The AstroStat Slog

My friend’s blog led me to Terrence Tao’s blog. A mathematician writes topics of applied mathematics and others. A glance tells me that all postings are well written. Especially, compressed sensing and single pixel cameras drags my attention more because the topic stimulates thoughts of astronomers in virtual observatory^[1] and image processing^[2] (it is not an exaggeration that observational astronomy starts with taking pictures in a broad sense) and statisticians in multidimensional applications, not to mention engineers in signal and image processing. Continue reading ‘compressed sensing and a blog’ »

1. see the slog posting “Virtual Observatory”[↩]
2. see the slog posting “The power of wavedetect”[↩]

As Alanna pointed out, astronomers and statisticians mean different things when they say “model”. To complicate matters, we have also started to use another term called “data model”. Continue reading ‘model vs model’ »

Google Sky is good for a quick look “what’s that you just saw over there?”, but not for anything more than that. Not yet anyway. Mind you, I think it is a good thing. It is easy to use, and definitely worth a look as an astronomy popularization tool. But there are a number of astro visualization programs that can (so to speak) beat the pants off Google Sky with one hand tied behind the back. Check these out (all open source): Continue reading ‘Beyond Google Sky’ »