I'm going on sabbatical starting tomorrow to Oxford in the Autumn and then UC Berkeley in the Spring. For more details see my home page. I'm psyched!

So I finally got around to creating a new web page since the last one looked liked something out of the late 1990s (which makes sense given when it was initially created). After being told by NRAO that I needed to keep a fully static page, I asked several people what they recommended, and decided to use Pelican which is a Python-powered static site generator. There are lots of themes available (many of them related to or using parts of Bootstrap), and the whole thing can be easily modified and put together with simple files, scripts, and some config files. Pretty slick and really easy to modify -- and I learned a bunch as well!

Courtesy Bill Saxton/NRAO

The paper on the MSP triple system J0337+1715 is finally out! It is a bright millisecond pulsar in a 1.6-day orbit with a hot white dwarf star, both of which are being orbited every 327 days by a much cooler and more massive white dwarf. It should end up being the best-yet test of the Strong Equivalence Principle (and therefore a qualitatively new test of general relativity). There is an arXiv version if you prefer and here is some press release stuff.

Based on some questions I had in talks recently about how we dedisperse pulsar data and why it is harder to detect fast pulsars rather than slow ones, I made these movies: a slow strong pulsar (and .avi), the same slow pulsar but much fainter (and .avi) (as per a real search), and a weak MSP (and .avi). Note how much narrower the significance peak (i.e. reduced-chi2) is as a function of Dispersion Measure for the MSP! Here is the python script that made the movies if you are curious.

NBC's Rock Center (may it RIP) sent me to Chile to check out ALMA with them. It really is pretty cool....