, with policy analysis and actual news items of major international and national import. Still, someone has to be, and it is not like any other show on television (except maybe Olberman) is actually doing news coverage.

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