sqrt(1/2), integers, floats

That may be Python 101, but np.sqrt(1/2) = 0, whereas np.sqrt(0.5) = 0.707...(). I thought integers are automatically cast to floats in such operations.
Except they aren't -- that's what the mysterious line from __future__ import division is supposed to remedy! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4841732/python-convert-fraction-to-decimal

Fitting a model to data: lit review

Yesterday I showed some preliminary TF results at our group meeting, and it was rightly noted that the straight line fit I made was wrong. I've only included errors in one variable (velocity, obtained by using bootstrapping) in the fit, and made a mess of that by mixing the variables on the plot.
I've been thinking about how to do a proper fit when the data has uncertainties in both directions, and been revisiting this paper by Hogg et al.:
In the astrophysics literature (see, for example, the Tully Fisher literature, there is a tradition, when there are uncertainties in both directions, of fi tting the "forward" and "reverse" relations, that is, fi tting y as a function of x and then x as a function of y, and then splitting the diff erence between the two slopes so obtained, or treating the di fference between the slopes as a systematic uncertainty. This is unjusti ed.

Handy grep options: show filename

grep -H or grep -l for filenames only (no matching lines shown).