Slashdot Mirror
The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (vice.com)
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.
Let's start measuring storage space by the ton! We can have Kilotons and Megatons...wait, that sounds very familiar...
What, no comparisons to stacked handwritten notes any more?
And that's just the top of the iceberg of what's wrong with idiot journos coming up with even stupider comparisons.
What was the bitrate and god help if it is that joint stereo garbage!
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Since TB drives are common now, 5000 TB would have been easier to understand for most people.
Well, most of the time the Fake News would have picked a 12 year old who did nothing.
”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...
#DeleteChrome
"added the ability to change the fontsize"
This sounds like that sciency stuff!
RIAA goons are going to sue for denial of monetizable piracy by all of that potential pirate storage being displaced by scientific data.
The universe lives because the black holes existence, otherwise the entropy had destroied it.
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.
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 development of the algorithm that imaged the black hole
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
Let's imagine a very simplistic scenario as starting point. We have a set of 2D points drawing a square (0,0), (1,0), (1,1), (0,1). The points represent matter (in whatever way: via mass, forces, behaviour of light, etc.) and the square center the black hole. You can convert that simplistic drawing into an as big as required one by accumulating more data points around the square. Let's assume that you have now 1 million points or 1 billion or 100 billions of billions, but not a single point in the central part, where the black hole is supposed to be.
Honestly, my knowledge about relativity, black holes and similar is pretty limited, so please correct me if I am wrong here or at any other point. In any case, please keep the discussion at a level where it is fully compatible with generally-applicable physics, maths and validatable statements. I am not particularly interested in the abstract theoretical, philosophical, similar aspects.
By assuming that the aforementioned ideas are right, I have various doubts:
1. How are they (not) getting data points? How can they find the place where a black hole exists? How do you measure matter (in the space) and absence of it? Or perhaps it is through force/gravity, interaction between bodies? Or the way in which light interact with objects? What is translated into the 0s and 1s, what makes something being a data point or part of the hollowed nothingness?
2. How is supposed to work this approach of using various devices located in different places? This seems a tremendously problematic, error-prone, difficult-to-coordinate/validate/fix methodology. Who and how is confirming the validity of each action/collection? How is it accounting for the fact that this black hole (or any other one, I guess) is extremely far away from us? So far away that there is a little chance to confirm/validate almost anything, that the actual applicability of virtually any assumption might be dubious. If your devices only find black holes in extremely far away places, wouldn't it make some sense to think that the absence of data might be associated with the limited capability of the devices? Or, in other words, how can anyone be sure that a device delivering a nonexistent/negative/erroneous measurement (a basic requisite to find a black hole, right?) is undoubtedly indicating the presence of something?
3. Why taking so long and collecting so much information when the black hole was already located? What is that algorithm exactly doing that couldn't have been easily done before? As shown in my simplistic example, once you locate the big deal here (the beyond-imaginable hollow where everything and nothing is possible), all the surroundings seem pretty irrelevant. Collecting 1 or 1M data points seems quite trivial, exactly the same than generating a picture from those data points. Even if you are representing interactions/forces/attractions because all that has to be already reflected in the collected information. Is perhaps that algorithm doing something else rather than just generating a picture associated with a set of descriptive enough data points? In that case, what is it doing exactly?
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
of a C130 loaded with Flashdrives flying at 700 mph. The latency is a bitch though.
**Life is too short to be serious**
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.
Why would a black hole be a disc shape?
'cause it's spinning?
> each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times.
*sigh* the while point and what took significant issues was that the observations had to be taken at *exactly* at the same time
Here's the data compressed: .
I will venture that this is because you don't understand black hole dynamics? What you see in the photo is not the black hole in itself, but the surrounding accretion disc and the event horizon.
It is truly sad with people like you who cause regression in human development.
Yes, and that causes a spinning accretion disc because the black hole doesn't sit in an environment of complete empty space. It sits in a region filled with gases.
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.
Not valid unless given in LOCâ(TM)s
Could've been done with 5u of rack space utilizing Intel's new ruler format SSD's, IDK how much it would weight but I'm guessing no where near half a ton ...
14 TB per HDD... 80 HDD to half a PB.... times 10...800 HDD weighs 500 kg... A little over half a kilogram.... Sounds about right
Now imagine having to load each one! :D
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.
There is a huge new building in Utah, with its own 65 megawatt electrical grid, that is ALL hard drives. You'll not get a tour of that though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The size/weight(?) of the data isn't the cool part honestly. Hell, Intel will be shipping a 1PB 1U flash system this year.
