So here's the deal. Once upon a time I was really excited by the prospect of putting things on the internet but nowadays it's a little bit less of a big deal than it used to be. Consequently, the vibe I'm going for here is “functional.” Feel free to get in touch if you need any information that's not here.
About Me
I'm a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the Astronomy Department. I'm working for Geoff Bower on projects associated with the Allen Telescope Array.
My office is Campbell 533. My work email address is pwilliams at astro dot berkeley dot edu, but that email just gets forwarded to the address at the bottom of this page. If you need my mailing address or phone number or something like that, contact me via one of those other routes and I'll send along the information you need.
Beyond this site, my web presence includes:
- A Twitter feed that is pretty frequently updated, for the time being.
- An irregularly-updated work log.
- A very rarely-updated photo log including many embarassing pics from high school.
- I'm on Facebook and friends but don't put much on those sites, for reasons only an intellectual-property nerd could care about.
Recent Work-Related Output
At the moment, there's little enough of this stuff to make it feasible to dump out manually:
- “Evaluating the Calorimeter Model with Broadband, Continuous Spectra of Starburst Galaxies Observed with the Allen Telescope Array”, 2009, ApJ accepted.
- “Old, Rich, and Eccentric: Two Jovian Planets Orbiting Evolved Metal-Rich Stars”, 2009, PASP, 121, 613.
- “Training the Next Generation of Astronomers”, 2009, Astronomy 2010 position paper #65.
- “Measurement of the Spin-Orbit Angle of Exoplanet HAT-P-1b”, 2008, ApJ, 686, 649.
- “Erratum: ‘the Transit Light Curve Project. VII. The Not-So Exoplanet HAT-P-1B’ (2007, AJ, 134, 1707)”, 2008, AJ, 136, 1753.
- “The Transit Light Curve Project. VII. The Not-So-Bloated Exoplanet HAT-P-1b”, 2007, AJ, 131, 1707.
- “Resolving the Surfaces of Extrasolar Planets With Secondary Eclipse Light Curves”, 2006, ApJ, 649, 1020.
- “Multipixel characterization of imaging CZT detectors for hard X-ray imaging and spectroscopy”, 2004, Proc SPIE, 5540, 22.
- ArXiv author search (inexhaustive)
- ADS author search (overenthusiastic)
Software
I like to code, and I'm a big user and supporter of Free Software, but these days I don't produce nearly as much fun stuff as I used to. Here are a few of the things on my plate:
- I work on a plotting library called OmegaPlot. I know that there are a million plotting libraries out there, but I hate each and every one of them so very, very much. This is because everything that I've looked at either 1) is a pain to drive programmatically or 2) produces ugly plots. Life is too short for ugly plots. Very much under development (at the “new features when I need them” schedule) and very much not perfect, but I like what it can do so far. I have a Git repository of it lying around somewhere. I should really productize this bad boy at some point.
- For work I've lately been developing a bridge between Python and the radio analysis package MIRIAD, imaginatively named miriad-python. It's pretty mature, and has a separate homepage.
- For a while I worked on a build tool called MBuild. I didn't have the time to turn it into a self-perpetuating project, but it worked pretty decently, and I think it had a kickass architecture. I continue to threaten to go back and start working on it again sometime.