Some useful links

Weak gravitational lensing

Here are some links that give background about my main research area, weak gravitational lensing

• Overview: a nice overview of gravitational lensing, and loads of links at the bottom
• Technical summary: Weak Gravitational Lensing, M. Bartelmann and P. Schneider, Phys. Rept. 340 (2001) 291-472

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)

Some pages related to the SDSS...

• Official website
• DR6 skyserver (to get data or learn about data projects)
• Some nifty images
• SDSS Spectroscopy home page
• SDSS Imaging home page
• NYU Value-Added Galaxy Catalog (VAGC)
• SDSS Project Book
• SDSSPix (a useful software package that pixelizes the SDSS survey area; good for computing correlation functions)

Literature references

Where to look for journal articles...

• ADS
• arXiv.org

Some useful programs or programming-language related references

• The integrator
• CPAN (comprehensive perl archive network), lots of perl resources
• C language reference, including common functions in the usual .h files and all sorts of other useful things
• CTAN (comprehensive TeX archive network), lots of TeX/LaTeX-related resources
• Supermongo (useful plotting program)
• IDL tutorial
• IDL tools (for dealing with SDSS data)
• IDL tools (more general than the above, e.g. routines to match lists of galaxies, compute various cosmological quantities)
• GALAXEV (library of evolutionary stellar population synthesis models plus code that allows computation of observational spectra, colors in commonly-used filters, k+e-corrections, etc. using models from Bruzual and Charlot, 2003)
• Mangle (code to deal with angular masks of realistic surveys, useful for computing random catalogs, from Hamilton and Tegmark, 2003
• Mathworld (general mathematics resource)
• SDSSPix (pixelization scheme similar to Healpix for the CMB that uses the SDSS scan strategy to do the pixelization, with routines in C, IDL, and fortran)
• Probability distribution compendium: go to this site to download an absurdly useful file with roughly 60 probability distributions shown in fully parametrized form, with expressions for means, medians, modes, standard deviations, plots, CDF, quartiles, formulas to generate random deviates, and generally useful notes about the distribution
• Confidence intervals: this site contains a calculator that derives confidence limits from the binomial and poisson distributions at whatever level the user selects

Random fun things

• Optical illusions
• Some more optical illusions
• Parodies: geeky but amusing song parodies by someone with too much time on his hands (?)
  

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