What makes the approach to a black hole dangerous is not the intense gravity, but the very high gradient of that gravity. That is, if you were falling headfirst into a small black hole, your head would be accellerated inward faster than your feet, as if you were on a medieval stretching rack. If you were falling into a large black hole, while your head would still be accellerated more than your feet, the structure of your body would be strong enough to resist any injury.
But I don't expect that many black holes would be big enough as to irradiate an entire galaxy to the point that life is impossible anywhere in that galaxy.
However, the very brightest celestial objects that we can see are the Quasars, or Quasi-Stellar objects. They are "Stellar" in that they appear to be pinpoint light sources, but their spectrum is heavily weighted to the bluer, higher energy end of the spectrum, and if I understand correctly do not appear to be radiating light as a result of just being hot. When an object emits thermal radiation, while that radiation is blueer (or 'X-ray-er') if it is particularly hot, the shape of the spectral intensity distribution takes an easily calculated form called the Planck Distribution.
There are lots of other ways to generate blue light other than thermally, but for many years, the incredible power of the Quasars was a mystery. The red shift of their spectrum that results from the expansion of the Universe between us and them is quite large, so clearly they are the farthest objects we can see, as well as the oldest, and must have formed not long after the beginning of the Universe.
It is thought now that the Quasars are very large black holes, such as those at the centers of some galaxies such as our own, but much much larger. I expect life would not be possible anywhere in their vicinity.
If a supernova goes off in any nearby galaxy, we can easily resolve it from its neighboring stars with average sized astronomical telescopes. Supernovas in more distant galaxies cannot be resolved, but they are at times as bright as the entire galaxy that they are contained within. If a supernova goes off within our own galaxy, at times we can easily see it at high noon on a bright, sunny day.
If any of our nearby celestial neighbors were to go off in a supernova, we would only get the bad news when all life on earth was wiped out almost instantly. We wouldn't just get 73h c4nc3r and die a few years later; the Earth's entire atmosphere would be blasted off into interstellar space.
The abundance of heavy elements not just on earth but throughout our solar systems makes us certain that the Sun is a second generation star, whose first generation star went off in a supernova, the intense pressure, heat and particle energy of which formed all those heavy elements that we find so useful for things like hard drive platters and Liquid Crystal Displays.
Because if they did, quite likely they would emit some gravitational waves that we might be able to detect with optical interferometers here on earth.
Einstein's general relativity predicts such waves theoretically, but because gravity is such a weak force - consider that an object with the mass of the earth is required to make you feel your own mass bearing down on the soles of your feet - even the gravitational waves emitted by the objects in our own solar system are too weak to detect.
Gravitational waves are only emitted from asymmetric motions of large amounts of mass. The explosion of a supernova, while not perfectly symmetric, is close enough to symmetric that it doesn't emit detectable waves.
I would expect that two black holes orbiting close to each other at very high radial velocity, or just two very massive stars, would emit waves we would eventually be able to detect here on earth.
We have yet to find any exceptions to the theoretical predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity, but there are a number of things that it predicts that we are as yet technologically unable to confirm either through experiment or astronomical observation.
A few years ago, someone measured the speed of gravity by observing the effect of Jupiter's gravitational field on the apparent position of a bright radio source, but their precision was so poor that if the speed of gravity is significantly different than the speed of light, their measurement was unable to distinguish it.
... because most black holes are formed from the remains of particularly large stars, and such stars are formed from the gravitational collapse of large gas and dust clouds, one would expect most black holes to be close to regions where lots of stellar formation has taken place. Such places would quite likely still have lots of gas around.
However a black hole could have formed early in the history of the Universe. It is thought that if there are any really small black holes, they are left over from the Big Bang. Those black holes could indeed be in places where we could not detect them, and because they are not very massive, we could not see their effects on nearby matter.
It is the very small black holes that emit lots of Hawking radiation. The intensity of it increases with the gradient of the gravitational field. Large block holes have a less steep gradiant, smaller holes a steeper one. Very small black holes may have formed early in the history of the Universe, but by now would have evaporated due to emitting all that Hawking radiation.
... light. They are hard to see because there aren't very many of them.
They are the residue left over by the death and subsequent collapse of particularly massive stars. Such stars can take other courses during their death throes, such as ejecting their mass all over the neighborhood in a supernova.
It is thought that at the center of our own galaxy and many other galaxies there are black holes that are the result of the particularly plentiful gas and dust there, but they are hard to see because they are surrounded by more of that gas and dust.
While we cannot see what is inside the event horizon of a black hole, we certainly can see what is just outside the even horizon. It's not just that there is an incredibly strong gravitational field there, but the gradient of that field is quite steep, that is, as one gets ever closer to the event horizon, the field gets increasingly stronger quite quickly.
The result is that any particle bound states such as atoms, molecules, atomic nuclei, or even nucleons such as neutrons and protons are torn apart because the particles that are closer to the event horizon are accellerated inward much faster than the more distant particles, despite the distance between all of the particles in that bound state being no more than the distance of an electron from the proton in a Hydrogen atom.
The result of all that tearing apart of bound particles, as well as the particles colliding with each other, charged particles interacting with the magnetic fields of rotating black holes and so on, is that the region just outside of the even horizon emits particularly intense, high energy, short wavelength X-Rays.
Those X-Rays are so bright that we can see them, if I understand correctly, being emitted from the material falling into black holes located in other galaxies.
