The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (vice.com) 293
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, an international team of scientists published the first image of a black hole ever. It looked like a SpaghettiO, and yet the image was an incredible scientific achievement that gave humanity a glimpse of one of the universe's most destructive forces and confirmed long-held theories -- namely, that black holes exist. Storing the raw data for the image was a feat itself -- tiny portions of data spread across five petabytes stored on multiple hard drives, the equivalent of 5,000 years worth of MP3s. Katie Bouman, a computer scientist and assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, led the development of the algorithm that imaged the black hole. An image of her posing with some of the data drives went viral as observers praised her success.
The massive amounts of data were essential to creating the image of the black hole. Bouman and other scientists coordinated radio telescopes all over the Earth, each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times. The data scientists then pieced this information together and used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and generate a likely image of the black hole. The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet. Instead, the hard drives were flown to processing centers in Germany and Boston where the data was assembled. On Reddit's /r/datahoarder subreddit, a community dedicated to spreading the passion of hoarding vast amounts of data, the drives were bigger news than the scientific achievement itself.
The massive amounts of data were essential to creating the image of the black hole. Bouman and other scientists coordinated radio telescopes all over the Earth, each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times. The data scientists then pieced this information together and used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and generate a likely image of the black hole. The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet. Instead, the hard drives were flown to processing centers in Germany and Boston where the data was assembled. On Reddit's /r/datahoarder subreddit, a community dedicated to spreading the passion of hoarding vast amounts of data, the drives were bigger news than the scientific achievement itself.
Forget Gigabytes or Terabytes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Forget Gigabytes or Terabytes (Score:5, Funny)
" the equivalent of 5,000 years worth of MP3s"
Is that 128kbps or 320kbps MP3?
(facepalm)
Re:Forget Gigabytes or Terabytes (Score:5, Funny)
Let's start measuring storage space by the ton! We can have Kilotons and Megatons...
Or we can compromise and measure storage by the kibiton and mebiton.
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"mebiton" in portuguese sounds like "meu butão", which literally means "my asshole".
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"mebiton" in portuguese sounds like "meu butão", which literally means "my asshole".
Which makes it a relevant metric for black hole image data!
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Wouldn't that be Mibiton?
How many station wagons is that (Score:2)
What sort of tires did they use to get the latency down?
Re:Forget Gigabytes or Terabytes (Score:5, Funny)
5 petabytes = 1 black hole of data. We already established that 5000 standard holes will fill the Albert Hall, so now we can calculate the data storage capacity of any concert venue.
Oh... But is that 2^50 bytes or only 10^15? I'm guess black hole manufacturers prefer the decimal definition so they can screw us out of 12%.
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Correction: 10,000 holes needed to fill the Albert Hall. Had to to dig out the research from way back in the 60s.
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That's a good question... Back in the 60s the UK was Imperial, but for science metric was already in use. I read that the main source of data for the study was the Daily Mail so probably Imperial.
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Need a better unit here. What weighs more than a stone but less than a Mini Cooper? That's the kind of mass unit the average TV news viewer can understand.
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Need a better unit here. What weighs more than a stone but less than a Mini Cooper? That's the kind of mass unit the average TV news viewer can understand.
Time to resurrect the witch scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Just avoid the very small rocks
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My new PC is going to have a fuckton of storage.
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Let's start measuring storage space by the ton!
First we have to know how much the Library of Congress weighs ...
indeed... (Score:3)
Gigagram is the correct SI unit for this.
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34 years ago: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:34 years ago: (Score:5, Funny)
How many tapes do you need before the station wagon collapses into itself into a black hole?
Re:34 years ago: (Score:5, Interesting)
The Tolmanâ"Oppenheimerâ"Volkoff limit is around 2.17 solar masses, or 4.3149799e30kg.
A typical LTO tape weighs about 200g. So 2.15748995e31, or 21 nonillion 574 octillion 899 septillion 500 sextillion tapes.
With a typical size of about 102x105x21.5mm you would end up with a sphere ~6.886e19m in diameter. Apparently LTO tapes are not very dense.
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I half considered starting on that :)
Of course now that you mention it is doesn't look right to use a weight of the tape accurate to a few percent and then calculate a result with 9 significant numbers !
