Date: 10/04/2019 22:59:40
From: Bubblecar
ID: 1373617
Subject: Black Hole Press Conference

Beginning now:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-watch-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole-get-revealed-wednesday/

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:02:48
From: Woodie
ID: 1373618
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Bubblecar said:


Beginning now:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-watch-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole-get-revealed-wednesday/

FMD…… Just put the fuckin’ thing on Twitter. Sheeesh.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:04:11
From: dv
ID: 1373620
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Woodie said:


Bubblecar said:

Beginning now:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-watch-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole-get-revealed-wednesday/

FMD…… Just put the fuckin’ thing on Twitter. Sheeesh.

You’re so mean

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:05:34
From: party_pants
ID: 1373621
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Woodie said:


Bubblecar said:

Beginning now:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-watch-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole-get-revealed-wednesday/

FMD…… Just put the fuckin’ thing on Twitter. Sheeesh.

I’m going to put the kettle on and have a nice cup of decaf.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:05:41
From: Woodie
ID: 1373622
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Proberlee look just like this

https://www.buzzfeed.com/danmeth/ink-blot-test

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:05:51
From: sibeen
ID: 1373623
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Bubblecar said:


Beginning now:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-watch-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole-get-revealed-wednesday/

Who is the frenchie?

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:08:23
From: sibeen
ID: 1373624
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

oo, it’s black. That’s a shock.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:08:24
From: Bubblecar
ID: 1373625
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

And there it is.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:08:44
From: dv
ID: 1373626
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Not bad for the first go.

I’m content

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:12:22
From: Bubblecar
ID: 1373627
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

dv said:


Not bad for the first go.

I’m content

It’s satisfying that it looks like so many of the artist’s impressions.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:15:04
From: Woodie
ID: 1373628
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

sibeen said:


oo, it’s black. That’s a shock.

Well, the thing about a black hole, its main distinguishing feature is it’s black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is it’s black. – So how are you supposed to see them?

How can you be ambushed by five black holes? You wait three million years and not one, then, suddenly, five turn up at once.

Come on. We’ve only got 20 minutes.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:16:53
From: party_pants
ID: 1373629
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

I can’t get the site working, just a swirly thing in space. Must be overloaded.

I’ll have to wait for Justin the work experience kid to post it on the AB friggin C.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:17:23
From: Woodie
ID: 1373630
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

See? Told ya. Looks just like one of these.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:19:01
From: Bubblecar
ID: 1373631
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

party_pants said:


I can’t get the site working, just a swirly thing in space. Must be overloaded.

I’ll have to wait for Justin the work experience kid to post it on the AB friggin C.

Here it is just on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:20:57
From: Woodie
ID: 1373632
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

party_pants said:


I can’t get the site working, just a swirly thing in space. Must be overloaded.

I’ll have to wait for Justin the work experience kid to post it on the AB friggin C.

Just go to bed and listen to the radio news in the morning. I’m sure they’ll go into every detail.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:21:10
From: dv
ID: 1373633
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

It’s worth remembering that it was only in then1960s that the existence of black holes was broadly accepted among cosmologists. Einstein never accepted it during his life. Through the 1970s some evidence began to show up.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:22:53
From: party_pants
ID: 1373634
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Bubblecar said:


party_pants said:

I can’t get the site working, just a swirly thing in space. Must be overloaded.

I’ll have to wait for Justin the work experience kid to post it on the AB friggin C.

Here it is just on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE

thanks.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:24:58
From: dv
ID: 1373635
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

The EHT is a palindrome

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:29:47
From: Bubblecar
ID: 1373636
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

It was a decent presentation. Don’t think I’ll bother with the press questions.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:30:55
From: Bubblecar
ID: 1373637
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Anyway, I think we can say: black holes is real, after all.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:31:45
From: Woodie
ID: 1373638
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Bubblecar said:


It was a decent presentation. Don’t think I’ll bother with the press questions.

Don’t think that bit will go for very long. Wasn’t very many journalists there.

There’ll be more journalists than that in Canberra tomorrow when our very own black hole gets announced.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:32:58
From: Woodie
ID: 1373639
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Bubblecar said:


Anyway, I think we can say: black holes is real, after all.

