Correspondence with Bohden Paczynski

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

The following is an excerpt from an e-mail I received today from Bohden 
Paczynski.

>The discovery paper aboit new W UMa type star is very nice: beautiful
>light curve. I do not think the discovery data alone are very useful.
>There is no system anywhere that would allow anybody to conveniently
>combine incomplete data from variouis sources. There is even no
>system that allows a convenient access to public domain data (hundreds
>of data points for quarter of a million variable stars). People are working
>on such a system, but it is not here yet. It is my expectation that the
>intellectual market for varaibility data will come when data will be
>easy to access with some tools to analyze it. Again, people are working
>on this problem, but it is my guess we are at least a year, more likely
>two years from this goal.

Congratulations Michael, Doug, and Aaron on the appreciative comment from a 
world renowned expert.  In case any of you do not recognize Bohden, he is a 
Professor at Princeton.  He is known for taking the right side of the gamma 
ray burst controversy, and for suggesting that gravitational lensing could 
be used to search for dark matter in the universe.  Many other 
accomplishments.  You can find his paper on why we are doing this on the 
web site.

Well, I see I got my hit for Figure 1.  I could hardly get slammed by a 
bigger name.  Still he has received my comments.  I will argue with God 
when he/she does not like Figure 1.  We shall see who wins out in the end.

Tom Droege