Random Thoughts generated on Day 1

A strong advantage of baryon oscillations is its geometric nature. 
If we want to consider both "unfiducial" dark energy and cosmology, 
we might want to calculate parameter constraints allowing for both 
a time variation w' and spatial nonflatness \Omega_k.  This is 
straightforward for BOsc and supernovae, but quite problematic for 
weak lensing, clusters, etc. 

If we change the matter/radiation ratio by adding a fourth neutrino, 
say, does this change the way we use \Omega_m h^2, or does it simply 
change the effective value derived but enter the same everywhere? 

Can we produce a maximum likelihood evaluation of power spectrum? 
The issues of putting error bars on a P_k plot and fitting curve to 
the data are separate. 

For 2D oscillation data, the assertion is that the power spectrum 
smearing does not impel one to seek higher galaxies number densities - why? 

Quasars at z=2 won't have high enough number density to map BOsc, and 
will never win out over galaxies. 

Here is the abstract I was mentioning from the Beyond Einstein meeting: 
Baryon Oscillations from Imaging Surveys as a Probe of Dark Energy
Derek Dolney, University of Pennsylvania, dolney@astro.upenn.edu
Additional authors: Bhuvnesh Jain, Masahiro Takada
We examine how well imaging surveys can constrain dark energy models 
through measurement of baryonic features in galaxy clustering statistics. 
The galaxy power spectrum alone allows one to constrain dark energy 
parameters, such as w_0 and w_a, if biasing is linear and scale 
independent. We find that measurement of the galaxy bispectrum allows 
one to constrain independently the galaxy bias and amplitude 
normalization. We demonstrate that by combining information from the 
power spectrum and bispectrum, one can break the degeneracy between 
the bias and normalization and obtain strong constraints.