I’m not very happy with myself right now. Today I was going through some of my old papers and a simple source-to-background ratio equation stuck out at me. I have been forgetting to square my values for the past two analyses I’ve done, at least! It’s such an insignificant part of the whole process that I can’t remember how far back I’ve been making this stupid mistake.

I redid the GRB I was working on and from what I can see, the main consequence of my error is the underestimation of the count rate in my light curves. For that particular afterglow, it wasn’t a very significant change, but I’m going to need to redo others to ensure that my results are accurate. As I’m unsure how long I’ve been forgetting to square, I can only conclude I must redo all of them, to be on the safe side. It shouldn’t take that long, but it’s a pain non-the-less. I know what I’ll be doing next week.

I’ve also took the time to document my folder architecture and file naming schemes so I don’t have to recreate it again like I had to when I first started working on Hubble. In theory, it shouldn’t be a difficult process to move my work from Hubble to my new NSSTC computer in June.

We’ve also passed the chapter in my Astrophysics course that discusses GRBs (although the topic was skipped over in class). The textbook we are using was published in 1996. Being young and new to the field, I found it interesting to reread a summary of what the field was like ten years ago. It’s especially neat to see how the theories have changed or evolved in only a decade. I wonder what GRB scientists will believe in 2016 or beyond.