Dissapointment

Debugging a large program under a deadline is not very fun.  As most people who program know, the debugging process is like a random walk. Once you fix one thing you find out that something else is broken.  This process is compounded when you are writing a program to try to measure a never before measured signal.  Then you don't know if you are not seeing the signal because it is really not there or if it is just an error in you code.  To combat this I created a simple mock filament/cluster dataset, to test the code on a problem I know the answer to.  Result:

This is the correct answer. The filament signal is the red stripe down the middle. Now compare this with the result from running my program on real data:

One of these things are not like the other! Clearly something has gone wrong in the analysis of the real data and clearly the problem is rooted in some aspect of the real data that I did not model in my simple analysis. The two primary suspects: masked regions in the survey, and full p(z).

I am afraid that I will not have results for the NSF deadline. I am generally an over optimistic person. I have come to terms with this, but it is still disappointing when I don't meet my expectations.