Coulda been the pic of the headlight of an oncoming train at the end of a tunnel.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:33:03
From: Bubblecar
ID: 1373640
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Woodie said:


Bubblecar said:

It was a decent presentation. Don’t think I’ll bother with the press questions.

Don’t think that bit will go for very long. Wasn’t very many journalists there.

There’ll be more journalists than that in Canberra tomorrow when our very own black hole gets announced.

Yeah, surprisingly thin crowd.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:58:09
From: kii
ID: 1373641
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Eye of Sauron.

Reply Quote

Date: 10/04/2019 23:59:05
From: sibeen
ID: 1373642
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Oh, I thought you used eye of newt.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 00:03:26
From: dv
ID: 1373643
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Couple of points from the press release :

6] Future EHT observations will see substantially increased sensitivity with the participation of the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the Greenland Telescope and the Kitt Peak Telescope.

The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across

—-

Given the distance to M87, this means the field of view of this image is around 50 billionths of a degree.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 00:04:59
From: dv
ID: 1373644
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Bubblecar said:


It was a decent presentation. Don’t think I’ll bother with the press questions.

One of them asked a reasonable question about whether or not there was evidence of any change over time, and the answer was “maybe, we are still working on it”

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 00:53:29
From: PermeateFree
ID: 1373646
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Bubblecar said:


It was a decent presentation. Don’t think I’ll bother with the press questions.

Wow! Once more underwhelmed.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 04:48:34
From: kii
ID: 1373648
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

kii said:


Eye of Sauron.

hahahahahahaha…..

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 06:41:50
From: buffy
ID: 1373655
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Woodie said:


sibeen said:

oo, it’s black. That’s a shock.

Well, the thing about a black hole, its main distinguishing feature is it’s black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is it’s black. – So how are you supposed to see them?

How can you be ambushed by five black holes? You wait three million years and not one, then, suddenly, five turn up at once.

Come on. We’ve only got 20 minutes.

I read that “in voice”. Just a hint of whine. I must have watched that a lot…

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 09:19:38
From: Divine Angel
ID: 1373673
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Hmm.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 09:30:37
From: Ian
ID: 1373675
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

dv said:


It’s worth remembering that it was only in then1960s that the existence of black holes was broadly accepted among cosmologists. Einstein never accepted it during his life. Through the 1970s some evidence began to show up.

No, Einstein tried to show that they could not exist… (so paradoxically, in many ways he was no Einstein)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-reluctant-father-of-black-holes-2007-04/

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 10:05:11
From: The Rev Dodgson
ID: 1373678
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Ian said:


dv said:

It’s worth remembering that it was only in then1960s that the existence of black holes was broadly accepted among cosmologists. Einstein never accepted it during his life. Through the 1970s some evidence began to show up.

No, Einstein tried to show that they could not exist… (so paradoxically, in many ways he was no Einstein)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-reluctant-father-of-black-holes-2007-04/

Not quite sure how:
“Einstein never accepted it during his life”

is inconsistent with:
“Einstein tried to show that they could not exist”

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 10:12:28
From: The Rev Dodgson
ID: 1373679
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Divine Angel said:


Hmm.

Well obviously its white-hotness has just a dash of flame-orangeness as well.

Or vice-versa.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 10:32:33
From: Tau.Neutrino
ID: 1373682
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

How to Understand the Image of a Black Hole

We have just seen the first image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun. But what is that image really showing us?

more…

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 11:22:56
From: Ian
ID: 1373689
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

The Rev Dodgson said:


Ian said:

dv said:

It’s worth remembering that it was only in then1960s that the existence of black holes was broadly accepted among cosmologists. Einstein never accepted it during his life. Through the 1970s some evidence began to show up.

No, Einstein tried to show that they could not exist… (so paradoxically, in many ways he was no Einstein)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-reluctant-father-of-black-holes-2007-04/

Not quite sure how:
“Einstein never accepted it during his life”

is inconsistent with:
“Einstein tried to show that they could not exist”

Really?