What's cools is the coordinated collection, aggregation and analysis. It's the stuff of my nerdy dreams.
How many elephants is that?
Your comment makes no sense. "Trumptards" would not give a fuck about curing cancer and would prefer oil over fusion.
You're missing his (angry) point anyway.
He may not have said it in the nicest way, but he definitely got a point there, from his limited POV.
So why do people here think it's appropriate to act like assholes *themselves* too, mod him "-1, Troll", and talk like you do?
Shouldn't you be agreeing that there are definitely more pressing concerns, but that because of $reasons, this is definitely not useless?
He's missing out, and standing there with his fly open, and you're calling him a moron and neither teach him nor tell him about his dick showing.
That is not nice. That is, in fact, exactly imitating what you just hated on and downmodded.
So go to your corner, be ashamed, and mod yourselves "-1, Troll" too.
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...
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?
"Kiloton" is a silly word.
It means "Kilo(kilo(kilogram))"
Just say gigagram. It sounds way cooler too.
As someone who's entire job is taking scientist's algorithms and explaining them to computers, number of lines of code contributes has nothing to do with how much of the 'brains' one is behind something.
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.
OGG is just a container.
And Matroska is a better one.
How much is it in: stereo 4K 32-bit FP RGB indistinguishable-from-uncompressed-by-video-engineers VBR H.265 video + 6-channel 32-bit FP indistinguishable-from-uncompressed-by-audio-engineers Vorbis audio = Matroska?
Or should we bring in full field of view and light field and sound wave field recording capabilities?
Just wanted to point out that this is not the accomplishment that the media and scientific community are making it out to be. This is a rendering of what a black hole MIGHT look like. It is not a picture of a black hole.
Yeah, there it is. Time for the whiny toxic manbabies to show up and cry about the evil woman. Fucking incels.
Jeez, does nobod read anything but comments anymore?
It's not a disc!
It's just that because light is bent around it, it looks like a donut/disc from every angle!
That's also why it's looking brighter on one side!
No, it does not make sense ... to the human mind.
We are not born to comprehend the twisting of spacetime and light like that.
So gut feel is useless here.
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.
Neither is easy to write, even more if you need to process that amount of data.
Black holes sound like a Coldplay song? Sounds about right.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives"
Thanks for this worthless factoid being pointlessly tacked onto the headline, my computer just slapped me with a lawsuit. She kept rambling on about toxic work environment, being fat-shamed (I mean, she does have 240TB), and that the last thing we need right now is to be chastised for a large Data Mass Index (DMI).
Man, I remember the days when that data was in a tight 4TB RAID-1 stripe. It eventually spread out far and wide across a RAID-10 array over the years. Careful of the data creep kids. At the rate we're clickbaiting titles these days, your medical insurance is gonna go up if you're carrying around more than 200TB, especially in a small form factor.
Thanks for the worthless joke tacked on to the worthless complaint about the worthless factoid.
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...
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.
Maybe we should put you in charge
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.
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.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I think it's more like "science journalism is flaming hot garbage, so journalists saw a woman and said 'she did everything, take that bigots!' and people are naturally rolling their eyes."
If he was a Trumptard he would actually be more likely to attend STEM rather than liberal arts and gender studies and street sign waving though.
Gigagram is the correct SI unit for this.
Looks like a square to me.
"It's expensive, stupid, last only seconds - but makes your mouth hurt for days - it's BEE IN A BALLOON" - Kibo 3/1/95
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.
Wow, that's a lot of data. Did it take the whole internet's bandwidth for a day to send it to all the sites?
No. We used sneakernet.
Honestly, would you question her abilities if she would have been a male professor?
Probably not. But we would also not see old, balding, male professor on every news front page out there (Einstein doesn't count, he is more a meme, rather than a real person now).
She would not end up with so much publicity if not for being female (quite cute on top of that). It is normal that some people will get suspicious and wonder if this is pure merit, or maybe journalists just want to push woman-in-STEM agenda.
I sincerely hope she is as accomplished as newspapers claim - it is heartwarming news to hear about young people being really passionate about real science (regardless of gender).
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.
What sort of tires did they use to get the latency down?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And some of them were undoubtedly wearing Hawaiian shirts.
Nice. I have some background in numerical analysis but ended up working in electronics. How did you get into your current gig, and do you work for a university?
are those Imperial holes or metric holes?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
They're not photons. And it's not a photograph. it's a simulated image based on 18 months of radio wave data. If anything that's even more impressive.
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.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"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.
