Kenneth's Picnic

This weekend I got organized with the papers.  I got my card index going, and have prints and bookmarks for numerous papers.

Besides keyword searches, I’ve also found it good to track citations from original papers.  So, taking the original Refsdal paper of ‘64, then finding recent papers citing it.  It’s a good system, though obviously it doesn’t validate the recent paper – I’ll still have to check the reliability of each one.
I’ve got a good collection together, and the beginnings of the content outline, based around my objectives.

Hours:6

Update:  Tutor has emailed to say he’ll be away the week before TMA03.  I need to catch up with him soon, and make sure I’m pretty finished by then.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7472722.stm

Cool.

I wonder:  How do you clean the windows?

Something people have asked me to do before.  I didn’t know how to do it, but I’ve found it here:

http://yahoorezinr.com/

The form has an action mailto:email@ddress.com?subject=blah blah

And the form submission data is the body text of the email.  In FireFox anyway.  IE seems to add a postdata attachment instead.  But I guess if one of the fields was called “body”, then it would be the message text.

It’s kindof ok.  But ugly in both.  Anyone know how to do this nicely?

On holiday in Mexico, I caught up with the skills requirements for OU.
I brought books on cosmolology (with maths required), and on the basics of lensing.  I think I’m happy with my skills coverage now, I can concentrate on further research and the beginning of the content outline.

Total hours for the week: 6

Jeff Veen at @media showed a nice graph, and Indi Young used it afterwards.  But I don’t have a copy of it, so I’ve recreated it below.  I think it shows really nicely the benefit of discussions early on, and the impact of a change of mind later on.

It’s great:  At the start, you can have whatever you like.  Near the end, even if you change the tiniest little thing, it has an impact.

The aim of the graph is to encourage talking and interaction at the beginning, not scare people about cost.