Concerning the practicalities of implementation, if you'd actually start piling on the tapes then the maximum radius would likely never exceed the radius of the sun since at earth size most tapes would already be compressed to a few tonnes per cubic meter apart from a very thin shell . Also I don't think th
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I'd run the experiment but I can't find enough used LTO tapes going cheap on eBay.
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just ask Google , they'll have enough to spare.
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Here's some help in calculating the max achievable radius before Things Begin To Happen.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/ [xkcd.com]
5000 TB (Score:2)
Since TB drives are common now, 5000 TB would have been easier to understand for most people.
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There is one significant digit - 5.
The rest is translating magnitude, and I think 5000TB is easier to translate for people because they're more likely to go "Oh shit, that's like 5000 of my laptops" whereas with 5PB they're going to be, "oh, another made up word".
I mean, it's 0.00004 zettabits, which incidentally is enough storage space for the DRM on the complete works of Disney since 1974.
What a ridiculous comparison (Score:2)
”the equivalent of 5,000 years worth of MP3s”
How am I supposed to get a sense of scale from that? They didn’t even provide the bit rate...
Never underestimate the bandwidth.... (Score:3)
of a C130 loaded with Flashdrives flying at 700 mph. The latency is a bitch though.
Re:Never underestimate the bandwidth.... (Score:5, Informative)
of a C130 loaded with Flashdrives flying at 700 mph. The latency is a bitch though.
If a prop-driven C-130 is traveling at 700MPH, your latency problem will be expiring very soon.
Unfortunately, it will be replaced by a much larger data loss problem...
How many library of Congresses is this (Score:2)
For those times when SSD RAID is too slow (Score:3, Interesting)
I mentioned this in a late comment on the other post, and the hardware has been mentioned on the Reddit thread - including by the person who built the modules! - but the Mark 6 drive packs used for recording this data at various large, high-bandwidth radio observatories can handle 16 Gbps sustained records. (By way of comparison, an all-SSD RAID might get you about one-quarter that speed.)
It was explained to me by a guy who runs a radio telescope as each pack more or less being a JBOD, but with controllers smart enough to write each packet of data to whatever drive was ready to handle it, while keeping a journal on some other drive of where things had been written, so that the data could be reassembled later. The word "shotgun" figured into the explanation.
Sneakernet (Score:2)
No. We used sneakernet.
Too much data? (Score:2)
"The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet.'
Subcontract the job to the adult video industry.
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Except a real picture of a black hole would be impossible and it doesn't have any dimension shape anyway, except it exists as a point in space with obscene amounts of mass. Its area of effect would be a sphere, correct, but since it's so mass filled that not even light can escape, trying to look at a black hole is pointless, because it's a point in space that bends everything to itself, even space, time and light.
Re:"a likely image of the black hole" - LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to look at star is also impossible because its surface masks everything underneath. And trying to look at a cup of coffee is also impossible because you're not really looking at the cup itself, just at the light which has reflected on it.
I can turn it upside down too: a black hole can be observed even better than a star because it doesn't have its own light so you can see the impact it has on its surroundings without interference from the central light source.
It's too much sophistry for me. You see a black hole because what it does with the things around it, and because you need a very busy place to create a big black hole you are going to see a lot of activity around it too once it's there.
Re:"a likely image of the black hole" - LOL (Score:5, Informative)
Erm...
I think you miss that this is a "real picture" of a black hole. It's black. That's the hole.
It bends space, time and light - correct. Anything past it's event horizon is lost forever, correct. But anything on the periphery isn't and arcs rounds and is fired back into space at random, almost... like a mirror. Light acts like a planet in orbit around the object, which means you can see all kinds of artifacts not caused by anything else, and can see light focused, diverted and spread from behind, in-front and the side of the object in question, producing bright halos of light - maybe from our own side of the galaxy - that orbited around the hole and came back our way.
And it's doing that in all dimensions. And depending on the tilt of the accretion disc, you'll see parts of that disc caught up in it / blocking light, which is why the halo isn't even - the accretion disc is tilted from our viewpoint.
Black holes are "invisible". But their presence makes everything near them go really weird and not like a standard piece of space at all.
You can even measure the Schwarzchild radius from the size of the haloes because parts of it will be directly related to certain multiples of the radius.
The black hole is only a point to us because it warps space, too. Whether it's actually a "point" in its local reference frame is another matter entirely.
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Why would a black hole be a disc shape?
