
Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image - tigerlily
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47891902
======
telesilla
Congratulations Katie! It's beautiful to see something that I hoped would be
real, especially after seeing Interstellar's gorgeous rendition. And may you
inspire hundreds of thousands of girls to enter the fields of science and
technology.

------
spyckie2
from her paper:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413](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 in the computer vision community. In this paper we present a novel
> Bayesian approach for VLBI image reconstruction. While other methods often
> require careful tuning and parameter selection for different types of data,
> our method (CHIRP) produces good results under different settings such as
> low SNR or extended emission. The success of our method is demonstrated on
> realistic synthetic experiments as well as publicly available real data. We
> present this problem in a way that is accessible to members of the
> community, and provide a dataset website (vlbiimaging.csail.mit.edu) that
> facilitates controlled comparisons across algorithms.

What strikes me as really amazing is the cross functional nature of these
modern achievements. I did not realize that this image was created with
statistical image models and a Bayesian approach.

Also, this link included ->
[http://vlbiimaging.csail.mit.edu/](http://vlbiimaging.csail.mit.edu/)
introduces the field and offers a good explanation for those interested in
learning more:

> Imaging distant celestial sources with high resolving power requires
> telescopes with prohibitively large diameters due to the inverse
> relationship between angular resolution and telescope diameter. However, by
> simultaneously collecting data from an array of telescopes located around
> the Earth, it is possible to emulate samples from a single telescope with a
> diameter equal to the maximum distance between telescopes in the array.
> Using multiple telescopes in this manner is referred to as very long
> baseline interferometry (VLBI).

~~~
wallace_f
>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?

~~~
blattimwind
No. Angular resolution is essentially the angular distance between two points
that are still resolved as separate points. So if your resolution increases,
angular resolution decreases, because you can resolve two points that are
closer together.

~~~
wallace_f
Thanks. I read the Wiki on the matter; should have gone straight there instead
of asking. After understanding what it is, _angular resolution_ does make
perfect sense a term, but at first glance was certainly a bit
counterintuitive.

~~~
Rooster61
I think the reason it's confusing is that the way that bit in the article is
worded does little to imply that you want a LOW angular resolution, and it
doesn't directly mention resolution in and of itself (which is understood to
have an inverse relationship with angular resolution, as it is directly
affected by diameter).

It took me several rereads and reading the comments here to understand that we
want low numbers for angular resolution.

I suppose it's fairly obvious for one well-versed in optics, but to the layman
(like me) it's initially opaque.

~~~
wallace_f
Yea. Measured in radians/degrees a lower number is a "higher pixel
resolution."

------
amai
She also has a newer paper, which gives a glimpse on what the people of EHT
are up next:

Reconstructing Video from Interferometric Measurements of Time-Varying Sources
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01357](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01357)

So maybe we will also see a video of a black hole, soon.

------
morrbo
I see a lot of mention on various forums about the storage they used (5pb) but
am just wondering if anyone know what kind of backend they used to house this?
From what I saw there were too many disks - in the wrong type of enclosure -
to be running on a single server, which suggests multiple physical servers.
I've seen a prior CERN research paper on gluster and ceph (iirc) and am just
wondering if anyone in the know could enlighten me?

~~~
andrelaszlo
The WaPo article also references a few of the interesting issues they had:

"Then they spent the two years parsing literal truckloads of data, some of
which had to be shipped on hard drives from the South Pole and defrosted
outside a supercomputer facility at MIT."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/10/see-
black-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/10/see-black-hole-
first-time-images-event-horizon-telescope/)

I'd love to read more about this if anyone has an article with more details.

------
melling
Katie gave a TED talk:

[https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs](https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs)

~~~
dennisgorelik
It is an interesting presentation, but I do NOT understand Katie's explanation
about how they were going to minimize the bias [to "see" already predicted
black hole visualization] while creatively interpreting inputs from sparsely
placed telescopes around the earth.

Do you understand Katie's explanation?

