Capitalogix

Photographing a Supermassive Black Hole: The Gravity of This Situation is Immeasurable

The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing. - Frodo seeing Sauron through the Mirror of Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring

The Event Horizon Telescope just released the first-ever image of a black hole ... specifically a supermassive black hole with a mass 6.5 billion times heavier than our sun. This behemoth of a black hole is over 50 million light-years away in a galaxy we call M87. The little blob (in the picture below) is 25 billion miles across, and the bright part is brighter than all of the billions of other stars in that galaxy combined.  To put it in context ... the black hole, shown below, is larger than our entire Solar System. 

Here's a link to the original RAW (183 mb) image. 

 

via National Science Foundation

The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun

In my opinion, the black hole image is even more amazing when you zoom out and see the entire m87 galaxy. The little black dot inside the orange is the black hole.

 

via NASA/CXC/VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY/J. NEILSEN 

To take a step back, a black hole is a celestial object that has a gravitational field so strong that light cannot escape it and that is believed to be created especially in the collapse of a very massive star.  It warps spacetime and superheats all surrounding materials. 

“In space no one can hear you scream; and in a black hole, no one can see you disappear.” 
― Stephen Hawking

Before today, black holes had only been observed indirectly. We had math that "proved it."  Now, we have direct, observable, and corroborated evidence for everyone to see.

Do you understand the gravity of that? 

In my lifetime, Black holes have gone from a fringe theory to a possibility, to a probability, and now, to reality.  

It is amazing to think about how right Einstein's theory of general relativity was ... especially considering that he did the math in 1915, before we had the technology and science to back it up.  The basic idea is that the relative velocity of light doesn't change, therefore it must be a constant in our universe. Using his math, we were able to predict how a black hole would "look", and it was supported by the Event Horizon Telescope's image. 

Veritasium puts understanding the image into better perspective. Check it out. 

 

via Veritasium 

For a side note, the first proposal of black holes actually goes back to John Michell in 1784

"If there should really exist in nature any bodies, whose density is not less than that of the sun, and whose diameters are more than 500 times the diameter of the sun, since their light could not arrive at us; or if there should exist any other bodies of a somewhat smaller size, which are not naturally luminous; of the existence of bodies under either of these circumstances, we could have no information from sight; yet, if any other luminous bodies should happen to revolve about them we might still perhaps from the motions of these revolving bodies infer the existence of the central ones with some degree of probability, as this might afford a clue to some of the apparent irregularities of the revolving bodies, which would not be easily explicable on any other hypothesis; but as the consequences of such a supposition are very obvious, and the consideration of them somewhat beside my present purpose, I shall not prosecute them any further." 

It took a massive amount of work to produce the photos of the black hole shown in this post. The ingredients: 200 researchers, 20 years, over 9 petabytes of data, 8 telescopes, and immense vision. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it also took the 104 years of research since Einstein's theory. 

Powerful stuff. 

For more:

• Here's a Reddit "Ask Us Anything" with the scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope 
• Here's a TED talk from Dr. Katie Bouman in 2017, about taking a photo of the black hole.  Katie went to MIT and led the creation of a new algorithm that helped produced today's image.
• Here are the six published papers by the EHT on today's achievement
• Here's another great video from the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics on today's image 

Robocalls and Taxes: These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

What're everyone's two favorite things? Paying taxes and receiving robocalls, obviously. 

Phone scammers used to just target the elderly or those with poor English skills, but today, they go after everyone. In fact, Americans received over 30 billion robocalls last year ... and it's only getting worse. Around half of those are "legal," but more and more are scams.

Those scams increase during tax season. 

Several of my friends have received calls from the "IRS" demanding immediate payment. That is a scam. The IRS has stated repeatedly, they will not call you asking for your credit card numbers over the phone, they will not threaten lawsuits, and they will not call you unless they've already tried reaching you by mail. 

According to the FTC, robocall complaints in March and April are 20% higher. They're the icing on the tax season cake. 

 

via allareacodes

 

If increased robocalls weren't enough, you can expect your refund to be 8% lower than last year. Though the average refund is still several thousand dollars, and my home state of Texas can expect the highest returns. 

 

via HowMuch

Texas tops the list (Everything IS bigger in Texas) with $3,206 as the average tax refund. Maine inhabitants bottom out the list with $2,336.