'cause it's spinning?
Re:I have some questions (Score:5, Informative)
And we are talking about radiotelescopes here. What you get is a signal from an antenna, and you have to recalculate the sources of the different waves the antenna recorded. The datapoints are just long lists of energy measurements from the different antennas.
We knew beforehand that M87 (a large eliptical galaxy about 55 million light years away) had a supermassive Black Hole at its center. There were estimates of its size from redshift measurements of the movements of the galaxy's center. Thus this is not a discovery we stumpled upon, this was a carefully selected target, and there were expectations beforehand how the picture should look like. A physicist who wrote his doctorial thesis on how a picture of a Black Hole should look like, gave a speech three month ago (albeit in German): Andreas Mueller: Foto eines Schwarzen Loches [youtube.com].
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Re:I have some questions (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I have some questions (Score:4, Interesting)
The largest stars we know so far have masses of around 200 times the mass of the Sun, e.g. Eta Carinae [wikipedia.org]. Eta Carinae has about 150 to 250 times the mass of the Sun, but it shines between 1,000,000 million to 5,000,000 million times brighter (the brightness actually fluctuates).
Re:I have some questions (Score:4, Interesting)
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TL;DR: The star becomes unstable and doesn't live very long.
Re:I have some questions (Score:4, Informative)
"what if there is a star there which is 4k times our sun"
What if.. What if...
We actually LOOKED and there is no such star. There is a cloud-like disk with a black center. See picture in TFA.
"(the end and beginning of everything, where time exist and not exist, where your dreams become true, etc.)"
Where do you get this bullshit from???? Hollywood?
"your conclusions and assuming that something 4000 times more massive is likely to be much more brighter and to have a much stronger gravitational force, you move to "black hole""
We haven't seen a star that is 4000 times more massive than our sun anywhere in the universe.
This is one of the puzzle pieces. We see gigantic sources of gravity in very small volumes, but no star at the center. In fact, no light at all from the center.
This is what we observe.
Another piece of the puzzle is that our current theories also say the same thing. You can't make a star bigger than a certain size. If you try to do it you will concentrate so much mass in a small space that it will collapse into a small point and will trap light. So theory predicts there should be very massive and very small objects that look black to us.
So these theories explain and predict our observations.
"And why assuming a black or light-less or matter-less center rather than the much more logical tremendously bright and massive one?"
Again, we have never seen a star that is this big and bright. All stars that we have seen so far in our galaxy and in other galaxies are limited in size. Apparently the universe does not have big stars like you propose.
If you can find one they you will become a science superstar.
"Because a century-old theory (about which I will better not talk) told you so?"
Everything we have observed so far is exactly like that theory predicted. If you don't want to talk about it you will never understand why we expected black holes in the first place.
The theory says that mass bends space. We have observed this phenomenon without black holes. It is a true property of this universe.
Some smart person once noted that, according to this theory there can be a region of space where gravity is so strong that light can't escape it. A kind of black hole. That was about 100 years ago and at that time we had no instruments to observe such phenomena. So it was 'only' a theory.
Over the years, as our instruments became better and better, we started finding such regions of space. But we never could get a good picture due to limitations of our instruments. But it was enough to develop our theories more.
Now we have pointed our telescopes towards a place where the theories predict a black hole could be. And what do we find? A picture of a black hole surrounded by a fuzzy disk! It even includes other effects that the theory predicts, like that one side of the dust disk looks brighter.
So this picture is exactly like the 'old theory' predicted!
In over 100 years no one managed to create a different theory that predicted this picture.
Now, you could argue that the picture could be the result some other process. But then you would need to provide the mechanics of this other process. You have to make your own theory of why this picture looks like it does. :)
But then your theory will ALSO need to explain why GPS needs time correction, why stars behind the sun can be observed to the side of the sun and why light always travels at a single speed and hundreds of other effects that are explained by "the old theory".
Thousands of professional physicists haven't been able to create a different theory that explains all these effects.
So good luck trying to invent your own.
If you do not provide an alternative explanation that covers everything we have observed then you have no right complaining. You should first study the 'old theory' and try to understand why it has been so successful and no one has managed to invalidate it so far.