I'm not really a software engineer; I only play one on the Internet. But I really am an astronomer.
i just don't record it. I vastly prefer live performance. the bulk of my music work is actually theoretical study. to the extent that I play it is to more deeply understand music theory. I have made it clear for many years that I want to learn to compose symphonies. one must understand music theory for that. producing recordings does not do much to advance me towards my musical goals.
it's not so much that I regard buying meals for the poor as my life's work. it is to convince others to do so.
I have been homeless and hungry. the worst part of it is not sleeping out in the cold but being treated by others as if I don't even exist.
even if you don't feed the poor, when someone asks you for money, just politely decline, then introduce yourself, ask for their name, offer to shake their hand, then spend sometime getting to know each other.
you'll quickly find that the poor, mentally I'll and homeless get far more out of genuine human companionship than any amount of food or money.
consider that the very worst punishment that is applied in Americas prisons is not execution but solitary confinement.
I have always been clear that I regard coding as the same kind of day job that enables any starving artist to get by as a Batista. It should have been obvious long before Rusty wrote his first line of Perl that it is my writing an music that I regard as my real life's work.
yet whenever I devote any significant attention to either of my passions, the very first response from the vast majority of kurons is that my devotion to my craft is either taking time away from work that I regard as largely pointless, or is evidence of som psychiatric symptom despite me being stone cold sober when I wrote it.
I have moved Heaven and Earth to benefit humanity through my writing since 1980, and my music since 1984. yet so many of you regard me as some kind of moral failure because I don't devote myself to the kind of work whose only substantial benefit to anyone is to make wealthy people far richer than they would be without my contribution.
it's not just me. your own tick on the Mortal Plane will expire before long. as you lay in your deathbed looking back at your life, will you only consider it to be well lived if you met more of your deliverables, or if you met the same objective I meet every day of my life, to ease the agony of those who suffer, or to impart the benefit of your extensive experience to your younger colleagues who struggle to understand the work set out for him.
yesterday some guy asked me to purchase his used train ticket. that's a common scheme here because port lands transit passes are time stamped and so can be used by any number of passenger before the timeout expires.
I sadly informed him that I wascas broke as he was, but spent ten minutes with him so we could get to know each other.
younalready know that when I'm not so broke, panhandlers don't get my spare change but any meal they want atba good restaurant, during which I put even more time into getting to know them.
I bought my first meal for a panhandler in 1984. perhaps you don't show thatbsame kindness to thosevwhonsuffer, but do show show any manner of kindness atvall?
Ricardo Stallman's very first priority is not writing code and never has been. write anything you want to him; you'll be surmised not that you get a responsevat all but the time and care he devoted to his reply. barn striustrup does the same thing.
if you and Richard ever meet in person, ask him for some money. his life's work of changing society does not permit him the time to dine with you as I would, but he will buy you a meal.
I've been struggling for years to understand thevattitudes of people such as yourself towards my life's work. enlighten me, I beg of yup.
The creep who posted the parent comment is most likely Kuro5hin's modus, who has been stalking me over the Internet for two or three years.
The reason he knows that I am mentally ill is that I devote a great deal of time and effort to educating the public about mental illness, my own as well as that of others.
For some reason that I am as yet unable to fathom, my colleagues at Kuro5hin feel that it is flatly impossible for me to work as a self-employed software engineer, despite the fact that I persisted with coding as a career because I found that it accomodates my condition far better than my original career choice of Physics did.
I was never actually hospitalized for fixating on, threatening or stalking anyone at all.
The single mother with a sick child happens to be one of my oldest and closest friends. I am just about the only real friend that poor woman has ever had in her entire life.
We met in 1986 or so. At the time she introduced herself to me as "Crystal". I had the idea that her nickname was due to her being quite strikingly beautiful and amazingly talented, as well as being one of the most intelligent people I have ever met in my entire life.
A year or so later I happened to refer to her as Crystal, but she asked me not to do so anymore as her nick was short for "Crystal Methamphetamine", to which she was horribly addicted for many years.
She was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder when she was in high school. I have ADHD too, and so I have to take a completely legal, prescription form of Amphetamine with the brand name of Adderall to have any hope of providing for myself.
I've known a whole lot of drug addicts over the years, and so am quite vividly aware of what would eventually become of me if I ever yielded to the quite tempting impulse to take more than my psychiatrist's recommended dosage of three ten milligram tablets per day.
But because Crystal was, when diagnosed with ADHD, quite addicted to Cocaine, she was completely unable to find a doctor willing to prescribe any manner of stimulant medication for her condition.
There is an antidepressant-like medicine called Strattera that is licensed for ADHD now, but it had not yet been developed when Crystal was in high school.
Despite my never having been addicted to anything, the use of stimulants for the treatment is quite unfairly stigmatized, so I sometimes have trouble obtaining the Adderall which a nationally recognized expert on Adult ADHD was completely convinced I needed to take. This I was on Stattera for a few months earlier this year, but it was not effective in any way whatsoever. I did not notice any effect from it of any sort. I did give it some time to take effect; then my p-doc put me back on Adderall after I complained that if I had to stay on Strattera, I'd be homeless in no time at all.
While I met Crystal at UC Santa Cruz, she had also been accepted to study pre-medicine at Yale, with the intention of becoming a surgeon. At UCSC, she graduated with Thesis Honors in Microbiology.
I've know this poor woman since 1986. She has to be the most fucked-up, miserable dysfunctional human being I have ever met in my whole entire life. Having been in a whole bunch of mental hospitals over the years, I've met quite a few crazy people, but Crystal tops them all.
