Stefano Meschiari's personal website.
This month, I pushed a big update to latex2exp , bumping it to version 0.9. latex2exp is the R package for rendering LaTeX-formatted text in any plotting context. This package lets the user add formatted text (e.g. bold, italic, underline, different font sizes…), mathematical symbols, and equations to plots. Although this capability exists in base R, latex2exp makes it more accessible by exposing…
It’s very rare for both the underlying generative processes that produce the raw data, and the systems we use to measure, transform, and store that raw data, to be static and unchanging. More commonly, they evolve: distributions shift, relationships and constraints between the different dimensions of the data drift and break, data stops being available, and assumptions about the semantics of…
[ This short article I wrote has been published on The Conversation UK. ] Is our little corner of the galaxy a special place? As of this date, we’ve discovered more than 1,500 exoplanets : planets orbiting stars other than our sun. Thousands more will be added to the list in the coming years as we confirm planetary candidates by alternative, independent methods. In the hunt for other planets,…
I added a bunch of new keywords to AstroTRENDS , mostly suggested by friends and people in the community who had read my Facebook post. A thought I had yesterday is the following: has the astronomical literature become more speculative, and perhaps less committed to audacious claims, in recent times? It is difficult to test this hypothesis by merely querying ADS for abstract keywords. It would…
When Giants Collide — WGC for short — is one of the “fun” projects I am working on. Once finished, it will be a small in-browser simulator where you can collide giant planets together (with some degree of realism). You can see my progress on my GitHub repo and the series of blog posts under this category. In this little demo app, you can run an N-body simulation in your browser where you make two…
[ Updated on March 2021 with new devices! ] In one of my last posts ( An interactive Barnes-Hut tree ) I talked briefly about one of the “fun” projects I’m working on, When Giants Collide (work in progress, GitHub repo ), and promised myself to blog about its development as I went along. I just finished refining the algorithm for building the tree and calculating the gravitational force. The small…
I’ve recently started experimenting with a new visualization that I think will turn out pretty darn cool. Its draft name is When Giants Collide. When Giants Collide will address a common request from planetary crashers: “ Can I see what happens when two giant planets collide” ? When Giants Collide will be a super-simple JavaScript app (so it will run in your browser) that will simulate the…
[ This short article I wrote has been published on The Conversation UK. ] The following is a short article about the Automated Planet Finder , Systemic and Super Planet Crash . We recently announced the first batch of exoplanets that were discovered in the first few months of science operation of APF. The first two systems ( HD141399 and Gliese 687 ) have been submitted and will be available on…
[ This short article I wrote has been published on The Conversation UK and Ars Technica . ] The giant planet Kepler-34b orbits round two stars. Now that’s just greedy. David A. Aguilar Planetary science is beginning to catch up with science fiction. Since the launch of the Kepler space telescope in 2009, a deluge of planets outside of our solar system has been found, with many oddball, exotic…