" Whether it's actually a "point" in its local reference frame is another matter entirely." - could you explain this? I can't make sense of what it means or implies - TIA
Media like the New York Times are slathering at the thought of hijacking all this bandwidth to propagate advertizing and propaganda..Real news is for losers.
While reading your post, it occurred to me that no validation of the algorithm ultimately adopted is provided. That is to ask, was an image of a known object produced using the same hardware and software, and did that image match reference images of said object.
It is curious that the image produced of the black hole seems to match our expectation of what we would find, which raises the question as to whether we/they have tweaked an algorithm to produce an expected result, or are we/they objectively observing the object.
The real credit goes to an international team of scientists who are MEN
This Feminist worship has got to stop.
Well it was a team. I am sure it had women and men. While Bouman did a lot more than "jack shit" she was hardly even decisive. There were three image processing systems used in generating the picture (no idea how you call a week's worth of radiotelescope data for 8 telescopes a picture). One of which was done by Andrew Chael another done by Kazu Akiyma and most of the code that produced the image was Chael's and he is the guy who created the Git Hub project a year before Bouman came on board.
So yeah it seems a lot of political science was involved here.
Forget about her, this is being hyped as to her, but more is involved! The image is "taken from an edit, of a crop, of a piece". The further investigated imagery is HUGE! and the image we are seeing is but a fragment of a massive imagery that may cause loss of all these interpretations. What a mess. Taken as a WHOLE the small snip we see could be considered as a hole in a window screen. On all sides of this hole are more holes in a completely geometric pattern as in a screen. Interpretations by others on a purposely misinterpreted image are false, far worse than just false color on a satellite image!
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.
That depends on what you mean by "led." She only committed about 0.4% of the actual algorithm code (affecting 3675 lines), 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.
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.
As someone who's entire job is taking scientist's algorithms and explaining them to computers, number of lines of code contributes has nothing to do with how much of the 'brains' one is behind something.
So how does one convert "brains" to computer algorithms without programming? I'd be interested to see how that happens. Do you dictate the programming to a secretary who enters it verbatim into and IDE?
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:
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.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Completely false. From Chael's own words:
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.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
And yet all I've seen on Facebook are memes about a woman who seemingly developed the algorithm all by herself. Your cognitive dissonance is strong.
Cry moar you fucking incel.
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
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.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Radio waves are photons.
that sounds like bs fantasy that you would find a company that cares about zero copy performance and design and not just throwing a crappy ruby system to do something
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
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.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
because it's a point in space that bends everything to itself, even space, time and light.
And it's exactly this phenomenon that produces the signature accretion disc of light that we have not only demonstrated exists in theoretical models, but literally just imaged.
I don't care how many of those I personally authored."
Think about that ? It makes me very sad that this guy is so threatened by this situation he has to deny the value of his work.
Without knowing more about everyone on the team and who did what, etc
I read that and say it's inappropriate to assign anyone credit, and any attempt to is nothing but pushing a bias.
Her algorithm was not used for the famous picture and fake news said it was. End of story.
Everyone is a bigot. Including yourself. Please look in a mirror, I beg of you.
There is no such thing as Gravity, it's only a form of magnetism.
All matter is simply energy levels in a synced state. once the matter enters the "black hole" it's synced state gets altered back into a high compressed state resulting in X-Rays and Gamma Rays and some other trace frequencies.
In short, a black hole is a giant energy recycle machine.
"They might be a shitty coder, or just have other responsibilities."
Or they may have written concise code with few errors that required revising.
It’s not “simulated”. You could say the image is a composite of smaller sets of data.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
So bouman has to downplay his achievements and success, because if not, the crowd will punish him for it. So he's downplaying his role because he doesn't want the back lash.
Imagine if he came out and said the truth.
Yea I wrote most of the code, she and other scientist just helped maintain and added shit we already had written. How would that play out?
Bowman=Chael. Mixed the names up.
Yea only doing this because if he said what he really thinks he would be fired. And that's a problem.
This.
It wasn't literally imaged. You know this. Stop spreading fud.
I read through a bunch of news articles this morning but can't remember who said what and where I read it.
From what I gathered, they gave the algorithm basic rules like "the image should be smooth and not grainy" but definitively not rules like "it should be a torus". They also split into 4 teams who worked independently with no contact to avoid biases. All teams produced images of a slightly oval torus with more light at the bottom left. They also "trained" their algorithms on solid flat disc images, but they still showed a torus so the claim is that the torus is very likely real. I have no idea what that last part means. I just assumed there was no AI magic involved.