~~~
QuotedForTruth
Disclaimer: this is based on watching the talk and some basic machine learning
knowledge. Im no expert.

They have a sparse set of data that is part of an image. They have trained a
model to look at the sparse set and make an educated guess about what the full
image looks like. They do this by feeding it full images.

The full images you feed into the model thus have an effect on the final image
generated. In order to see how large that effect is, they trained different
versions of the model with different sets of complete images. Some were images
of what we thought a black hole looked like. There is potential that this
heavily influences the model and ensures that the output looks like what we
expect it to, even if that isnt actually true.

They also trained the model with non-blackhole images. Since the output of the
model was approximately the same, this indicates that the resulting output
picture doesnt look like what we think a black hole looks like just because it
was trained with black hole images. It likely really looks like that.

The model doesn't need to be told what a black hole looks like. The sparse
measurements combined with knowledge of how sparse data can be combined to
form a generic image is enough. The model learned that the sparse data is not
likely pure noise, instead there are shapes and lines and gradients that
relate the sparse data points to each other.

Her analogy of sketch artists is good. If you have a functionally complete
description and give it to 3 sketch artists from different cultures who are
used to different looking people, they will still draw the same person.
However if your description isnt actually detailed enough, their sketches will
significantly differ as they use their existing knowledge and bias to fill in
the gaps with what they think is likely.

~~~
jamestenglish
Not OP, but I too am confused. I understood the sketch artist analogy but that
didn't seem related to this point:

>They also trained the model with non-blackhole images. Since the output of
the model was approximately the same, this indicates that the resulting output
picture doesnt look like what we think a black hole looks like just because it
was trained with black hole images. It likely really looks like that.

If you are feeding non-blackhole images in and getting blackhole results out,
wouldn't that be indicative of an over-trained model? Her other analogy was we
can't rule out that there is an elephant at the center of the galaxy, but it
sounds like if you feed a picture of an elephant in you'll get a picture of a
blackhole out?

~~~
pricecomstock
From what I understand, the training input images are just to establish the
relationship between sparse data points and full image, regardless of subject
matter. Since they were getting the black hole picture out of the trained
model regardless of how it was trained, it's likely that the model was
producing accurate results of what the "camera" was pointed at. If they had
pointed it at an elephant, the model would have produced a picture of
something elephant-like because it was somewhat accurately reconstructing a
full image from sparse data points.

~~~
dennisgorelik
> getting the black hole picture out of the trained model regardless of how it
> was trained

Did they try to feed random noise into their trained image builder?

I suspect that the output of that trained image builder is always the same
"black hole", even with random noise as an input.

~~~
QuotedForTruth
Probably not with random noise. With random noise there is literally no
connection between pixels. With any actual picture there are connections. Like
for instance a pixel is more likely to be the value of its neighbor or nearly
so than any random value. This follows from the fact that the pictures are of
actual objects with physical properties that determine the value of the pixel
that maps to them. Most of the image can be characterized by continuous
gradients with occasional edges.

I think if you trained with random noise you would get random noise output.

------
brootstrap
I just want to see what she named her jupyter notebook.
'black_hole_v4_new_FINAL.ipynb'

------
godelmachine
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Bouman](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Bouman)

------
streb-lo
Serious question HN:

If Katie was a man do you think people would be going through git histories
and their published papers trying to determine if she is being over-credited
for her achievements?

~~~
anonytrary
People are already doing this on Reddit[0][1], and it's pretty silly because
they obviously have no idea how Github or scientific research works. There's
an effort underway to undermine Katie Bouman's contributions and it's
absolutely ridiculous.

Edit: I just checked Twitter, apparently there are thousands of idiots who
believe this "850,000/900,000 lines written by Andrew, therefore he wrote the
algorithm" narrative. It's amazing how willing people are to eat up a low-
hanging narrative as long as it confirms their world-view. All it takes is a
very crude understanding of how software development works to see through this
narrative.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/bbykvf/ka...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/bbykvf/katie_bouman_should_not_be_getting_credit_for_the/)

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bbuvff/this_is_andrew...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bbuvff/this_is_andrew_chael_he_wrote_850000_of_the/)