But think of it this way. If this 'old theory' wa
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So in a certain way, this pict
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I don't know... why expecting the same (tremendously simplistic) rules which work in our system to be applicable to any other galaxy and group of bodies? Anyway... I don't want to come into all this, just to understand this black-hole measuring situation, for what your comments are being very helpful. Thanks again.
This is an important point: laws of physics are assumed to be same everywhere. If I'm not mistaken, that is what is also observed. This means that distant astronomical events (ie. in the past) follow theories developed on Earth.
We don't know much about a black hole, but as I understand our guesses are pretty apocalyptic. So, how could the given planets continue orbiting under more or less the same rules than are applicable to a star (= gravity theory of relativity) when talking about a black hole? Shouldn't all of them be immediately suck into the black hole? Or, at least, should the situation become so crazily different than all the performed calculations wouldn't really make any sense?
Sufficiently far from the black hole, gravity doesn't work differently when compared to another object of the same mass. That is, if the Sun was replaced with a a black hole of the same mass (event horizon diameter 6 km), the motions of the planets wouldn't change much. We'd notice
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Why could you know that there was a black hole there?
The best way to confirm a black hole is by looking at the red/blue shift of the orbiting material. This allows you to calculate orbital speed, and that tells you about mass and radius.
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why can't it be a star which is 4k times (or any other size) the size of our sun?
Because there's no room to fit such a big star in such a small orbit.
why it has to become that matter-less, light-/time-trapping elucubration basing all sorts of apocalyptic-like assumptions whose scientific foundation seems very weak to me?
Why would it seem weak ? I'm not a physicist, but the concept of having an object that's so massive that gravity becomes the dominant force is fairly easy to grasp. And once that happens, there's nothing that can stop it from collapsing.
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The existence of such objects was predicted by Einstein a century ago. While some physicists are resistant to the notion of a singularity, no one contests that stars of a certain mass or greater with suffer gravitational collapse.
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I think you should actually understand black hole formation. You appear pretty ignorant of the science, and thus utterly incapable of critiquing it.
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I'm sorry, you don't want to change the fact that youre ignorant?
Lemme guess, you fall somewhere on the spectrum.
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"It seems to me that there is lots of beforehand issues here and I see a problem with that. This doesn't seem too scientific."
It only looks to you like that because you don't actually know the science behind it.
In reality there are millions of observations done on every scale of the universe and all these observations are related to each other.
You can't simply invent a theory that explains one observation but invalidates other observations.
The cool thing is that we knew about m87 because of other reasons th
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Re:I have some questions (Score:5, Insightful)
All science is provisional, but some science is less provisional. Every test we've flung at general relativity over the last century has confirmed it. While it's not complete (Quantum Mechanics is not accounted for), it is as much settled science as one can get. Your problem is ignorance of how science works, coupled with pedantry, so that somehow you imagine you can usefully critique theories which you clearly know absolutely nothing about. You're arrogant and ignorant, but obviously not stupid, so instead of constructing versions of science that don't exist to cover up your lack of knowledge, just pick up some god-damned literature on the subject and fill the void that you have mistaken for intellectual curiosity.
Re:I have some questions (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not stupid, but you are ignorant. When you know enough to even ask sensible questions, and know enough to understand what is meant by "provisional" in science then maybe you can have a conversation. But you're pedantry and ignorance is just too much of an obstacle, and your thin skin just makes it all the worse.
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Re:I wonder how much Bouman actually contributed. (Score:4, Interesting)
She clearly didn't write the majority of the code. However it's entirely possible she's responsible for the math and/or the actual algorithm the code implements. There's a system used at my company that I wrote relatively little of the code for (mostly low-level stuff like high-performance maths primitives and zero-copy networking), but I had a lot of input into the design and how it's supposed to achieve what it does. I don't know enough about this project to comment on whether Bouman is or isn't the brain behind it. I'm just saying that from experience, there are plenty of cases where the person who designed the algorithm isn't the person who ultimately implemented it. They might be a shitty coder, or just have other responsibilities.
Re:I wonder how much Bouman actually contributed. (Score:5, Informative)
She clearly didn't write the majority of the code.
However it's entirely possible she's responsible for the math and/or the actual algorithm the code implements.
