Today a neighbor brought by her grandson, who is in middle school and was signed up for some science olympiad. For this he had to learn some ‘basic’ astronomy, such as the difference between Population I and Population II stars. That made me realize how difficult it was for me to explain many astronomical things in laymens terms. I should probably work on that before I ever try to TA or teach and especially before I ever have to persuade any governmental agency to give me funding.
On a completely different note, I had a meeting on friday which reiterated to me again how completely dependent Astrophysics is on a good treatment of statistics. Because most of us work with large data sets everything we do relies on the type and strength of statistical test we use. The thing is that stellar astronomers always seem to drag a little behind extragalalctic astronomers, who have been working with large galaxy sets for so long that none of them can get away without doing their statistics right.
I can’t think of a cool statistics link so instead a pretty picture:
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