~~~
claudiawerner
This[0] comment seems to be another in that vein, though it seems to have more
details, even if it repeats the 850k lines stat which doesn't really hold up.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bbql1i/this_is_dr_kat...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bbql1i/this_is_dr_katie_bouman_the_computer_scientist/ekmy2su/)

~~~
anonytrary
The analysis you linked to seems to be vastly misrepresenting Andrew Chael's
contribution. Quote from the link:

> Andrew Chael wrote 850k out of the 900k lines of code. He was also the
> leader of the project. Michael D. Johnson wrote 12k lines of code.
> Chanchikwan wrote 5k lines of code. The woman? Only wrote 2.4k lines of
> code.

It's a little bit unbelievable that the author of this comment
(/u/dragonballcell) nailed all of these fine-grained details (red herrings,
perhaps?) and yet glossed over an incredibly important _and_
superficial/trivial detail: that Andrew Chael did not "write 850k LOC", he
generated _hundreds_ of thousands of lines of data and committed them to the
repo. Needless to say, I think this whole drama is incredibly pointless.

------
billfruit
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?

~~~
CydeWeys
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 than Hubble, whose
purpose was also to generate photographs, seeing as how they simply connected
together existing radio telescopes.

The point was to demonstrate that this technique is feasible. Now they can use
it to image all sorts of other stuff and learn lots more.

~~~
billfruit
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?

~~~
InitialLastName
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).

~~~
bartimus
It also appears to have confirmed some of Einstein's theories (from what I
understood)

------
ilarum
Relevant repository - [https://github.com/achael/eht-
imaging](https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging)

~~~
darkpuma
> [https://github.com/achael/eht-
> imaging/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/achael/eht-
> imaging/graphs/contributors)

Huh, I wonder how accurate this is. All the code is beyond me in any case, I'm
in no position to judge the relative value of any of it.

~~~
telesilla
This is deeply offensive. I'm the owner and founder of my company and I
haven't written any meaningful code for our core products in 10 years. Our
github repo has barely a scratch from me in it. Does this make my work, my
hard long hours in managing my team and designing the product, worthless?

~~~
vertis
It's offensive and frustrating. I don't understand why people have to try and
pull holes in this kind of celebration like there is some conspiracy to
promote Katie at the cost of others.

If I read it right, she mentioned and praised her team as well.

------
roguecoder
Hacker’s News is so sexist they can’t just find the joy in this algorithm
genius’ success. She solved one of those hard technical problems we always
talk about, and the world is richer for it.

------
daosulta
Redirect your confusion towards that unprofessional media outlet. What Dr.
Bouman has to do with this? Read or listen to her interviews, she always
highlights that it was a team effort.

------
old_rot
Mega Science projects are always huge collaborative efforts. This remarkable
scientific achievement is now unfairly focused on an individual. Lets compare
this with a couple of other mega science discoveries. The gravitational waves
detection discovery was not attributed to any single individual. The
collaboration got the credit for it. Back in 2012 when ATLAS experiment at
CERN announced the discovery of Higgs boson, the collaboration spokesperson
Fabiola Gianotti made the announcement through quite an impressive
presentation of the results. Yet the discovery was attributed to the whole
collaboration. In both these occasions no Eureka moment photographs were
publicized and stole the credit.

In particle physics, these practices evolved over decades, when specific
individuals tried to claim credits for discoveries in an unfair way(Nobel
dream by Gary Taubes gives a beautiful account of this). Many particle physics
collaborations now have detailed constitution and guidelines on what
images/graphs they can show to the public. Someone who first made the first
Higgs mass plot which shows a 5 sigma evidence of Higgs observation could not
have leaked that plot on social media.

However this narrative is inspiring and perhaps motivate many young woman to
take up careers in science and promote a more welcoming atmosphere for women
in STEM.