It's worth mentioning that these refunds represent federal figures, and don't take into account any refunds from your state government - meaning there's likely more money flowing back to taxpayers than this map illustrates. 

What many people don’t understand is that the size of your tax refund isn’t solely based on tax cuts or raises.

Getting a refund feels like a win, but it represents an interest-free loan to the government for the last year. In an ideal world, you'd have a refund of $0 - meaning you paid exactly what you were supposed to.

Don't forget to file your taxes (Monday, April 15th is the deadline to file without an extension) and if you want to protect yourself from robocallers, here are some tips: 

• Don't answer calls from unknown phone numbers - let them go to voicemail and call back if necessary
• If you do accidentally answer a spam call, don't press any buttons or speak, as that simply alerts them that they've reached a working phone number
• Don't call a scammer back, and don't engage with them ... it's like talking with cops, Anything you say can and will be used against you 
• To decrease legal calls sign up for the federal and state do not call lists
• Check out CTIA's tip sheet on How to Stop Robocalls to see a list of apps available to prevent robocalls on your mobile OS

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - April 7th, 2019

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• Scientists Plead to Stop Creation of Killer Robots: We're at 'The Brink of a New Arms Race'. (FoxNews)
• Moratorium on Human Genome Editing: Time to Get It Right. (HastingsCenter)
• 'Those Who Obeyed the Rules Were Favored by Evolution'.(Spiegel)
• Meet the World's Oldest Confirmed Person, 116-Year-Old Kane Tanaka. (TwistedSifter)
• Why Democrats Want to Abolish the Electoral College and Republicans Want to Keep It. (Fortune)

Trading Links:

• Why Companies that Wait to Adopt AI May Never Catch Up.(HBR)
• Iranian Hackers Have Hit Hundreds of Companies in past Two Years. (Wall Street Journal)
• What is an Inverted Yield Curve and What Does It Really Mean? (TheStreet)
• S&P 500 Posts Best First Quarter in 21 Years. (FoxBusiness)
• Bill Gates is Back in the $100 Billion Club, and Not All Thanks to Microsoft. (CNW)

 

 

Sardines in a Tincan Hurtling Through The Air

I fly a lot.

In fact, I just hit five million "butt-in-seat" miles on American Airlines. 

 

 

I don't expect to continue at this place forever ... but now is the time to push.

I have a different workflow when I travel, and it works for me.

Ultimately, I believe that good things happen when you are in motion! 

Many people, however, are focused on the hassle.

The practical realities of travel mean I spend some time thinking about the things airlines do well or poorly.  Nonetheless, I appreciate the benefits more than the frustrations.

Yes, it is true ... Status means much less today than it used to.  Every week it feels like they make the space between seats smaller while the time for finding overhead luggage space gets shorter. 

Yet, the planes themselves are getting better.  Here, for example, is what an empty 787 looks like. 

 

 

It looks more like a set from Star Trek then the hellscape passengers complain about on a regular basis. 

What about the boarding process? 

Here is a video that presents the findings from studies on experimental boarding methods that work better. 

 

via CGP Grey

If you really don't like commercial flying, you can fly on any of the "economical" private options like JetSmarter or WheelsUp. Or, better yet, you could be like this guy and buy the world's only private Boeing 787 Dreamliner. 

 

via Sam Chui

You can rent it out for a measly $70k an hour ... What a bargain!

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - March 31st, 2019

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

 

• 7 Odd Traits Geniuses, Masters and Entrepreneurs All Have in Common.(Forbes)
• Nest Founder: I Wake up in Cold Sweats Thinking, What Did We Bring to the World?. (FastCompany)
• Bill Gates: AI is like Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Energy in Danger and Promise. (Vox)
• Artificial Intelligence and Ethics. (HarvardMagazine)
• These are All the World's Major Religions in One Map. (WEForum)

 

Trading Links:

• Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn't Mean the Algorithms Aren't out to Get You. (TimHarford)
• Here are the Top Risks on Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon's Radar.(Finance)
• UBS CEO Says this is One of the Worst First-quarter Environments in History. (CNBC)
• Apple Sold 35 Million AirPods in 2018, Currently Most Popular 'Hearable' Brand. (AppleInsider)
• Facebook, Google and Other Big Tech Giants are about to Face a Reckoning, State Attorneys General Warn. (Washington Post)

Celebrating 30 Years of the Internet [Infographic]

"The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow" - Bill Gates

We take the internet for granted.  Honestly, we take a lot for granted.