From The internet’s idiots are already trying to discredit Katie Bouman’s historic accomplishments [thenextweb.com]:
The criticism claiming Bouman is just one name of a few on the research paper shows a misunderstanding of how academic papers work. Bouman is the first author of her paper “Computational Imaging for VLBI Image Reconstruction.” The first author on a research paper is typically the person who made the most important contributions. Alongside Bouman, Michael D. Johnson, Daniel Zoran, Vincent L. Fish, Sheperd S. Doeleman, and William T. Freeman worked to produce their findings.
“Of course Bouman will not have written all of the code, just like Englert and Higgs are not solely responsible for the discovery of the Higgs boson. ..." Wade said.
In the discussion on Hacker News, and even in our own Facebook comment section, multiple users claim Bouman’s colleague Andrew Chael wrote over 850,000 lines of the 900,000 lines of code used to discover the black hole. Chael tweeted to her defense, saying that without Bouman and her contribution to the software, the project would never have been a success.
So, with respect to a successful outcome, does it really matter how *many* lines of code she (or someone) wrote, especially if her/their code and/or other contributions made everything work?
I imagine we've all heard the joke about getting an itemized bill like: $0.50: Pushing a button; $99.50: Knowing what button to push.
Re:I wonder how much Bouman actually contributed. (Score:5, Informative)
Following up whit this information from To undermine Katherine Bouman's role in the Black Hole photo, trolls held up a white man as the real hero -- until he fought back [cnn.com]
The misleading posts said Chael alone had authored "850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm!" ...
However, the effort quickly backfired.
Though it may have been nice to receive more recognition, Chael immediately took to Twitter to explain that the online trolls had exaggerated his contributions, and he defended Bouman's work. In addition, Chael said that as an openly gay man, he is also an underrepresented demographic in STEM.
Chael disputed the incorrect posts
I did not write "850,000 lines of code" -- many of those "lines" tracked by github are in model files. There are about 68,000 lines in the current software, and I don't care how many of those I personally authored.
[... several tweets referenced ...]
While I appreciate the congratulations on a result that I worked hard on for years, if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life.
Chael wrote the code for one of three scripted code pipelines that scientists used to transform telescope data into a coherent image.
Bouman has emphasized collaboration
Though Bouman has received a lot of attention, she has maintained that the black hole image was the product of teamwork.
"No one of us could've done it alone," Bouman told CNN. "It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds." The Event Horizon Telescope project was composed of an international team of more than 200 researchers.
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They might be a shitty coder, or just have other responsibilities.
Or that implementation of an idea takes a different set of skills. She designed the algorithm, but does she have enough experience in whatever programming language was selected? Also there are technical challenges like the 5 PB of data the algorithm had to analyze. Can the problem be broken down in parallel tasks, etc? The challenge of 5PB alone is enough to require special skills.
Re:I wonder how much Bouman actually contributed. (Score:5, Interesting)
She designed the algorithm. This does not necessarily relates to lines of code. Also eht-imaging is used for a wide area of applications. Mr. Chael is a PhD student at Harvard working on that piece of software. While Dr. Bouman performed the analysis and "developed the algorithm that turned telescopic data into the historic photo we see today". Here is her CV https://people.csail.mit.edu/k... [mit.edu]
If Chael had done all this, his supervisors had claimed that or pushed that he would have been in the media.
Honestly, would you question her abilities if she would have been a male professor?
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Yeah, while the shared image was highly amusing it also entirely failed to acknowledge the difference between an algorithm and the code that implements it.
One of those is really easy to write.
Re:I wonder how much Bouman actually contributed. (Score:5, Funny)
Manbabies don't know the difference. All they have is some dim recognition that being marginally competent and male is no longer enough to get by and scares the shit out of them.
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No one said it is easy to write software handling large amount of data. The argument is that you cannot derive from the number of code contributions the value of contributions to the project or the implemented algorithm. You cannot even derive the quality of the code contributions based on LOC. Especially not with scientific software.
Re:I wonder how much Bouman actually contributed. (Score:5, Informative)
She designed the algorithm.
The NY Times says it wasn't the algorithm used to make the final picture. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com]
While she led the development of an algorithm to take a picture of a black hole, an effort that was the subject of a TED Talk she gave in 2016, her colleagues said that technique was not ultimately used to create this particular image.
But that doesn't diminish her contribution to the project or her skills. She is clearly a skilled scientist but you have to read her actual articles to see that. By misrepresenting her role in the project you miss an opportunity to give her credit for the cool things she actually did. Not to mention the other 39 women and 160 men who also worked on the project.
