Stop postponing!

I did almost all I had planned for today. I finished the analysis of the good data. I am rerunning the 2 files of bad data. And my computer is crunching the numbers on the extraction of ~1000 sky spectra. I am almost done with the extraction of 50% of the sky spectra.

The nth nearest neighbor code seems to be the most postponed piece of work I have ever had. It's been on my "To Do" list for about a month. It really shouldn't be that hard to do. In fact I wrote out the algorithm and seems really easy. I just haven't been inspired to do any coding lately. IDL would probably be the easiest to write the script in. Once I get around to coding I need to do 2 more things - rewrite Ann's velocity dispersion script (very important) and finish the damn coffee page (less important).

Getting up early and hiking was great! If I had gotten some more sleep the night before it would have been even better. It was so beautiful and lush and full of butterflies! Wow! Took a picture of a petroglyph of a "sunbathing man/lizard". Hope I get some more sleep tonight. Too stressed to sleep ...

Today was the first Journal Club for the semester. It was pretty packed. Journal club is an hour long weekly meeting where two people present recent papers in 30 min each. The presentation today were vastly different but both interesting (which is not always the case). One was on a recent discovery of a planet (possibly 2) around an M star and the statistics of planets - apparently more massive stars have planets more frequently. The other was on a yet another weird cluster (exhibit #2) where the galaxies, the DM and the intracluster gas are all in different positions. Is there really dark matter or is it all just a modification of Newtonian gravity? I don't know enough about the latter to pick a stand (but nobody knows anything about the former and that doesn't stop them).

Tasks for tomorrow: Nth nearest neighbor algorithm first thing in the morning. The last 2 files with crappy data. Analyze all the sky spectra I've extracted. Analyze the 2 files of data I re-extracted today.