OT black hole pic.

That indicates you comprehend neither the scientific method nor why experiments are done.

That's a /remarkable/ blind spot in someone that posts on a scientific/engineering board.

But somehow it doesn't surprise me. :(

BITD making an IBM logo in some novel fashion was a good way to get a nice bonus. Making chips that way is ridiculously uneconomic, from that day to this.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Phil Hobbs wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@supernews.com:

It was a mere one off to show the capacity of the technology at the time.

A bigger advance was liquid photolithography, which is what has us now below 22nm feature sizes. We are now at 14nm and 7nm even. Wow!

We do some pretty fancy pulling pushing and shoving of electrons around on little pieces of finely structured earth.

"Over-hyped" is a subjective judgement, and John Larkin doesn't know much about physics or science, making his judgement in this particular area even more fallible than usual.

If you are looking at a radio-frequency image, it's difficult to imagine what true-colorised would be. The image was colour-coded to display more information than you could put into a shades of grey image.

And if the data hadn't been heavily processed there wouldn't have been any kind of image to see.

Probably, but there is a great deal of it - you'd probably have to negotiate an expensive deal if you wanted to copy it onto your own computer system (which probably hasn't got the capacity to store all of it).

Other posters have suggested that this is exactly what's going on - there has even been some discussion of the volume of data invlvoed.

Einstein was right even when he thought he was wrong.

Einstein was once right when he though he was wrong. It might be unwise to generalise - even if you aren't John Larkin.

Does any animal (on this planet) have the ability to see images at 1.2mm?

They couldn't use bog-standard 8TB discs, since at that altitude the air is too thin to allow the head to "fly". Hence they used helium-filled discs.

Everything about this is impressive.

They are almost always false coloured to allow you to see the necessary dynamic range on print media. My only objection to the media presentation is that it makes little sense to supply 5k pixel artwork for an image that has at most 1000 independent individual pixels in it.

The thermal CLUT they have used looks to me like one of the ones that preserves intensity so convert to greyscale will give you a monochrome version (traditionally this was done when big colour monitors were horrendously expensive and only used when the greyscale image was already the best you could possibly make from the data).

I would rather like to see what they get if they zoom out somewhat - say by a factor of 10.

The papers propose doing exactly that to increase the number of targets where this technique could image the accretion disk.

Yes. But it is a nightmare to make it stay on the fringes. Already been done at MRAO Cambridge using the old munitions bunkers as thermally stable delay lines for the phase compensators COAST - the telescope that sings (as its servos chase the white light fringe).

Snag is that in the optical you need a lot of beam splitters and it will only work on very bright sources. It took genius level experimental technique to get anything useful at all through UK skies!

Much more sensible locations at altitude now have built optical interferometers using radio astronomy techniques at (near) optical wavelengths - ISTR they are just near IR in practice.

Magdalens ridge observatory is one such

Doing it at mm wavelengths and on VLBI baselines was the obvious next step but it really is an astonishing achievement to make it work so well. SgrA* could have more detail when they get a handle on it.

A lunar eclipse can be very impressive and would have been terrifying to the ancients if they didn't know what was going on. You can get anything from pale orange to blood red colour in total lunar eclipse.

Last one visible from the UK required getting up at 3am to see it.

Immersion litho is certainly a help, but the main thing that allows 193 nm light to print smaller patterns is the high contrast of photoresist.

Modern litho (i.e. in the last 10 years or so) forces chip patterns to consist mostly of parallel lines with additional steps to cut them. The high density comes from multiple patterning, i.e. you print one set of narrow lines, bake, develop, spin more resist, bake, print another set offset from the previous one, lather rinse repeat.

Initially it was double patterning, but at 10 nm they're doing it at least 4 times per level. Ex Pen $ive.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yes indeed.

I saw my first blood moon eclipse by accident on a very clear winter's night in 1976.

It made such an impression that I can still visualise it in my mind's eye.

I also saw the total solar eclipse in Cornwall; the clouds opened up (mostly) for the necessary 10 minutes Despite it being a big media event, there were no TV cameras /there/ to record it.

Whenever I feel I am being unduly pessimistic, I remind myself that somethings do go /right/ at the last minute.

Be interesting to know what E. would have made of the more recent discovery regarding the increasing rate of expansion. I'm guessing that would have clusterfucked even *his* brain.

-- This message may be freely reproduced without limit or charge only via the Usenet protocol. Reproduction in whole or part through other protocols, whether for profit or not, is conditional upon a charge of GBP10.00 per reproduction. Publication in this manner via non-Usenet protocols constitutes acceptance of this condition.

If I understood correctly, the image extends to 120 x 120 uarcsec and the VLBI resolution is 20 uarcsec so the image is created from 6 x 6 or 36 pixels, which is then upconverted to give a pleasing image.

In practice you always oversample the image by at least 1.5x and for something so hard like this probably a more conservative 2-2.5x.

They imply that they are using super resolution by imposing the positivity constraint so a rule of thumb says that they can probably infer fine details out to about 3x the classical Rayleigh definition. Signal to noise and computing time permitting that is. Light detail on a dark background is much easier (so we are lucky that empty sky is dark).

I remember that one. I tried to film it with a stop motion Chinon 8mm cine camera modified to have its trigger automatically pressed by a modified relay solenoid. It didn't work all that well.

It was pot luck on the day. I know my friends with the BBC were clouded out and they had to use live footage from an aircraft above the clouds.

Luckily I was in France for that having driven rather further than I had intended from my intended location after looking at the meteosat images. I knew that UK total eclipse was coming from when I was at school but never imagined that I would actually be overseas when it happened.

Luck always plays a part with astronomical observations.

Unlikely. The extra information that has become available since Einstein di ed (in 1955) could have been sufficient to lead him to a more satisfactory synthesis than anybody has come up with.

The four papers he wrote in 1904 were all spectacular steps forward in four rather different areas. General relativity took him a bit longer, but it s till predated the observational data that showed that the universe was expa nding, which was known from the mid-1920s, though it wasn't really sorted o ut until the 1950s.

He derived the concepts of black holes and stimulated emission, then wrongly assumed that bh's would not actually exist and that lasers were thermodynamically forbidden [1]. He probably got the cosmological constant idea wrong+right.

Yikes. The public image involves some serious artistic license.

I wonder what the 36 pix image looks like.

Even EUV is going to multiple patterning, which kind of undercuts its economics.