Crystal knew very well that there was no way she could survive UCSC's Microbiology course, let alone do well in her studies, unless she could get medication for her ADHD. It happens that Methamphetamine works even better than Adderall for ADHD, and in fact is available in prescription form, completely legally. Provided you keep a lid on the dosage, Methamphetamine - the very same chemical compound that Crystal Meth is composed of - really is the best treatment there is for ADHD.
Crystal's family was once quite wealthy, but for reasons I won't go into, things didn't work out well for her father's business
Point out that fact to all of your Facebook friends.
After I deleted all that Apps from my FB profile, I pointed out what I'd done on my FB wall.
One of my FB Friends immediately replied to thank me for doing so, and told me that it was only because of my advice that she knew to do the same thing for her own profile.
The vast majority of old friends that I want to find again don't have the first clue how to use Google.
While I'm pretty good at "Feeling Lucky" myself, the kind of people who don't know how to use Google also tend not to appear anywhere on the Web under their own real names.
One of my very best friends during my Freshman year of high school was a fellow Roman Soldier in Armijo High School's production of Jesus Christ Superstar. I'm handy with tools, so with the help of Ted and the other tool-handy Roman Soldiers, I supervised the fabrication of all of our spears in my family garage, using my Dad's tools.
Over the summer after that year, Ted totally disappeared. Fell Off The Edge Of The Earth. Left The Building.
I figured that he's moved somewhere and neglected to ever tell me where he moved to. After a while I gave up on ever hearing from one of the very best friends I ever had, ever again in my life.
A couple of years ago I turned Ted up on Facebook. I left the theatre when I graduated from high school, but Ted made theatre his career.
Not long after we Friended each other, Ted invited me to the taping of a TV commercial for one of the big science museums in downtown San Jose, California. I was living in San Jose at the time.
If you ever want to walk right on to a movie or TV set while taping is taking place, just walk right up to the security guard, politely introduce yourself then say "I'm here to see Ted." He'll show you right in. I don't think it really matters whether anyone named Ted is actually present on the production set.
Ted had lost a lot of weight since high school. We used to call him "Little Orange Basketball". He was also a lot taller, as we were both fifteen when we knew each other back then.
Despite the very real Starfleet uniform, green facepaint and pointy prosthetic ears, Ted's very un-Vulcanlike smile was totally unmistakable.
I have all the same objections to Facebook that any rational software engineer - or any rational human being - would have, but if it were not for Facebook, I would never, ever have found my old friend Ted Arabian ever, ever again.
It would be the same for so many of my other friends. There are many that I'm still searching for, but have not yet found. I was once quite stoked to discover that my very best friend from elementary school was the lead actor in a live theatrical production I attended one night, but woe is me, it was not him, he was just using my childhood friend's name as his stage name.
Maybe I can find you a YouTube of The Little Orange Basketball appearing as Commander Spock... damn, I'm not finding it. There are lots of videos of that exhibition online, but I can't find Ted's TV commercial.
I'll drop him a line; if he has a link I'll post it in a followup.
Some guy over at Kuro5hin who I know only as modus got the idea that I am some manner of dangerous criminal psychopath because I was so inconsiderate of his easily-wounded feeling to point out that, after two decades of working as a coder, I was weary of the work and wanted to change careers by going back to school to learn how to compose symphonies.
If you look at his comment and diary history at his user info page I linked above, you'll find that the vast majority of them are focussed entirely on me, quite commonly telling all manner of bald-faced lies about me.
He want to all manner of trouble and expense in hopes of making me completely unemployable, by running Google AdWords Select ads that pointed to the rather sarcastic diary I posted in which I requested that my colleagues at Kuro5hin stop giving me crap for not having ever shipped a Free Software product I've been tinkering with over the years. I have always made it crystal-clear that the real value of Ogg Frog was its website, because of its informative articles as well as its opinion pieces, with the Ogg Frog software being meant mainly to attract readers to those articles.
I wrote them all in 2005 and 2006, so I cannot possibly imagine why anyone would have cause to complain. I won't release Ogg Frog because it has some severe bugs in it; because the product is targeted towards naive music fans, I don't want to subject them to the usability problems, crashes, and end-user data loss that are so commonly found in Open Source products that are "Released Early, Released Often".
While I can see the value of having my code inspected by "Many Eyeballs", the two I have are sufficient.
I don't have a problem with some troll being so obsessed with me that he has nothing better to do with his sorry existence than lie about me from the basement of his mother's house.
What I do have a problem with is that this guy devotes vast quantities of effort to discovering where I live or what company I am consulting for. Whenever he is able to figure either of those out, he blasts news of his incredible discovery All Over God's Creation.
For this reason, for a couple of years now I've been very quiet about where I live, and I never, ever mention anywhere who I am working for. When he pointed out that he was following my updates to my resume on my website, I removed my resume entirely then replaced it with a redirect to a general description of my company's consulting services.
He has the idea that he's just being funny in the way so many Internet trolls think they are. If he had not, at this point, kept this crap up for two or three years I might believe him. But by now I feel I really do have reason to be concerned that this crime I committed by pointing out that I want to follow my passion rather than working as a corporate whore anymore is so serious, that if he knew how to physically locate me, he might come after me with a gun.
Don't think I'm just being paranoid. That kind of thing happens All The God Damn Time. I recall as if it were yesterday the incident in which some Silicon Valley engineer for reasons I don't recall brought a gun to work one day and slaughtered seven of his colleagues.