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 11:23:49
From: Ian
ID: 1373690
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Tau.Neutrino said:


How to Understand the Image of a Black Hole

We have just seen the first image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun. But what is that image really showing us?

more…

Nice vid

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 12:29:52
From: dv
ID: 1373741
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Ian said:


dv said:

It’s worth remembering that it was only in then1960s that the existence of black holes was broadly accepted among cosmologists. Einstein never accepted it during his life. Through the 1970s some evidence began to show up.

No, Einstein tried to show that they could not exist… (so paradoxically, in many ways he was no Einstein)

What the fuck? Why did you start that sentence with “No”? You’re agreeing with me.

That shit happens a lot on this forum and I’ve never been sure why.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 12:34:57
From: The Rev Dodgson
ID: 1373744
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Ian said:


The Rev Dodgson said:

Ian said:

No, Einstein tried to show that they could not exist… (so paradoxically, in many ways he was no Einstein)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-reluctant-father-of-black-holes-2007-04/

Not quite sure how:
“Einstein never accepted it during his life”

is inconsistent with:
“Einstein tried to show that they could not exist”

Really?

Yes.

It seems that dv is not quite sure either.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 12:41:49
From: The Rev Dodgson
ID: 1373746
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

dv said:


Ian said:

dv said:

It’s worth remembering that it was only in then1960s that the existence of black holes was broadly accepted among cosmologists. Einstein never accepted it during his life. Through the 1970s some evidence began to show up.

No, Einstein tried to show that they could not exist… (so paradoxically, in many ways he was no Einstein)

What the fuck? Why did you start that sentence with “No”? You’re agreeing with me.

That shit happens a lot on this forum and I’ve never been sure why.

No, Ian was agreeing with you.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 12:43:02
From: Ian
ID: 1373748
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

dv said:


Ian said:

dv said:

It’s worth remembering that it was only in then1960s that the existence of black holes was broadly accepted among cosmologists. Einstein never accepted it during his life. Through the 1970s some evidence began to show up.

No, I agree with you. Einstein tried to show that they could not exist… (so paradoxically, in many ways he was no Einstein)

What the fuck? Why did you start that sentence with “No”? You’re agreeing with me.

That shit happens a lot on this forum and I’ve never been sure why.

Steady fella :)

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 12:43:16
From: party_pants
ID: 1373749
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

The Rev Dodgson said:


dv said:

Ian said:

No, Einstein tried to show that they could not exist… (so paradoxically, in many ways he was no Einstein)

What the fuck? Why did you start that sentence with “No”? You’re agreeing with me.

That shit happens a lot on this forum and I’ve never been sure why.

No, Ian was agreeing with you.

Yes, he wasn’t.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 12:43:50
From: Tamb
ID: 1373750
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Ian said:


dv said:

Ian said:

No, I agree with you. Einstein tried to show that they could not exist… (so paradoxically, in many ways he was no Einstein)

What the fuck? Why did you start that sentence with “No”? You’re agreeing with me.

That shit happens a lot on this forum and I’ve never been sure why.

Steady fella :)

No………………..one knows.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 13:03:17
From: dv
ID: 1373753
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

I see. Y’all just fucking with me.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 13:04:48
From: dv
ID: 1373754
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

I’ve pumped up the volume in order to highlight some kind of things, indicated by the arrows.

So is that some kind of … stuff? Possibly items?

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 13:05:44
From: Ian
ID: 1373755
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

party_pants said:


The Rev Dodgson said:

dv said:

What the fuck? Why did you start that sentence with “No”? You’re agreeing with me.

That shit happens a lot on this forum and I’ve never been sure why.

No, Ian was agreeing with you.

Yes, he wasn’t.

No, no, I was.

You can see the back of your own head if you get in close to a BH.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 13:07:11
From: Tamb
ID: 1373756
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Ian said:


party_pants said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

No, Ian was agreeing with you.

Yes, he wasn’t.

No, no, I was.

You can see the back of your own head if you get in close to a BH.

Or a hairdresser.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 13:07:27
From: party_pants
ID: 1373757
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

dv said:


I see. Y’all just fucking with me.

No. we were agreeing with you.

