Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 547 posts

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#191

Post by billfruit »

CydeWeys wrote: post #181
billfruit wrote: post #171

Was making a photographic image the main aim of the project? Or is the image just a byproduct? I mean hard to imagine such a large project being taken up, for the benefit of public being able to see a picture of the black hole. Would this kind of multi telescope effort be capable of producing surface images of extra solar planets for example?

It wasn't a photographic image (they're using radio waves, not visible light). This is a visual representation of the radio waves. And yes, this is one way of representing the data. I'm not sure exactly what your question is though, as actually getting this data is really important to confirm a variety of theories and also to potentially open up new avenues for investigation. And this cost orders of magnitude less th…

Question is, what did the project aim to achieve? Take a picture of the black hole?

Or gather data that will help us study blackholes?

Because the press is largely focusing on the picture and not telling much else detail.

And is Boumans contributions to do with the making of this image?

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#192

Post by wallace_f »

nagVenkat wrote: post #160
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what you're seeing, I see news headlines and comments that are suggesting Dr Bouman worked alone. They just need "a" instead of "the", or "lead" if she's responsible as leader of a team. For me, I am slightly primed by the "Apollo code" story: the claim was (paraphrasing) "this programmer created all the code for the Apollo programme" with an image of a person standing with folders of printouts stacked up…

I can not believe you have written the last sentence without any sense of irony. We are just discussing about how stupid the LOC metric is and how most of the LOC Andrew write were machine generated. People were also saying that her commits were more math heavy. Anyway if you actually believe that there is a secret feminist agenda, I don’t think I can say anything that will change your mind.

There are, just factually speaking, a lot of headlines reading something like "this is the woman who wrote the code..."

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#193

Post by [deleted] »

titanix2 wrote: post #131
ralusek wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Exactly. The sheer fact that the headline use "Katie Bouman" instead of Dr. Bouman or name her at all shows that the important point conveyed by the title and the article is the sex of the researcher. Don't believe it? BBC didn't use the name of Pr. Honjo and Pr. Allison for the Nobel prize of Medecine. [1] I guess getting a Nobel prize is not important enough to be mentioned in headline... for men. [1] https://www.b…

[deleted]

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#194

Post by InitialLastName »

billfruit wrote: post #191
CydeWeys wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a photographic image (they're using radio waves, not visible light). This is a visual representation of the radio waves. And yes, this is one way of representing the data. I'm not sure exactly what your question is though, as actually getting this data is really important to confirm a variety of theories and also to potentially open up new avenues for investigation. And this cost orders of magnitude less th…

Question is, what did the project aim to achieve? Take a picture of the black hole? Or gather data that will help us study blackholes? Because the press is largely focusing on the picture and not telling much else detail. And is Boumans contributions to do with the making of this image?

I'm confused. Given that "images" are just data, how is taking a bunch of data about a black hole and combining it into a single "picture" of a black hole not also gathering data to help us study black holes?

As I understand it, the notability of the project is that it found a novel way to process data from coordinated data collectors scattered around the earth into a single coherent data set (with more resolution than any single collector could gather).

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#195

Post by bloopernova »

charliepark wrote: post #144
vonseel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb attitude. For every extraordinarily recognized academic/professional person, there’s always going to be many times more people who are never publicly recognized for their achievements. Maybe they fly under the radar, maybe they picked the wrong subject to focus on or industry for career, maybe their timing is bad, maybe there’s nothing wrong with them. I’m proud of this (stranger to me) girl for accomplishing so…

Agreed with you that her accomplishment is great. As in engineering, it's helpful to use proper terminology with people: if using a gender is necessary for the narrative … - under 13: girl - 13 – 18: girl / teenager / young woman (depends on context; 16? – 25?) - 18 or over: woman

Some additional anecdotal information on the above comment:

My wife absolutely loathes being called "girl". It is used to reinforce the toxic idea that women are less mature and capable than men. Same feeling from other women that I've discussed this with.

18 or over = woman.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#196

Post by CydeWeys »

billfruit wrote: post #191
CydeWeys wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a photographic image (they're using radio waves, not visible light). This is a visual representation of the radio waves. And yes, this is one way of representing the data. I'm not sure exactly what your question is though, as actually getting this data is really important to confirm a variety of theories and also to potentially open up new avenues for investigation. And this cost orders of magnitude less th…

Question is, what did the project aim to achieve? Take a picture of the black hole? Or gather data that will help us study blackholes? Because the press is largely focusing on the picture and not telling much else detail. And is Boumans contributions to do with the making of this image?

Did you watch the announcement press conferences and Katie's TED talk? All this info is out there. Start with the links from yesterday on the HN story.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#197

Post by gyaru »

growlist wrote: post #102
baq wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may inspire women to pursue a career in computer science. Is it bad even if it's political?

As it happens I only have vision in one eye. In her position would I want the headlines to begin 'Visually-impaired scientist..'? Personally I would find this patronising.

Are you comparing being visually-impaired with being a woman?

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#198

Post by edraferi »

nagVenkat wrote: post #160
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what you're seeing, I see news headlines and comments that are suggesting Dr Bouman worked alone. They just need "a" instead of "the", or "lead" if she's responsible as leader of a team. For me, I am slightly primed by the "Apollo code" story: the claim was (paraphrasing) "this programmer created all the code for the Apollo programme" with an image of a person standing with folders of printouts stacked up…

I can not believe you have written the last sentence without any sense of irony. We are just discussing about how stupid the LOC metric is and how most of the LOC Andrew write were machine generated. People were also saying that her commits were more math heavy. Anyway if you actually believe that there is a secret feminist agenda, I don’t think I can say anything that will change your mind.

Don’t think GP supports that statement. That post just explains why the earlier lost was miffed about the commit log.

It’s disappointing to see this celebration of an amazing technical achievement devolve into a contentious meta-analysis inspired by the USA’s broken politics.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#199

Post by seaish »

CydeWeys wrote: post #189
dave84 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She’s literally standing in front of a sign on the stage that says TEDxBeaconStreet.

I meant on the channel branding, intro, etc. Usually when these things are TEDx they say so really obviously. Did this talk's status get upgraded?

The main TED channel occasionally reposts talks from TEDx conferences. This one should be the original posting: https://youtu.be/P7n2rYt9wfU

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#200

Post by wallace_f »

spyckie2 wrote: post #79

from her paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 > Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) is a technique for imaging celestial radio emissions by simultaneously observing a source from telescopes distributed across Earth. The challenges in reconstructing images from fine angular resolution VLBI data are immense. The data is extremely sparse and noisy, thus requiring statistical image models such as those designed i…

>large diameters due to the inverse relationship between angular resolution and telescope diameter.

Not trained in this field, but this reads like a certain mistype. Shouldn't resolution increase with telescope diameter?

Post reply on HN