It was at one time possible to obtain personal information from the California Department of Motor Vehicles database. I don't think it was public record, exactly, but somehow some stalker was able to get his victim's home address from the DMV, then showed up at her place and murdered her.
This of course made headlines all over Creation, so now the California DMV database is locked down much more tightly, but I would not be at all surprised if all of the other government databases which have not yet been used to obtain the street address of your next murder victim are not so secure.
In the US, banks, credit card companies and the like use the account holder's mother's maiden name as a form of identification. Given the divorce rate in the state, as wel
One of them had the idea that she could shock me by giving me her business card that bore a professionally photographed wide-open beaver shot.
If you're anywhere near Santa Cruz, California, Seraphina Landgrebe does excellent erotic photography. I rang her up once in hopes that she could do a nice portrait for use as a Valentine's Day gift, but I did not yet have the kind of relationship with that young lady that would have made Seraphina's suggestion that I pose while clad in nothing but a leopard-print jockstrap appropriate.
That stripper invited me to a party at her place once. There were only three men there, and all manner of incredibly hot young women. It turned out that the lot of them were strippers as well.
The other day I finally got around to configuring those privacy settings that everyone has been so on about. Facebook sure doesn't make them easy to find.
I was shocked to find that my account granted access to about three dozen apps that I never even heard of. There were only two or three that I signed up for with my own conscious knowledge. I don't have the first clue how I got signed up for all the rest.
That just pissed me off. As I was no longer actually using the two or three apps that I did voluntarily use, I deleted all three dozen from my account.
You may be completely unaware that a whole bunch of private companies that are not affiliated with Facebook have access to your personal data. Even if you want to use a particular Facebook app, you should configure that particular app's privacy settings to grant it access only to the data you voluntarily want it to have. If you are no longer using an app, or don't recall ever requesting the use of it, you should delete it from your account completely.
Here's what you do:
Log in to your Facebook account. (Heh, when I did that just now, I found my account locked. It turned out to be because I had deleted my cookies, not because Facebook caught me spreading the word about how to dump what Facebook considers to be its real customers!)
At the top-right is your username, "Friends", "Home" and a small triangle. Click on the small triangle then select "Privacy Settings".
Click on "Edit Settings" to the right of "Apps and Websites". You may need to scroll down a little bit.
Click on "Edit Settings" to the right of "Apps You Use".
I no longer use any apps so I can't continue from here, but at this point it should be pretty clear what to do.
Some apps really will require access to your details so they can function. If so, be certain that you really want to continue using those apps. Give them the minimum level of access that you really want them to have. Delete all the rest.
comments that were formatted with aster ices in a certain specific way.
a colleague discovered that the cause of a certain memory leak was an allocation with the c++ new operator without a corresponding delete. after receiving her proud email announcing her discovery, I filed a bug against her specific fix, then blasted thebentire company with a short angry written lecture about the critical importance of using smart pointers for c++ memory management.
the company president ordered me to stop filing such bug reports. I resigned in protest not long after.
Trihedral Engineering makes Human Machine Interface Software Control And Data Acquisition products.
HMI SCADA software is some of the most human life critical software there is. our product was used to automate a pickup truck assembly plant in Kentucky. The Stuxnet worm that attacked the Iranian uranium centrifuges attacked the HMI SCADA product produced by our competitor Siemens.
If you don't use smart pointers in c++ your code won't be exception-safe. if you don't use smart pointers in the c++ HMI SCADA code used to drive a giant automotive assembly plant, you will drop a pickup truck on one of your plant's workers, making a widow of his wife instantly.
I once worked for a digital aerial photography company. It had been acquired by another firm. The new owners desperately hoped that I'd kept a personal copy of all the source I'd written. "of course not" I replied.
While I was very good at backing up my code some cluebot had taped over it all with aerial photos.
now one does need to document the expected inputs and results of subroutines. better than commenting is to use assertions as well as unit tests. so for that contrived example, what I would actually do:
int foo() {
int result = 5;
assert( 4==result);
return result; }
if you don't maintain the assertions and unit tests with the payload code you'll find out about it right away.
if your own employees do the work your company retains the knowledge of how to get it done.
if you outsource you never learn how to do your own work, instead you finance your outsourcing firms efforts to learn how to operate your business. not only do you not gain that institutional memory but that outsourcing firm can now perform that same work for your competitors.
i did so slavishly at first but then my boss pointed out that comments are rarely updated with the actual code. a contrived example:
int foo() {// always returns 4
return 5; }
now I have a coding style that the simplest fool can understand. that's quite a different thing than the arrogant coders who feel that their colleagues are incompetent if they cannot follow uncommented code. if someone cannot follow my code then I feel I have done something wrong, not them.
This would be a good time to write your congresscritter to point out the problems with undocumented file formats as well as Apis and network protocols.
There are plenty of formats that could be used that are open and vendor neutral.
If congress doesn't require that in it's funding authorization, many of our public records will be stored as word dos or in ms SQL databases.
I do almost all my projects completely on my own. I'm lucky if my clients devote more effort to their specs than tossing some chicken entrails on the back of a used envelope then mailing it to me.
I'm sick to death of consulting. Until I can get a perm job I do most of my work from wifi spots so I can be around the rest of humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes the approach to a black hole dangerous is not the intense gravity, but the very high gradient of that gravity. That is, if you were falling headfirst into a small black hole, your head would be accellerated inward faster than your feet, as if you were on a medieval stretching rack. If you were falling into a large black hole, while your head would still be accellerated more than your feet, the structure of your body would be strong enough to resist any injury.