(sorry, somebody had to post that)

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 14:07:56
From: dv
ID: 1373768
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Kind of a shame Hawking did not live to see it

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 14:11:02
From: The Rev Dodgson
ID: 1373769
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

dv said:


I’ve pumped up the volume in order to highlight some kind of things, indicated by the arrows.

So is that some kind of … stuff? Possibly items?


It’s a little fuzzy, but I think that image clearly shows the outline of a turtle.

Clearly Terry Pratchett was right.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 14:15:37
From: Tamb
ID: 1373771
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

The Rev Dodgson said:


dv said:

I’ve pumped up the volume in order to highlight some kind of things, indicated by the arrows.

So is that some kind of … stuff? Possibly items?


It’s a little fuzzy, but I think that image clearly shows the outline of a turtle.

Clearly Terry Pratchett was right.

Are the four lumps fuzzy elephants?

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 14:16:44
From: dv
ID: 1373772
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Tamb said:


The Rev Dodgson said:

dv said:

I’ve pumped up the volume in order to highlight some kind of things, indicated by the arrows.

So is that some kind of … stuff? Possibly items?


It’s a little fuzzy, but I think that image clearly shows the outline of a turtle.

Clearly Terry Pratchett was right.

Are the four lumps fuzzy elephants?

Tis the inflamed ass of a baboon

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 14:42:53
From: buffy
ID: 1373773
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Tamb said:


The Rev Dodgson said:

dv said:

I’ve pumped up the volume in order to highlight some kind of things, indicated by the arrows.

So is that some kind of … stuff? Possibly items?


It’s a little fuzzy, but I think that image clearly shows the outline of a turtle.

Clearly Terry Pratchett was right.

Are the four lumps fuzzy elephants?

Possibly, but if it’s a view from above, the blob in the middle would be Cori Celesti? And the horseshoe shape would be the counterweight continent?

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 15:05:47
From: Tamb
ID: 1373775
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

buffy said:


Tamb said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

It’s a little fuzzy, but I think that image clearly shows the outline of a turtle.

Clearly Terry Pratchett was right.

Are the four lumps fuzzy elephants?

Possibly, but if it’s a view from above, the blob in the middle would be Cori Celesti? And the horseshoe shape would be the counterweight continent?

Of course. Perfect reasoning.

Reply Quote

Date: 11/04/2019 15:31:32
From: Ian
ID: 1373780
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

dv said:


I’ve pumped up the volume in order to highlight some kind of things, indicated by the arrows.

So is that some kind of … stuff? Possibly items?


Jean-Pierre Luminet’s 1979 black hole visualization. Using computer data, he drew several thousand black dots on a white sheet by hand and took a photographic negative to get the final image. Gas racing around the black hole toward us is brighter from a Doppler boost. The part of the gas disk behind the black hole is visible above it, because its light has been bent by the black hole’s gravity.

?

Reply Quote

Date: 12/04/2019 08:09:53
From: poikilotherm
ID: 1374080
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

apparently the ‘full pic’ true?

Reply Quote

Date: 12/04/2019 08:45:11
From: JudgeMental
ID: 1374099
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

poikilotherm said:


apparently the ‘full pic’ true?


http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2019/black_hole/

Reply Quote

Date: 12/04/2019 09:32:50
From: The Rev Dodgson
ID: 1374141
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

JudgeMental said:


poikilotherm said:

apparently the ‘full pic’ true?


http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2019/black_hole/

Thanks poik and Judge. The link looks well worth a read (from a quick scan).

The difference in the images from the two sources is interesting.

Reply Quote

Date: 12/04/2019 21:29:31
From: PermeateFree
ID: 1374639
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Reply Quote

Date: 15/04/2019 02:09:29
From: kii
ID: 1375323
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

From Misty S. Boyer. No idea who she is.

I have not checked ALL the links or read ALL the words.

“There’s a lot of news going on about the “black hole girl” right now, and how she’s being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.

Once Katie Bouman became the “face” of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her “the woman behind the black hole photo”, an assortment of people that I’m strongly inclined to call incels but won’t decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You’d have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.