------
PascLeRasc
Slightly off-topic - is anyone able to identify the software used in this
photo of the first time seeing the black hole?

[1] [https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190410153403-katie-
bo...](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190410153403-katie-bouman-mit-
graduate-student-black-hole-super-tease.jpg)

~~~
moyix
At a glance the graph UI looks like matplotlib's.

------
geden
BBC covered it more as a team effort for this BBC4 doc I watched last night.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00042l4/how-to-
see-a-...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00042l4/how-to-see-a-black-
hole-the-universes-greatest-mystery)

------
romanovcode
How come she is everywhere on the internet but not at the presentation panel
on live conference that was yesterday?

Jeez why the downvotes? It's a legitimate question I had.

~~~
melling
“ 29-year-old computer scientist”

She’s not an astronomer?

~~~
Canada
She is definitely not an astronomer. A lot of highly specialized and talented
people who aren't astronomers or physicists are are critical to the success of
big science projects.

------
walrus01
from april 2017:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs)

------
seaborn63
It's so awesome! I thought it was kinda cool that it actually looks a little
bit like the one from Interstellar.

<sarcasm> I just wish they had used a camera from this century </sarcasm>

------
gonational
Is this the correct repo?

[https://github.com/achael/eht-
imaging/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/achael/eht-
imaging/graphs/contributors)

I didn't realize this was public code.

It looks like one "achael" is the author of this, though.

------
philonoist
What many people here committing is logical fallacy of Tu Quoque[0]. Just
because people wrongly attributed disproportionate credence of such
creativity, fame, and inspiration to Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and
all, it doesn't mean they must be mute to such continued disproportionate bias
of limelight and recognition when add another one adds to the list. _We are
always allowed_ to correct ourselves whenever we find such bias regardless of
it emanating from some implied message of jealousy or butt hurt attitude
because a minority section has achieved. This is why I like HN( and back in
the day, Quora). They are so beautifully intelligent minded that they won't
even leave git histories and published papers. This, I have seen on many
submissions here.

Never have men at large objected to such bias when women have cited theories
and concepts discovered by men to publish papers and win medals in the field
of mathematics. That is something naysayers should ponder over.

All the documentaries, autobiographies, and famous books that peered deep into
the lives of those inspirational people always give proportionate credit to
those contributors of success either by these people or the authentic
researchers. Katie was no less enthusiastic when it was her turn.

But these news agencies play with people's emotions, desires,aspirations, etc.
These news agencies are capitalistic and optimize over consumerism. These news
agencies are shameless whores to betray the principles of intellectual honesty
and journalistic ethics in dissemination of facts by kowtowing to the
appeasement of the disgruntled - who happen to be majority of their viewers.

But? We, the layman, are hapless to (1) gain knowledge from immediate sources
(2) draw immediate conclusions from these sources. We can't be blamed for not
putting efforts to gain complete picture or check the veracity of middlemen
called the media. We run forward the self fulling prophecy originating from
media. The trust was put in reputed media and that is why the media should
care for its reputation. That trust was put in the media because it was touted
as fourth pillar of democracy who can't commit hypocrisy in its main endeavors
to expose the truth.

Whereas otherwise, the organization Katie Bouman is working, official
representatives such as MIT blogs, and TED talks have all credited to the
development of original algorithm, though when it was at nascent stage, to THE
Katie Bouman, _while at the same time to her team for handling in subsequent
parts._

I salute her. With relevant degree and using her education in imaging black
holes, she set the discourse of the main branch that others picked up. If the
idea and algorithm germinated in her mind, she should get credit for it,
simple. All she needed is few people to delegate implementation of her ideas
or modify it for sustenance. If somebody furthered her ideas enough that it
can be versioned as 2.0 or 3.0, then they get equal credit and status as her
in final mission[1]. She can patent her invention rightly for conjuring the
initial stages of algorithm using all of her own cognitive capabilities.

 _But we should go only so far._ Even women aspirants will get disheartened
and show recidivism by wrongly strengthening the bias that they are somehow
less capable in attaining pinnacles of STEM, when they learn that the
achievements of women in reality is not what media portrays. This is why I
consider the twitter photo of her being placed aside Margaret Hamilton as the
efforts are no way comparable _ceteris paribus._

Moreover, if lack of minority role models is enough of a reason to discourage
that aspiring minority from their passions, then it would be no less effective
in discouragement of non-minority's passions when there is lack of attention
and acknowledgement to non-majority's achievements. I mean how did Katie
meander through her success to begin with, if there were no role models to her
in the field she is working, in the first place?

People say that men had plenty of men in annals of history to look up to, but
I'd contend that women aren't in anyway stopped to take inspiration and pique
their curiosity in men's achievements just like men take inspiration from
Marie Curie or Hedy Lamarr apart from the sea of men.

[0]rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

[1] I mean Prof Falcke.

------
patrickg_zill
The Chinese military used a similar method to find US spy planes - they used
background signals from e.g. cell phone towers and looked for the area where
there was a "blank spot" \- which was the spy plane's absorption of the
spectrum.