But I don't expect that many black holes would be big enough as to irradiate an entire galaxy to the point that life is impossible anywhere in that galaxy.
However, the very brightest celestial objects that we can see are the Quasars, or Quasi-Stellar objects. They are "Stellar" in that they appear to be pinpoint light sources, but their spectrum is heavily weighted to the bluer, higher energy end of the spectrum, and if I understand correctly do not appear to be radiating light as a result of just being hot. When an object emits thermal radiation, while that radiation is blueer (or 'X-ray-er') if it is particularly hot, the shape of the spectral intensity distribution takes an easily calculated form called the Planck Distribution.
There are lots of other ways to generate blue light other than thermally, but for many years, the incredible power of the Quasars was a mystery. The red shift of their spectrum that results from the expansion of the Universe between us and them is quite large, so clearly they are the farthest objects we can see, as well as the oldest, and must have formed not long after the beginning of the Universe.
It is thought now that the Quasars are very large black holes, such as those at the centers of some galaxies such as our own, but much much larger. I expect life would not be possible anywhere in their vicinity.
If a supernova goes off in any nearby galaxy, we can easily resolve it from its neighboring stars with average sized astronomical telescopes. Supernovas in more distant galaxies cannot be resolved, but they are at times as bright as the entire galaxy that they are contained within. If a supernova goes off within our own galaxy, at times we can easily see it at high noon on a bright, sunny day.
If any of our nearby celestial neighbors were to go off in a supernova, we would only get the bad news when all life on earth was wiped out almost instantly. We wouldn't just get 73h c4nc3r and die a few years later; the Earth's entire atmosphere would be blasted off into interstellar space.
The abundance of heavy elements not just on earth but throughout our solar systems makes us certain that the Sun is a second generation star, whose first generation star went off in a supernova, the intense pressure, heat and particle energy of which formed all those heavy elements that we find so useful for things like hard drive platters and Liquid Crystal Displays.
Because if they did, quite likely they would emit some gravitational waves that we might be able to detect with optical interferometers here on earth.
Einstein's general relativity predicts such waves theoretically, but because gravity is such a weak force - consider that an object with the mass of the earth is required to make you feel your own mass bearing down on the soles of your feet - even the gravitational waves emitted by the objects in our own solar system are too weak to detect.
Gravitational waves are only emitted from asymmetric motions of large amounts of mass. The explosion of a supernova, while not perfectly symmetric, is close enough to symmetric that it doesn't emit detectable waves.
I would expect that two black holes orbiting close to each other at very high radial velocity, or just two very massive stars, would emit waves we would eventually be able to detect here on earth.
We have yet to find any exceptions to the theoretical predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity, but there are a number of things that it predicts that we are as yet technologically unable to confirm either through experiment or astronomical observation.
A few years ago, someone measured the speed of gravity by observing the effect of Jupiter's gravitational field on the apparent position of a bright radio source, but their precision was so poor that if the speed of gravity is significantly different than the speed of light, their measurement was unable to distinguish it.
... because most black holes are formed from the remains of particularly large stars, and such stars are formed from the gravitational collapse of large gas and dust clouds, one would expect most black holes to be close to regions where lots of stellar formation has taken place. Such places would quite likely still have lots of gas around.
However a black hole could have formed early in the history of the Universe. It is thought that if there are any really small black holes, they are left over from the Big Bang. Those black holes could indeed be in places where we could not detect them, and because they are not very massive, we could not see their effects on nearby matter.
It is the very small black holes that emit lots of Hawking radiation. The intensity of it increases with the gradient of the gravitational field. Large block holes have a less steep gradiant, smaller holes a steeper one. Very small black holes may have formed early in the history of the Universe, but by now would have evaporated due to emitting all that Hawking radiation.
... light. They are hard to see because there aren't very many of them.
They are the residue left over by the death and subsequent collapse of particularly massive stars. Such stars can take other courses during their death throes, such as ejecting their mass all over the neighborhood in a supernova.
It is thought that at the center of our own galaxy and many other galaxies there are black holes that are the result of the particularly plentiful gas and dust there, but they are hard to see because they are surrounded by more of that gas and dust.
While we cannot see what is inside the event horizon of a black hole, we certainly can see what is just outside the even horizon. It's not just that there is an incredibly strong gravitational field there, but the gradient of that field is quite steep, that is, as one gets ever closer to the event horizon, the field gets increasingly stronger quite quickly.
The result is that any particle bound states such as atoms, molecules, atomic nuclei, or even nucleons such as neutrons and protons are torn apart because the particles that are closer to the event horizon are accellerated inward much faster than the more distant particles, despite the distance between all of the particles in that bound state being no more than the distance of an electron from the proton in a Hydrogen atom.
The result of all that tearing apart of bound particles, as well as the particles colliding with each other, charged particles interacting with the magnetic fields of rotating black holes and so on, is that the region just outside of the even horizon emits particularly intense, high energy, short wavelength X-Rays.
Those X-Rays are so bright that we can see them, if I understand correctly, being emitted from the material falling into black holes located in other galaxies.
I'm not really a software engineer; I only play one on the Internet. But I really am an astronomer.
i just don't record it. I vastly prefer live performance. the bulk of my music work is actually theoretical study. to the extent that I play it is to more deeply understand music theory. I have made it clear for many years that I want to learn to compose symphonies. one must understand music theory for that. producing recordings does not do much to advance me towards my musical goals.
it's not so much that I regard buying meals for the poor as my life's work. it is to convince others to do so.