Re: I wonder how much Bouman actually contributed. (Score:2)
I did not want to play down her involvment. That is why I posted a link to her CV. That should show that she has done a lot of research. Unfortunately, while posting I had not the luck to find better material to underline my argument.
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Chael has also come out and said that the software he worked on only has 68,000 lines of code in it anyway, and that he doesn't know, or care, how any of those lines were his.
Re:I wonder how much Bouman actually contributed. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, there it is. Time for the whiny toxic manbabies to show up and cry about the evil woman. Fucking incels.
Re:I wonder how much Bouman actually contributed. (Score:4, Informative)
Also:
But congratulations on supporting a gay guy in his efforts. I'm sure he's very pleased with your support. Now go scurry back to your white supremacist site with your tail between your legs because you played yourself.
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Dude, lay off the racism in your own statements. It's not helping anyone.
Also, not all white guys are racist, sexist homophobes.
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But what does the black hole sound like?
Yellow
Re: One of the universe's most destructive forces (Score:2)
Black holes sound like a Coldplay song? Sounds about right.
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It's an image of a shadow of the event horizon
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No it's not.
It's a visual representation of WHAT WAS RECORDED by an Earth-wide telescope (standard practice with radio telescopy) from photons whose paths were last warped by a black home 53.5m light years away / ago.
It's not a rendering at all. It's not a simulation. It's not a representation of received data. That conforms almost exactly to expectations made under assumptions that - up until now - we did not know were actually true.
It's quite literally what light the black hole has sent our way 53.5m y
Re:Sorry but (Score:5, Interesting)
Which happens to look exactly how we'd expect to see the simulation that was done for Interstellar to look if we saw it from where we are, and with the equipment we have.
Honestly, you're directly getting photons for which the last thing they touched was a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, in the middle of another galaxy, 53.5m years ago, 53.5m light years away.
The picture isn't photographically beautiful because it never would be at those kinds of distances. That it even *exists* and produces anything at all is astounding.
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Radio waves are photons.
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And some of them were undoubtedly wearing Hawaiian shirts.
Re:Katie Bouman did jack shit (Score:5, Informative)
Completely false. From Chael's own words [cnn.com]:
BTW, Chael is gay. So congratulations on supporting him.
As to Bouman herself, she isn't the one taking credit. She has said repeatedly it was a collaborative effort:
So yeah it seems a lot of political science was involved here.
Sure was, it came from only one group who was so incensed a woman could do anything remarkable it had to jump up and down, wave its hands, and put out fake information to make itself feel better.
Re:Katie Bouman did jack shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Well it was a team. I am sure it had women and men.
From How Katie Bouman Accidentally Became the Face of the Black Hole Project [nytimes.com]
As Dr. Bouman herself was quick to point out, she was by no means solely responsible for the discovery, which was a result of a worldwide collaboration among scientists who worked together to create the image from a network of radio antennas.
The project, led by Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was the work of more than 200 researchers. About 40 of them were women, according to Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative.
Without knowing more about everyone on the team and who did what, etc... the rest of your speculations and commentary about "political science" in your post are pointless and/or counter-productive.
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That you have to put down a woman who was instrumental in this magnificent feat of scientific endeavor says volumes about your insignificance on this planet. As Chael himself said [cnn.com]:
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That depends on what you mean by "led." She only committed about 0.4% of the actual algorithm code (affecting 3675 lines [github.com]), and many of those commits were for superficial things like the font color of the output. Other commits were to place other people's code into the project. The other 99.6% of the code was committed by men.
I've been on many some coding teams, and I will tell you that not many of my bosses contributed a single line of code. No one however will question whether or not they "led" the team.
She did not lead in the sense that she did not do most of the work, or most of the programming. Perhaps she was appointed to supervise the people who actually developed the algorithm, and in that sense she "led" the development.
No one has claimed she did ALL of the coding. Her claim is she developed the algorithm. According to Andrew Chael [twitter.com] who wrote much of the code, you're just wrong.
So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library (https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging ) to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop.
Our papers used three independent imaging software libraries (including one developed by my friend @sparse_k). While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data. With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85 );
as a result, this is probably the most vetted image in the history of radio interferometry. I'm thrilled Katie is getting recognition for her work and that she's inspiring people as an example of women's leadership in STEM.