Do you remember a time before cell phones, before the internet, before all these science fiction realities.  Even when the internet started … do you remember dial-up ... or when you needed dial-up for each individual site?

In March of 1989, Tim Berners-Lee published “Information Management: A Proposal” which outlined his vision for what would soon become the World Wide Web. March 12^th is the official anniversary.

In celebration of 30 years of the internet, here’s an infographic on the timeline. Click to see the full thing. 

 

 via AppInstitute

Think of the impact of that one paper has on so many aspects of our life. 

 

Information Gathering 

I remember being in law school, going to the library and scanning through microfiche (or actual books) to study or do research.

I remember reading encyclopedias (and photocopying relevant articles). 

I remember paying for newsletters that were mailed to me (or paying extra for fax delivery).

Having access to more data or faster delivery was a huge advantage.

Today, you have all the information you could ever ask for at the tip of your fingers ... Google and Wikipedia are just the tip of the iceberg.

There is almost too much information now.  It is hard to separate the signal from the noise.  It seems like anyone can find justification for almost anything.  The result is lots of data, but too little knowledge.

Part of what is needed is a way to help people make better decisions about what to trust, what it means, and what to use.

 

Social Interaction

People record every moment, every intimate detail of their lives online, contrasted by a fear of strangers and letting children roam. 

While riding around the neighborhood on your bike to see if your friends could come out to play is by no means outlawed - it does seem passé. 

Chat rooms, Facebook, Online multi-player ... many people's key friendships are born and kept online. 

I remember my son, 13 years old at the time,  sending 10,000+ texts a month and thinking it was a phase. I was wrong. 

The internet has radically changed the structure of relationships - for better, or often worse. 

 

Privacy ( ... or the lack of it)

One of the biggest changes is that we as individuals have become productized. We take advantage of all these free resources at the cost of being pixeled and cookied into oblivion. We've chosen convenience over safety. 

Remember, if you’re not paying for a product - you are the product.

Little bits of our private information, demographics, and psychographics are sold to advertisers to create smarter ads, new offers, and realistically we have very little control over that.

It’s been proven time and time again that these giants like Google and Facebook will find ways to sneak your data to advertisers even when it’s “illegal” with a slap on the wrist.

Data protection is a massive issue not only for corporations but for individuals. While many companies are trying to manage your privacy while still monetizing your data, there are just as many companies who couldn’t care less.

The GPDR - while frustrating for many - is a step towards protecting individuals.

Every action has a reaction, and every benefit has a cost. The internet is an amazing tool - but it can also be a weapon. 

 

What will the next 30 years of the internet hold?

"The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won't even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room." — Eric Schmidt

It has been 30 years since inception, and there's radical growth. 

We’ve gone from bit speeds to megabyte speeds. We’ve gone from crappy-quality video taking hours to download to streaming HD quality video live.

How do imagine that the internet will evolve?

What influence do you think the Internet of Things will have?

It’s hard to foresee how innovation and regulation will change the internet, but it’s clear there will be change.

We live in exciting times!

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - March 17th, 2019

The US grounded the Boeing 737 Max after similarities between two crashes. It's good they did, safety first, but it definitely caused some headaches coming back from Saskatchewan.  There's an interesting thought experiment here to understand the complexities that the airlines had to solve.

Imagine a 737 holds 200 people and does 4 or 5 flights a day. American has 24 737s in its fleet. That means each day ~24,000 people are displaced on American Airlines alone. They're replacing those planes with smaller regional jets – meaning more flights, more small airports, and more delays. The logistical/supply chain dynamics are a nightmare. 

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• DARPA's New AI, Machine Learning 'Breakthrough'. (Realcleardefense)
• Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life inside Tesla's Production Hell. (Wired)
• The Psychology behind Costco's Free Samples. (The Atlantic)
• The Fall of Rome and the Lessons for America. (Time)
• How Timeboxing Works and Why It Will Make You More Productive. (HBR)

 

 

Trading Links:

• Despite Store Closings, There's Still One Blockbuster Store Left in the World. (USAToday)
• Oracle's Larry Ellison Has a $1 Billion Stake in Tesla. (TheStreet)
• Mansa Musa: the Richest Man Who Ever Lived. (BBC)
• Amazon Go Cashierless Stores are Coming to Airports. (VentureBeat)
• Millions of Japanese Homes are Abandoned, and Owners are Giving Them Away for Free. (BusinessInsider)

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - February 17th, 2019

NASA's Mars Opportunity Rover has officially lost contact with earth after a fierce dust storm. Its last message was "My battery is getting low and it's getting dark." The rover's original mission was scheduled for 90 days ... it lasted 14 years. 