I have been homeless and hungry. the worst part of it is not sleeping out in the cold but being treated by others as if I don't even exist.
even if you don't feed the poor, when someone asks you for money, just politely decline, then introduce yourself, ask for their name, offer to shake their hand, then spend sometime getting to know each other.
you'll quickly find that the poor, mentally I'll and homeless get far more out of genuine human companionship than any amount of food or money.
consider that the very worst punishment that is applied in Americas prisons is not execution but solitary confinement.
I have always been clear that I regard coding as the same kind of day job that enables any starving artist to get by as a Batista. It should have been obvious long before Rusty wrote his first line of Perl that it is my writing an music that I regard as my real life's work.
yet whenever I devote any significant attention to either of my passions, the very first response from the vast majority of kurons is that my devotion to my craft is either taking time away from work that I regard as largely pointless, or is evidence of som psychiatric symptom despite me being stone cold sober when I wrote it.
I have moved Heaven and Earth to benefit humanity through my writing since 1980, and my music since 1984. yet so many of you regard me as some kind of moral failure because I don't devote myself to the kind of work whose only substantial benefit to anyone is to make wealthy people far richer than they would be without my contribution.
it's not just me. your own tick on the Mortal Plane will expire before long. as you lay in your deathbed looking back at your life, will you only consider it to be well lived if you met more of your deliverables, or if you met the same objective I meet every day of my life, to ease the agony of those who suffer, or to impart the benefit of your extensive experience to your younger colleagues who struggle to understand the work set out for him.
yesterday some guy asked me to purchase his used train ticket. that's a common scheme here because port lands transit passes are time stamped and so can be used by any number of passenger before the timeout expires.
I sadly informed him that I wascas broke as he was, but spent ten minutes with him so we could get to know each other.
younalready know that when I'm not so broke, panhandlers don't get my spare change but any meal they want atba good restaurant, during which I put even more time into getting to know them.
I bought my first meal for a panhandler in 1984. perhaps you don't show thatbsame kindness to thosevwhonsuffer, but do show show any manner of kindness atvall?
Ricardo Stallman's very first priority is not writing code and never has been. write anything you want to him; you'll be surmised not that you get a responsevat all but the time and care he devoted to his reply. barn striustrup does the same thing.
if you and Richard ever meet in person, ask him for some money. his life's work of changing society does not permit him the time to dine with you as I would, but he will buy you a meal.
I've been struggling for years to understand thevattitudes of people such as yourself towards my life's work. enlighten me, I beg of yup.
The creep who posted the parent comment is most likely Kuro5hin's modus, who has been stalking me over the Internet for two or three years.
The reason he knows that I am mentally ill is that I devote a great deal of time and effort to educating the public about mental illness, my own as well as that of others.
For some reason that I am as yet unable to fathom, my colleagues at Kuro5hin feel that it is flatly impossible for me to work as a self-employed software engineer, despite the fact that I persisted with coding as a career because I found that it accomodates my condition far better than my original career choice of Physics did.
I was never actually hospitalized for fixating on, threatening or stalking anyone at all.
The single mother with a sick child happens to be one of my oldest and closest friends. I am just about the only real friend that poor woman has ever had in her entire life.
We met in 1986 or so. At the time she introduced herself to me as "Crystal". I had the idea that her nickname was due to her being quite strikingly beautiful and amazingly talented, as well as being one of the most intelligent people I have ever met in my entire life.
A year or so later I happened to refer to her as Crystal, but she asked me not to do so anymore as her nick was short for "Crystal Methamphetamine", to which she was horribly addicted for many years.
She was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder when she was in high school. I have ADHD too, and so I have to take a completely legal, prescription form of Amphetamine with the brand name of Adderall to have any hope of providing for myself.
I've known a whole lot of drug addicts over the years, and so am quite vividly aware of what would eventually become of me if I ever yielded to the quite tempting impulse to take more than my psychiatrist's recommended dosage of three ten milligram tablets per day.
But because Crystal was, when diagnosed with ADHD, quite addicted to Cocaine, she was completely unable to find a doctor willing to prescribe any manner of stimulant medication for her condition.
There is an antidepressant-like medicine called Strattera that is licensed for ADHD now, but it had not yet been developed when Crystal was in high school.
Despite my never having been addicted to anything, the use of stimulants for the treatment is quite unfairly stigmatized, so I sometimes have trouble obtaining the Adderall which a nationally recognized expert on Adult ADHD was completely convinced I needed to take. This I was on Stattera for a few months earlier this year, but it was not effective in any way whatsoever. I did not notice any effect from it of any sort. I did give it some time to take effect; then my p-doc put me back on Adderall after I complained that if I had to stay on Strattera, I'd be homeless in no time at all.
While I met Crystal at UC Santa Cruz, she had also been accepted to study pre-medicine at Yale, with the intention of becoming a surgeon. At UCSC, she graduated with Thesis Honors in Microbiology.
I've know this poor woman since 1986. She has to be the most fucked-up, miserable dysfunctional human being I have ever met in my whole entire life. Having been in a whole bunch of mental hospitals over the years, I've met quite a few crazy people, but Crystal tops them all.
Crystal knew very well that there was no way she could survive UCSC's Microbiology course, let alone do well in her studies, unless she could get medication for her ADHD. It happens that Methamphetamine works even better than Adderall for ADHD, and in fact is available in prescription form, completely legally. Provided you keep a lid on the dosage, Methamphetamine - the very same chemical compound that Crystal Meth is composed of - really is the best treatment there is for ADHD.
