The astronomical axis of evil?

A quick post about a press release published by Royal Astronomical Society about Eduardo Rozo's presentation, Cluster Cosmology with Multi-Wavelength Observations, at Scaling Relations of Galaxy Clusters meeting.
Following Rozo, it seems that Universe try to hide some of his properties: indeed results about weight of galaxies clusters appear to depend on measurement technique. In order to verify the assertion, I find reserach's page at KICP and here the links to yout last preprints (published in 2011). Here the abstract:
Extrinsic Sources of Scatter in the Richness-Mass Relation of Galaxy Clusters with Eli Rykoff, Benjamin Koester, Brian Nord, Hao-Yi Wu, August Evrard, Risa Wechsler

Maximizing the utility of upcoming photometric cluster surveys requires a thorough understanding of the richness-mass relation of galaxy clusters. We use Monte Carlo simulations to study the impact of various sources of observational scatter on this relation. Cluster ellipticity, photometric errors, photometric redshift errors, and cluster-to-cluster variations in the properties of red-sequence galaxies contribute negligible noise. Miscentering, however, can be important, and likely contributes to the scatter in the richness-mass relation of galaxy maxBCG clusters at the low mass end, where centering is more difficult. We also investigate the impact of projection effects under several empirically motivated assumptions about cluster environments. Using SDSS data and the maxBCG cluster catalog, we demonstrate that variations in cluster environments can rarely ($\approx$ 1% - 5% of the time) result in significant richness boosts. Due to the steepness of the mass/richness function, the corresponding fraction of optically selected clusters that suffer from these projection effects is $\approx$ 5% - 15%. We expect these numbers to be generic in magnitude, but a precise determination requires detailed, survey-specific modeling.

Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and the Mass-to-Number Ratio of Galaxy Clusters with Jeremy L. Tinker, Erin S. Sheldon, Risa H. Wechsler, Matthew R. Becker, Ying Zu, David H. Weinberg, Idit Zehavi, Michael Blanton, Michael Busha, Benjamin P. Koester

Matching pennies in Turing's brithday

Today is Alan Turing's birthday. Turing was the mathematician who breaked Enigma code during the Second World War and he posed the basis for modern computers. In a rare coincidence I play today matching pennies, a game of simulation of a launch of a penny against computer. Indeed player must choice head or tail and confrount his choice with computer. In the first page there is the following suggestion:

The best strategy to win the game is to be as random ad possible.

When you conclude all three levels, you can read the project details. We can read:

It is common knowledge that human subjects have difficulty in generating random sequences. This hypothesis has been studied in detail for some time by psychologists and mathematicians. This project takes that theory further by studying it from a game theoretical point of view and supposes that humans are less able to randomise under increasing pressure than under normal circumstances.
Matching pennies is an ideal game for this study because there is no pure strategy in the game that gives one player an advantage over the other.
(...)

I play the game. In the first level I'm losing when I'm trying to apply the suggested strategy, but I win (also the two next levels) when I apply the following simple strategy: change my choice when computer wins!
I don't know if my strategy is casual or it is the best to simulate a casual strategy, but this is the results. And you?

Thanks to Marco Gaudenzi for sharing the game.

Video abstract: a critical point in the phase diagram of the Bose gas

I propose you the video abstract of Existence of a critical point in the phase diagram of the ideal relativistic neutral Bose gas by Jeong-Hyuck Park and Sang-Woo Kim:

Submit your lunar eclipse

Dear readers, if you want to submit your shots about the lunar eclipse, you can use the following form (probably you must join on tumblr, I don't remember the options of the submission...).
And now I propose you two learning object about eclipse.
First of all an aplett from the Guardian:

Video abstract: ATLAS and the search of dijets

You can read abstract and download the paper on New Journal of Physics vol.13.