 

via XKCD

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links

• A Quantum Future Awaits. (Science)
• Can We Make Artificial Intelligence Ethical? (Washington Post)
• Life's Secret Ingredient: A Radical Theory of What Makes Things Alive. (NewScientist)
• What Does "Dead" Mean? the Debate Continues Some 50 Years after Harvard Defined Death. (Forbes)
• Scientists Have Built a Real Star Trek 'Replicator' that Builds Objects with Light. (ScienceAlert)

 

Trading Links

• Warning: Stocks Have Only Been Stretched this Thin Once in the past 150 Years. (MarketWatch)
• From the Year When Nothing Worked in the Financial Markets to the Month When Everything Did. (CNBC)
• Mark Zuckerberg Adds $6.2 Billion in a Day, Vaulting to No. 5 Richest in World. (OCRegister)
• American Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager Has Spent $700M on Personal Real Estate in Five Years. (CNW)
• There's a New Movie Coming out about High-speed Trading on Wall Street, and It Looks Bonkers. (BizInsider)

 

 

The Bizarre and Surreal Works of Deep Learning AI

One thing that Deep Learning excels in is analyzing pictures & videos, and creating facsimiles or combining styles. If you want to create art with deep learning look no further than the Deep Dream Generator or deepart.io which use Convolutional Neural Networks to combine your photo with an art style (if you want to do it on your phone another cool tool to check out is Prisma). 

via SubSubRoutine

Deepfake is it's exactly what it sounds like ... the use "Deep Learning" to "Fake" a recording.  For example, a machine learning technique called a Generative Adversarial Network can be used to superimpose images onto a source video.  That is how they made this fun (and disturbing) Deepfake of Jennifer Lawrence and Steve Buscemi.

 

via YouTube

While this is a fun example, Deepfakes create very real concerns. They're often used for more "nefarious" purposes (e.g., to create fake celebrity or revenge porn and to otherwise make important figures say things they never said).  It's likely you've seen videos of Trump or Obama created with this technology.   But it is easy to imagine someone faking evidence used at trial, trying to influence business transactions, or using this to support or slander causes in the media.

As fakes get better and easier to produce, they will likely be used more often.  So, as a reminder, don't trust everything you see on the internet. 

But also ... Technology is pretty freaking cool. Right?

 

The Pale Blue Dot: Life, Mankind, and the Universe

In 1977, the Voyager 1 launched into space.   Just over a dozen years later, the Voyager 1 spacecraft had traveled farther than any spacecraft/probe/human-made anything had gone before.  It was approximately 6 billion kilometers away from earth.  At that point, the Voyager 1 was "told" by Carl Sagan to turn around and take one last photo of the Earth ... a pale blue dot. 

The resulting photo is impressive precisely because it shows so little in so much.

 

"Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."  – Carl Sagan

Earth is in the far right sunbeam –  a little below halfway down the image. This image (and the ability to send it back to earth) was the culmination of years of effort, the advancement of technology, and the dreams of mankind.

The resulting speech from Carl Sagan is still profound, moving, and worth a listen. 

 

Carl Sagan via YouTube
 

Here's the transcript:

 

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

 

Today, we have people living in space, posting videos from the ISS, and high-resolution images of space and galaxies near and far. 

We take for granted the immense phase shift in technology. You have more computing power in your pocket than we first used to go to the moon. 

As humans, we're wired to think locally and linearly. We evolved to live our lives in small groups, to fear outsiders, and to stay in a general region until we die. We're not wired to think about the billions and billions of individuals on our planet, or the rate of technological growth - or the minuteness of that all in regard to the expanse of space.  

However, today's reality necessitates we think about the world, our impact, and what's now possible for us.

We created better and faster ways to travel, we've created instantaneous communication networks across vast distances, and we've created megacities. Our tribes have gotten much bigger - and with that, our ability to enact massive change has grown as well. 

Space was the first bastion of today's innovation, but today we can look toward A.I., medicine, epigenetics, and more. 

It's hard to comprehend the scale of the universe and the scale of our potential ... but that's what makes it worth exploring!

Onwards!