Crystal's family was once quite wealthy, but for reasons I won't go into, things didn't work out well for her father's business
Point out that fact to all of your Facebook friends.
After I deleted all that Apps from my FB profile, I pointed out what I'd done on my FB wall.
One of my FB Friends immediately replied to thank me for doing so, and told me that it was only because of my advice that she knew to do the same thing for her own profile.
The vast majority of old friends that I want to find again don't have the first clue how to use Google.
While I'm pretty good at "Feeling Lucky" myself, the kind of people who don't know how to use Google also tend not to appear anywhere on the Web under their own real names.
One of my very best friends during my Freshman year of high school was a fellow Roman Soldier in Armijo High School's production of Jesus Christ Superstar. I'm handy with tools, so with the help of Ted and the other tool-handy Roman Soldiers, I supervised the fabrication of all of our spears in my family garage, using my Dad's tools.
Over the summer after that year, Ted totally disappeared. Fell Off The Edge Of The Earth. Left The Building.
I figured that he's moved somewhere and neglected to ever tell me where he moved to. After a while I gave up on ever hearing from one of the very best friends I ever had, ever again in my life.
A couple of years ago I turned Ted up on Facebook. I left the theatre when I graduated from high school, but Ted made theatre his career.
Not long after we Friended each other, Ted invited me to the taping of a TV commercial for one of the big science museums in downtown San Jose, California. I was living in San Jose at the time.
If you ever want to walk right on to a movie or TV set while taping is taking place, just walk right up to the security guard, politely introduce yourself then say "I'm here to see Ted." He'll show you right in. I don't think it really matters whether anyone named Ted is actually present on the production set.
Ted had lost a lot of weight since high school. We used to call him "Little Orange Basketball". He was also a lot taller, as we were both fifteen when we knew each other back then.
Despite the very real Starfleet uniform, green facepaint and pointy prosthetic ears, Ted's very un-Vulcanlike smile was totally unmistakable.
I have all the same objections to Facebook that any rational software engineer - or any rational human being - would have, but if it were not for Facebook, I would never, ever have found my old friend Ted Arabian ever, ever again.
It would be the same for so many of my other friends. There are many that I'm still searching for, but have not yet found. I was once quite stoked to discover that my very best friend from elementary school was the lead actor in a live theatrical production I attended one night, but woe is me, it was not him, he was just using my childhood friend's name as his stage name.
Maybe I can find you a YouTube of The Little Orange Basketball appearing as Commander Spock... damn, I'm not finding it. There are lots of videos of that exhibition online, but I can't find Ted's TV commercial.
I'll drop him a line; if he has a link I'll post it in a followup.
Some guy over at Kuro5hin who I know only as modus got the idea that I am some manner of dangerous criminal psychopath because I was so inconsiderate of his easily-wounded feeling to point out that, after two decades of working as a coder, I was weary of the work and wanted to change careers by going back to school to learn how to compose symphonies.
If you look at his comment and diary history at his user info page I linked above, you'll find that the vast majority of them are focussed entirely on me, quite commonly telling all manner of bald-faced lies about me.
He want to all manner of trouble and expense in hopes of making me completely unemployable, by running Google AdWords Select ads that pointed to the rather sarcastic diary I posted in which I requested that my colleagues at Kuro5hin stop giving me crap for not having ever shipped a Free Software product I've been tinkering with over the years. I have always made it crystal-clear that the real value of Ogg Frog was its website, because of its informative articles as well as its opinion pieces, with the Ogg Frog software being meant mainly to attract readers to those articles.
I wrote them all in 2005 and 2006, so I cannot possibly imagine why anyone would have cause to complain. I won't release Ogg Frog because it has some severe bugs in it; because the product is targeted towards naive music fans, I don't want to subject them to the usability problems, crashes, and end-user data loss that are so commonly found in Open Source products that are "Released Early, Released Often".
While I can see the value of having my code inspected by "Many Eyeballs", the two I have are sufficient.
I don't have a problem with some troll being so obsessed with me that he has nothing better to do with his sorry existence than lie about me from the basement of his mother's house.
What I do have a problem with is that this guy devotes vast quantities of effort to discovering where I live or what company I am consulting for. Whenever he is able to figure either of those out, he blasts news of his incredible discovery All Over God's Creation.
For this reason, for a couple of years now I've been very quiet about where I live, and I never, ever mention anywhere who I am working for. When he pointed out that he was following my updates to my resume on my website, I removed my resume entirely then replaced it with a redirect to a general description of my company's consulting services.
He has the idea that he's just being funny in the way so many Internet trolls think they are. If he had not, at this point, kept this crap up for two or three years I might believe him. But by now I feel I really do have reason to be concerned that this crime I committed by pointing out that I want to follow my passion rather than working as a corporate whore anymore is so serious, that if he knew how to physically locate me, he might come after me with a gun.
Don't think I'm just being paranoid. That kind of thing happens All The God Damn Time. I recall as if it were yesterday the incident in which some Silicon Valley engineer for reasons I don't recall brought a gun to work one day and slaughtered seven of his colleagues.
It was at one time possible to obtain personal information from the California Department of Motor Vehicles database. I don't think it was public record, exactly, but somehow some stalker was able to get his victim's home address from the DMV, then showed up at her place and murdered her.
This of course made headlines all over Creation, so now the California DMV database is locked down much more tightly, but I would not be at all surprised if all of the other government databases which have not yet been used to obtain the street address of your next murder victim are not so secure.
