The paper still isn't done, unfortunately, but will be done soon and circulated to the EPTA list for comments. :D
I am currently fighting with C. I want it to read info from a file and make a 4D array. It refuses. The battle continues!!

My supervisor says we're publishing by... Friday!! Wohoo! We tied up some loose ends yesterday, meeting again tomorrow, and that should be it. We're trying for PRL (to dream the impossible dream...) but we'll see.
Today one of the students in the department asked me if I was on BBC's Stargazing Live (tihihi), of course I was. See this website! lol! It's odd that he only noticed about a month after the event.. 
Today I will finish the beast of a paper that is the nanograv limit paper. Today, for real. 

This is the end of crazy week. I never finished the nanograv paper... didn't re-derive the covariance matrix from the EPTA paper... but I did manage to get a working final draft of our PTA paper with Kat. At least that's something! I also did all my teaching and marking, which now turns out to be 5 hours of teaching and 1 of marking per week plus an extra 1.5hrs of prep time= 7.5hours/week. Sheesh. 
Since I have to give a pulsar timing review at next week's meeting, it means extra weekend work :( oh the life a perpetual student...

Today is day 1 of my Paper Madness Week. I need to read nanoGRAV's new limit paper and re-derive a covariance matrix from the EPTA's paper. This may well take longer than a week...
On the bright side, I submitted my travel grant application to the RAS today for the summer IPTA meeting in Sydney. Fingers crossed!

What a beautiful day! I got up early this morning and took advantage of the light to take some uncharacteristically sunny photos of Birmingham. I posted a few on my flickr account, http://www.flickr.com/photos/chiaramingarelli/. Enjoy!

The mice get snowed under with work. My supervisor is leaving for a week. While he's gone, I basically need to do a PhD student's equivalent of "painting the house". 
We had a meeting about our paper, and it turns out that there are still a lot of changes to be made :( Publication in T-1.5 weeks.
Programs looking good!

Last night's lecture was very well attended. There were about 160 people there, almost filling the Large Lecture Theatre in the Poynting building. Sources (namely Dan) say that it was all going swimmingly until I started on gravitational waves (3/4 way through) and then I lost some people.. Argh.. I guess that's something for me to work on.
I was really impressed by the young crowd there. They had really good questions, intuitive ones.. future physicist ones! That was really great.
I put the slides online in a "talks" tab, just in case anyone wanted to revisit the slides. 
All in all, it was a great experience.

It turns out lots of people I know are coming to tonight's talk on how to find gravitational waves using pulsar timing arrays :)
I'm so excited! Bring on 7.30pm!

Phew.. that took longer than I thought! My talk is done and has lots of great pictures and animations. It should be about 45 mins long, but might be shorter-- when I get nervous I speak to quickly.

The SKA video is so cool, if I do say so myself. That was the nail in the coffin of my former PhD (experimental gravity). I never looked back!


Now, back to programming to look for those tiny little space-time ripples... 

Today I divided time playing with my new camera (a Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR) which was a gift from my fiance' Dan and my dad. I had a great time taking photos of Birmingham covered in snow.  I put only a few up on my flickr account, because the rest of my day was spent preparing the IoP talk for Tuesday night.
It should be done by tomorrow... well.. it had better!