How typical. I found the article after posting. It is an interview with Katie Bouman.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/s...
The process of imaging is taking the incomplete information that we get from a couple of places on our virtual telescope, and trying to fill in all the missing information to get the picture an actual Earth-sized telescope would have produced
There’s an infinite number of possible images that could have been created from the sparse measurements that we took. The goal of imaging is to find the image that not only reconstructs and matches the data that we measured, but also is the one that is most likely.
We have to impose some information about what the image should look like in order to recover that image. Some stuff that we impose is natural and easy — we know that light is positive. You can’t have negative light.
Other things we might impose would be how smooth the image is. You wouldn’t expect an image of a black hole to look like the white noise you get when you pull a cable out of your television.
You really don’t want to accidentally tell our imaging algorithms that, for example, “Oh, what is likely is this ring shape,” because then we just recover that ring back, and we’ve learned nothing.
To avoid shared bias, we split ourselves into four different teams that had different focuses and different kinds of algorithms. We worked separately for a month, not talking to each other about anything.
Then after one month we all gathered together in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we put all the images up on a screen at one time. I think that was the most amazing moment, because even though each of the other images had different underlying assumptions and looked different, this ring appeared in all of the images.
The ring was always the same size, and it was brighter in the south. That was huge.
That was in late July of last year. Since then, we’ve spent months trying to break our images by training our algorithms on synthetic data. [In other words, the teams tried to mislead their algorithms with fake data that portrayed a flat disk with no hole in the center. They then applied the actual information collected by the Event Horizon Telescope to those new, misled algorithms.]
Even when we then applied those algorithms to the real data, we still got the ring in the end. You would have to bend over crazy backwards to not get this ring.
In the end, what was shown today was from three different pipelines, three different methods that we trained on the synthetic data. We got an image from each of those, and we blurred and averaged them together so they were all consistent.
Pretty cool indeed!
Aww, is the poor incel insecure a woman got some attention? There, there...
And yet, you are so threatened by the idea that a women could be a talented scientist that you are projecting what YOU think by claiming its what he really thinks. Both of these young scientists are gifted contributors to the greater understanding of our universe who have BOTH stated they were mere members of a larger team. YOU however, are a coward hiding behind anonymity, terrified of anything that remotely impacts your false narrative of reality.
Einstein is a good example given 90% of "what Einstein said about black holes" was said by Schwartzchild or Minkowski or Poincare or Wheeler or Hawking or Thorne or ...
it's sad that you probably had your parents or the state fund your gender studies and all you got out of it is a few new insults that you can throw at people - that money could have been used for something useful, like beer
Dude, lay off the racism in your own statements. It's not helping anyone.
Also, not all white guys are racist, sexist homophobes.
People like top put a face to projects, even though this is the combined work of a large number of very talented people. That does not detract from Bouman having made a major contribution.
The gender question is a little unfortunate because astrophysics actualy has a lot of women in the field, more so that most sciences. I met some of the SPT folks when I was at the pole a few months ago, and that group had lots of awesome people, a fair number of them women. Same for the BICEP/KECK project I was on where for about 1/2 my time there or south pole lead scientist was a woman.
I'm a little concerned that people will get the idea that Bouman was somehow singled out *because* she was female, when there are many women making major contributions to these projects.
She did NOT design the algorithm.
Some guy in india did. Decades ago.
She found a new use for it.
Andrew Chael wrote the majority of the algorithm. He is the person responsible for this achievement. The left wing media found a woman to prop up and has mislead the entire world. All of this is SJW crap on the left is profoundly absurd and wrong.
You are making a common mistake. The kilogram is the standard weight, but naming nomenclature is based on the gram:
Names and symbols for decimal multiples and submultiples of the unit of mass are formed by attaching prefix names to the unit name "gram," and prefix symbols to the unit symbol "g."
from https://www.nist.gov/pml/weigh...
We know that humanity is in danger when we start measuring scientific success in tons and kilograms... Donut or pretzel shaped, how about dropping by your neighbour to find out how s/he is doing ... :-\
The Black-hole concepts -misnomer-misleads Science.
Astronomers need reference frame Index to understand cosmology studies.
get out of the psychology of Black-holes and pull down gravity. The real Picture must emerge out of this
-black-hole flare-up. We are missing knowledge base in dimensions. Search origins -means open dialogue and Cosmological digest.
To be sure, on /. anyone's achievement will get nitpicked to death, even white necrophagic males.
I'd like to take my rocket ship in to her black hole!