At long last

Diary!

I told you!  Working late on Tuesdays somehow fixes whatever breakthrough made you happy while working late on Fridays!  Today was just such a day:  a Tuesday!

I FIT MILES' DATA!

I stayed late and started to redo some calculations that I'd done earlier since I'd run into a brick wall. The work-around paper that Kieron gave me was going to take a bit to digest, so why not double check some things first?  I went back, took Miles' data, and fit it.  I got his numbers spot on!  It's more amazing that Miles did this all by hand and was as accurate as a computer!

This is such a relief.  I had resorted to methods (even being non-sensical in front of Kieron!) to solve this problem that I would even agree were completely stupid.  It's the sort of crazy that makes you wonder if you're actually sitting in a padded room somewhere babbling incoherently; a feeling I frequently have while doing physics!

But, the battle isn't over.  I'll probably still do Kieron's suggested calculation, and  I suspect that these numbers only work in the low density limit.  The points we trained on were only quasi-uniform in the low density limit and we haven't really tested the fit on anything higher, but I have a sneaking suspicion that our numbers work best on only low densities.  I'd be happy to be wrong, though, since it means I don't have to rerun all the plots Lucas and Miles made!

One could ask why I couldn't get the numbers earlier.  I told Kieron that I was out of all my Luke-scuses at the end of last quarter, but I seem to remember that Lucas and I decided to put Miles' training sets into ours.  I also think we were weighting the data sets which would take us farther from the numbers.  Keep in mind, Diary, if I would have confirmed Miles' numbers at the beginning, we would not have serendipitously found the right answer in all the wrong ways.  If I'm wrong-wrong and have wasted all our time...well, then we're double sure!

I suppose I should look forward to some ribbing for dragging this out so.  Really, this has taken me too much time to see if Miles' numbers could be found from my fancy pants program.  Ok, sure, there was a fellowship, a test, a vacation, and lots of administrative things in the way, but I'd like to move this along.  I might even have something for the March Meeting!