And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote “the algorithm”, these people decided that “the algorithm” in question must be Chael’s.

So they looked at Chael’s GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael made 850,000 commits to the GitHub repository, while Katie Bouman made only 2,400.

“Oh my god!” they all said. “He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she’s the one getting all of the credit!”

They dug a little deeper – but not much – and discovered that the algorithm that “ultimately” generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

“She’s taken the credit from two men!” they gasped. “Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!”

There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. “She’s always said that this was a team effort,” they said. “We don’t blame her, we blame the media. She didn’t ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to.”

Meanwhile, Andrew Chael – a gay man – tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he’d spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn’t have happened without Katie.

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn’t want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman’s actual contributions were. As a programmer, I’m well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn’t count how many he did personally, someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000— it’s more than 2,400 right? Why call it “her” algorithm, then?

Because there’s more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don’t realize it.

I’ll work my way backward because it’s easier to explain that way.

The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It’s actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma’s algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to “stitch together” photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman, Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama, Michael Johnson, and Jose L Gomez. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques – an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML – to generate an image.

The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate.

And lo, that’s exactly what happened. The data wasn’t just good, it’s the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.

Data that would need to be sorted.

Clearly, it’s not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole’s data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for “Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors”.

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she’d been involved in since high school. But she had a theory that black holes have shadows, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called “clever algebraic solutions” to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

It’s called the CHIRP algorithm because that’s what she named it. It’s the only reason these images could be created, and it’s responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It’s the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can’t analyze or visualize data until it’s been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.

That’s what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing – data transformation – I can tell you it’s not easy. It’s not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet with only one month’s worth of programming for a single TV station!

Katie Bouman’s 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael’s work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman’s algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it’s far more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she’s only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at equal or less-than-equal contribution to others.

But I’m writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman “behind the black hole photo”, it is objectively true.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn’t just being a stand-up guy, he’s being literal.

And while it’s true that every one of the 200+ people involved placed an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project – and there usually is – then why shouldn’t it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy.

Edited:

Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I’m not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn’t have been complete.

So let’s take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

===========================================
2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it’s over 2K. I guess it’s gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

I’m going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn’t trying to write an essay so I didn’t put sources in and I didn’t ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I’m doing that now.

Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I’ll make corrects and credit them here.

Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She’s been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I’ve corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.

Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here:
https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/1116304522660519936…

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606
This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman’s contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-researcher-develop…
This goes into detail about Katie Bouman’s algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph “a grapefruit on the moon.” This also explains how Bouman’s algorithm made all of this work— it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs
This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attend she’s getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an…/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf
This is the paper based on Bouman’s work, where she’s listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I’m basing the ‘primary contributor’ interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging
This is Andrew Chael’s imaging library available on GitHub. It’s where our original “sleuths” discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn’t make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156
This is a paper describing Chael’s work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of ‘last author’ is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman’s paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman’s name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael’s specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
This is the official EHT telescope website. I can’t remember what I looked at here, it’s in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman’s project lead was.

https://twitter.com/thisgreyspir…/status/1116518544961830918
This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn’t write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn’t have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063/PT.6.1.2…/full/
This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman…
This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a “true mountain” of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-picture-captured-f…
This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to “stitch data across the EHT network” of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn’t the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html
This article explains Honma’s significant role. It describes what Honma’s algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is a part. While I intentionally highlight her contributions in defense of her, her statement that it was a team effort is true.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7”

Reply Quote

Date: 16/04/2019 00:31:09
From: kii
ID: 1375777
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-15/black-hole-photo-katie-bouman-trolls/11006820

Reply Quote

Date: 16/04/2019 00:32:37
From: Bubblecar
ID: 1375778
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

kii said:


https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-15/black-hole-photo-katie-bouman-trolls/11006820

Good to see them put in their place.

Reply Quote

Date: 16/04/2019 04:56:00
From: Tau.Neutrino
ID: 1375785
Subject: re: Black Hole Press Conference

Throw all the sexist trolls into the black hole, we don’t need them or their misinformation!

A sculptural, hand-made lamp inspired by black holes

Reply Quote