In the US, banks, credit card companies and the like use the account holder's mother's maiden name as a form of identification. Given the divorce rate in the state, as wel
One of them had the idea that she could shock me by giving me her business card that bore a professionally photographed wide-open beaver shot.
If you're anywhere near Santa Cruz, California, Seraphina Landgrebe does excellent erotic photography. I rang her up once in hopes that she could do a nice portrait for use as a Valentine's Day gift, but I did not yet have the kind of relationship with that young lady that would have made Seraphina's suggestion that I pose while clad in nothing but a leopard-print jockstrap appropriate.
That stripper invited me to a party at her place once. There were only three men there, and all manner of incredibly hot young women. It turned out that the lot of them were strippers as well.
The other day I finally got around to configuring those privacy settings that everyone has been so on about. Facebook sure doesn't make them easy to find.
I was shocked to find that my account granted access to about three dozen apps that I never even heard of. There were only two or three that I signed up for with my own conscious knowledge. I don't have the first clue how I got signed up for all the rest.
That just pissed me off. As I was no longer actually using the two or three apps that I did voluntarily use, I deleted all three dozen from my account.
You may be completely unaware that a whole bunch of private companies that are not affiliated with Facebook have access to your personal data. Even if you want to use a particular Facebook app, you should configure that particular app's privacy settings to grant it access only to the data you voluntarily want it to have. If you are no longer using an app, or don't recall ever requesting the use of it, you should delete it from your account completely.
Here's what you do:
Log in to your Facebook account. (Heh, when I did that just now, I found my account locked. It turned out to be because I had deleted my cookies, not because Facebook caught me spreading the word about how to dump what Facebook considers to be its real customers!)
At the top-right is your username, "Friends", "Home" and a small triangle. Click on the small triangle then select "Privacy Settings".
Click on "Edit Settings" to the right of "Apps and Websites". You may need to scroll down a little bit.
Click on "Edit Settings" to the right of "Apps You Use".
I no longer use any apps so I can't continue from here, but at this point it should be pretty clear what to do.
Some apps really will require access to your details so they can function. If so, be certain that you really want to continue using those apps. Give them the minimum level of access that you really want them to have. Delete all the rest.
comments that were formatted with aster ices in a certain specific way.
a colleague discovered that the cause of a certain memory leak was an allocation with the c++ new operator without a corresponding delete. after receiving her proud email announcing her discovery, I filed a bug against her specific fix, then blasted thebentire company with a short angry written lecture about the critical importance of using smart pointers for c++ memory management.
the company president ordered me to stop filing such bug reports. I resigned in protest not long after.
Trihedral Engineering makes Human Machine Interface Software Control And Data Acquisition products.
HMI SCADA software is some of the most human life critical software there is. our product was used to automate a pickup truck assembly plant in Kentucky. The Stuxnet worm that attacked the Iranian uranium centrifuges attacked the HMI SCADA product produced by our competitor Siemens.
If you don't use smart pointers in c++ your code won't be exception-safe. if you don't use smart pointers in the c++ HMI SCADA code used to drive a giant automotive assembly plant, you will drop a pickup truck on one of your plant's workers, making a widow of his wife instantly.
There's just gotta be something wrong with that picture.
What next? "'The Cool, Fresh Taste of Marlboro Cigarrettes is the Opiate of the People' -- Karl Marx".
I once worked for a digital aerial photography company. It had been acquired by another firm. The new owners desperately hoped that I'd kept a personal copy of all the source I'd written. "of course not" I replied.
While I was very good at backing up my code some cluebot had taped over it all with aerial photos.
It costs money to maintain secrets. If there is no reason to keep it secret anymore it is cheaper not to guard it.
now one does need to document the expected inputs and results of subroutines. better than commenting is to use assertions as well as unit tests. so for that contrived example, what I would actually do:
int foo()
{
int result = 5;
assert( 4==result);
return result;
}
if you don't maintain the assertions and unit tests with the payload code you'll find out about it right away.
if your own employees do the work your company retains the knowledge of how to get it done.
if you outsource you never learn how to do your own work, instead you finance your outsourcing firms efforts to learn how to operate your business. not only do you not gain that institutional memory but that outsourcing firm can now perform that same work for your competitors.
i did so slavishly at first but then my boss pointed out that comments are rarely updated with the actual code. a contrived example:
int foo() // always returns 4
{
return 5;
}
now I have a coding style that the simplest fool can understand. that's quite a different thing than the arrogant coders who feel that their colleagues are incompetent if they cannot follow uncommented code. if someone cannot follow my code then I feel I have done something wrong, not them.
This would be a good time to write your congresscritter to point out the problems with undocumented file formats as well as Apis and network protocols.
There are plenty of formats that could be used that are open and vendor neutral.
If congress doesn't require that in it's funding authorization, many of our public records will be stored as word dos or in ms SQL databases.
I do almost all my projects completely on my own. I'm lucky if my clients devote more effort to their specs than tossing some chicken entrails on the back of a used envelope then mailing it to me.
I'm sick to death of consulting. Until I can get a perm job I do most of my work from wifi spots so I can be around the rest of humanity.
Is the off been remote since 1998.
Ive been working remotely most of the time since 1998.
When does the boss take me out to lunch with the team? Never.
A beer after work on Fridays? Nope.
Project tshirts? Nada.
Don't think telecommuting is paradise. It's not.
I do that so I can verify that my iOS App runs properly on old firmware releases.
Yes, it is a huge PITA, but I don't want to require that my users upgrade their firmware.