This week's crazy paper title award goes to...
Things are very strange over on astro-ph. One of the articles on there today is titled "Local Pancake Defeats Axis of Evil". Strange. The paper, submitted as a letter to the Astrophysical Journal, describes a possible explanation for the so-called Axis of Evil effect in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This is an observed effect where the CMB seems to have some large scale structure which, theoretically, it shouldn't. This paper describes the theory that this structure can be explained by weak lensing caused by large scale structures in the local universe.
Today was the first day of the European Radio Interferometry School (ERIS) in Manchester. I'm helping out with the tutorials and I went along to the lectures this morning as well. When we started the first tutorial we discovered several basic problems with the online notes, so we seemed to spend most of our time running round the two computer rooms sorting out simple problems. Today's tutorials covered calibration and basic imaging using pipeline tools for MERLIN and the EVN. Tomorrow we are doing more on imaging techniques and how to cope with spectral line data. I had better go and read the tutorial notes so have some idea what I'm supposed to be doing!
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