Bloggings

A quick overview of two of the main biases seen in astronomical surveys Eddington Bias is introduced by measurement error. If you measure a collection of different sources that all have the same intrinsic luminosity, your observations will show a scatter introduced by the measurement errors. This isn’t too much...

Here’s something that has been bugging me for a while - embedding video in Jupyter Notebooks. A quick Google search brings up a load of deprecated modules from the pre-Jupyter IPython days, but it turns out this is the way to do it. Make sure you get the full iframe...

This review is also available on Goodreads. Before ‘The Terminal Beach’ I hadn’t read any Ballard before, but I’m aware of his other work (Empire of the Sun, the Crystal World, the recently cinematised High-Rise) and the reputation he’s built on them. I’ve spoken before on this blog about the...

If you’re storing large amounts of data that you need to quick access to, your standard text file isn’t going to cut it. The kinds of cosmological simulations that I run generate huge amounts of data, and to analyse them I need to be able access the exact data that...

The early universe was a pretty uninteresting place, an expanse of neutral hydrogen with a few marginally heavier elements scattered around. It wasn’t until overdense regions of gas started to collapse and condense that stars and galaxies formed. But this collapse only occurs under the right conditions; the gravitational collapse...

I’ve had my eye out for an online Latex editor since first starting to learn the markup language back in my undergraduate. Latex is tricky to serve through the browser since compiling it can actually be quite computationally expensive, and supporting the array of packages must be a bit of...

Me and Annie recently went to a photography exhibition, Strange and Familiar at the Barbican showcasing the work of international photographers on the theme of Britain. The idea was to show how they capture British life from outside its social confines, from the bowler hats and conservatism of the 1930s,...

I found this neat visualisation on the Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics Portal. It’s difficult to discern the topology of our local cosmic environment through 2D plots alone, but without context 3D visualisations can be just as confusing and unwieldy. The authors of this video do a really great job in revealing...