Machine Learning and Satellite Imagery

Back in the spring, I had some fun doing experimentation around machine learning models for labelling satellite imagery with atmospheric conditions and various classes of land cover/land. You can check out my work in an open source Kaggle notebook. For this I trained on the data provided in the Planet Kaggle competition, Understanding the Amazon Read More …

I wrote a book: Mastering Quantum Computing with IBM QX

I wrote a book during my pregnancy on quantum computing. Packt approached me, based on my work in quantum computer simulation and education (kickstarted in this post). They asked me to write a book proposal, which they accepted, and then we negotiated an advance. My writing goals were a chapter a week. After our baby was Read More …

Back at Caltech: Supermassive Excitement

I’m delighted to be back doing numerical relativity research at Caltech after taking a year leave to deploy to the South Pole with the South Pole Telescope collaboration. I will continue to be involved with the South Pole Telescope data analysis in parallel with my work at Caltech to simulate formation pathways for supermassive black Read More …

Kliq movie is live

I’m amazingly lucky to have only hobbies, even though I work constantly. The Kliq movie is live! I am extremely proud of the work myself, and my cofounder Michael Craig have done thus far and where we are taking it next, making it easier than ever to interact with people, friends, acquaintances, and potential new best friends, business partners, etc. at events you are already RSVPing to. Read More …

pv-astro poster, simulating the Milky Way, and supercomputer lovefest

I gave a short presentation Friday about pv-astro at the Swiss National Supercomputer Center’s User’s day. We also got to hear a few talks, including about Lucio Mayer’s recent work on a realistic simulation of a Milky Way type galaxy similar to our own. Finally we got an update about the machines at the center being upgraded in October. Some people like fast cars, motorcycles, and airplanes. Me however, I like big machines, with lots of cores and an obscene amount of RAM. Read More …

So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar….

So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar…. HHere’s a collection of interesting twitter snippets from physicists I follow on twitter about today’s neutrino webcast announcing the surprising, and frankly unbelievable, results that the OPERA collaboration observed superluminal neutrinos. I haven’t watched the webcast myself, nor read the paper beyond the abstract yet so can only comment that I believe it must be systematics. That said it would be insanely interesting to be proven otherwise. Finally, the following highlighted tweets are in reverse chronology, because, well… I’ve been here since the day after tomorrow, said the tachyon. What took you so long? Read More …

Galaxy clothing

I splurged and bought two galaxy printed items of designer clothing the other week from the lovely http://www.blackmilkclothing.com/. Some colleagues and I couldn’t help but think about possibilities of extending this further: what about layers of astronomy themed clothing each featuring the same image taken in a different wavelength? Interested seamsters and seamstresses or people with an idea how to print high resolution images on fabric, please contact me! Read More …

SSL and packet sniffing with Wireshark.

SSL stands for the secured socket layer and it is the way many websites handle encrypting your data as you communicate to them and helping you to verify that they are who you think they are, making it more difficult for others to view your traffic. As simple as using SSL is, many services don’t use it. What happens then? Well if an eavesdropper, let’s call her Eve, is somewhere on the same network as you are, for example if you are at a coffee house and she is sitting a few tables down from you, she can run any number of freely available tools (or one she wrote herself) to observe your network traffic. Sounds like a rather far fetched scenario, if you aren’t familiar with how easy it is to be Eve(il) if you so choose. Read More …