Adam Ginsburg's blog

Articles by Adam (keflavich@gmail.com)

• Using AWK to fixed-format print in VIM

  24,42!awk '{printf("\%30s\%20f\%15g\%15g\%15g\%15g\%15g\%15g\%15g\%5i\n" , $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9,$10)}'
  

  It's important that the %'s must be escaped, otherwise they print the current filename.

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• wget

  wget is very useful for acquiring data from, e.g., IRSA, the NASA Infrared Science Archive. wget -nd -r -l1 -A*g09*_b4_20.fits http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/IGA/images/ The important elements: -nd: don't reproduce the host directory structure -r: recursive. Grab the files referred to by the page, not just the page itself -l#: number of recursion levels -A: "accept" wildcard

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• Why astronomy is important

  Preface: This is not a good argument for why astronomy is important now. But it may be in the future. Earth is a limited habitat. Bacteria in a petri dish show the same growth curve as humanity: exponential growth. An exponential curve grows very quickly, but we are in a finite (non-growing) environment. If humanity is to continue its growth, we must find new worlds to inhabit. There is always a moral question of whether we should continue our growth and attempt to conquer significant portions of the galaxy, but we probably won't (and maybe shouldn't) start examining the morality of our survival until it's ensured. Consider what happens if humanity stops growing. Our current economic system is completely dependent on continued growth. The financial markets can't survive unless more wealth is constantly being generated. Interesting calculation to try: Divide the total solar energy input to Earth by the average energy consumed per person, or the minimum energy (theoretically) per person. It's probably not as large as you think when you take into account efficiency factors.

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• Why can't numpy do duplicate index assignment

  AG I want to do drizzling with numpy. It should be trivial, but it's impossible (without a for loop, afaik) instead. In [2]: a = array([1,1,2,2])In [3]: b = arange(5)In [4]: b[a] += 1In [5]: bOut[5]: array([0, 2, 3, 3, 4])In [6]: # but b should really be:In [7]: b[a] += 1In [8]: bOut[8]: array([0, 3, 4, 3, 4])

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• Why do astronomers have such a strong presence on the web?

  I'm not making this a complete post, just a few examples of blogs and websites I'm aware of. But we do have a strong presence on the web - astronomers have an unusually high google ranking etc. Is it just because 'we' were here first ('we' excludes me, I'm just jumping on the bandwagon and getting a free ride)? Examples: Pamela Gay Dr Lisa Science writers who write on astronomy: Dave Mosher

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• wrapping text around a figure in latex

  An example from Devin: %\begin{wrapfigure}{l}{0.5\textwidth} % \vspace{-27pt} % \begin{center} % \includegraphics[width=0.48\textwidth]{nsf_fig3.ps} % \end{center} % \vspace{-27pt} % \caption{\it{}} % \vspace{-12pt} %\end{wrapfigure} 1:16 \usepackage{wrapfig}

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• Characterizing Precursors to Stellar Clusters with Herschel

  [ ADS ] [ arXiv ]

  C. Battersby, J. Bally, A. Ginsburg, J.-P. Bernard, C. Brunt, G.A. Fuller, P. Martin, S. Molinari, J. Mottram, N. Peretto, L. Testi, M.A. Thompson 2011

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  The paper includes a careful characterization of the properties of both dense and diffuse regions within the two Hi-Gal Science Demonstration Phase fields (l=30 and l=59). It demonstrated that star formation tracers are more common at higher temperatures, and that IRDCs exist on both the near and far side of the galaxy, where the difference between near and far is around 5-7 kpc.

  I helped develop the iterative background subtraction method and contributed to the discussion and conclusions; most of the work was Cara's but my experience with iterative flux estimation from the BGPS pipeline proved useful.

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• The optically bright post-AGB population of the LMC

  [ADS ] [arXiv ]

  E. van Aarle, H. Van Winckel, T. Lloyd Evans, T. Ueta, P. R. Wood, and A. G. Ginsburg

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  A catalog of post-AGB stars in the LMC, useful in particular because they are at a common distance. Post-AGB stars are quite luminous (> 1000 L_O usually), so easily detected in the LMC.

  My contribution to this work was years ago; I worked on the SAGE project for a few months at the University of Denver with Toshiya Ueta. I generated a catalog of post-AGB objects and an online catalog with automatic SED plotter. It was a pretty neat project, but I left before I was able to convince others that my catalog was definitive; nonetheless it was eventually used in this publication. As an aside, that was my first foray into data languages, and I ended up using the Perl Data Language long before I learned of python and before I got a free IDL license.

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• Star-forming Region Sh 2-233IR. I. Deep Near-infrared Observations toward the Embedded Stellar Clusters

  [ ADS ] [ arXiv ]

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  My contributions to this paper were minor. Analysis of luminosity functions in the IRAS 05358+3543 region have identified different aged groups. The paper contributes to the picture of sequential (triggered?) star formation in the S233-235 region in Auriga.

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• Outflows and Massive Stars in the protocluster IRAS 05358+3543

  First Author [ ADS ] [ arXiv ]

  A mm and near-IR study of the IRAS 05358+3543 system. Recently (2011), it has become clear that "protocluster" is unlikely to be the right label for IRAS 05358+3543. "proto-association" might be more accurate. Perhaps the most interesting result of this paper is the discovery that the central source is likely to be a 400-AU binary with two massive (>8 msun) stars at different evolutionary stages. It is just barely in ALMA's range...

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