~~~
lambdadmitry
This is a popular hypothesis, but how exactly do you think it may work? It's
not like you can see a "blank spot" by looking _from_ radio sources, you'd
need to put your antennas in a position where the plain will intersect your
line of sight to the transmitter. And not just one, but _massive_ number of
lines if you plan to track it and deliver a missile there.

It sounds pretty improbable and I believe it's just an urban myth.

~~~
patrickg_zill
Why let the facts get in the way of your unexamined beliefs?

References a paper from 2009 (classified research could well have been much
earlier):

[https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navys-next-
hawkeye-...](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navys-next-hawkeye-
plane-can-detect-stealth-fighters-51023944fcbe)

Guess what emits UHF/VHF? Terrestrial TV stations and 900Mhz and 700Mhz cell
phone towers , like Sprint and Nextel used to operate in the USA before their
spectrum was traded/sold back to the government.

China claims can track F22 fighter even in stealth configuration:
[https://news.yahoo.com/stealth-no-more-china-
claims-02470090...](https://news.yahoo.com/stealth-no-more-china-
claims-024700905.html)

And this is what is publicly released for public consumption...

~~~
dralley
It's well known that low frequency radars can detect stealth airplanes. But
it's difficult to target a missile using them, and they're too big to put
anywhere but on the ground.

------
dalemyers
I've read comments on Hacker News for many years, often finding them a useful
source of additional information and insight into details from whatever the
linked piece is. Sometimes these threads are full of only subtly veiled hatred
and leave me with a feeling of disgust. This thread is one of those.

There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit
for something a team has worked on and there is practically never any comments
about this. For once a woman gets credit and this thread is full of people
complaining that there was an entire team.

Yes, there was a team, but that doesn't matter. For once a woman is getting
credit for the great work they've done and this should be applauded. Stories
like this help bring more women into STEM fields. Anyone who is complaining
about the lack of fairness in this is making themselves look ignorant by
ignoring the last thousand years of scientific progress.

~~~
simias
In my experience this is common for this type of news about "prodigies" on HN.
I remember the same types of reactions a few years ago about an article about
a child who made the headlines (it even prompted a response by pg IIRC). Was
it Malala? I can't remember.

I think it's just that many people feel threatened or inadequate when they
(naturally) compare themselves to these people. It's tempting to put them down
so that we feel better about ourselves. I think most of us here on HN like to
think that we're clever but when people like Katie Bouman get under the
spotlight suddenly most of us realize that we're not such hot shots after all.

It's probably worse when it's a woman/child/minority/... because it gives us
the convenient excuse of "this is probably a PR stunt" to dismiss them. It's
lazy and it's intellectually dishonest but it's also very human unfortunately.

~~~
njepa
I would hope that isn't it. While her trajectory might be uncommon it isn't
abnormal. This is the kind of thing you are supposed to do with a PhD from
MIT.

~~~
hurryskurry
But the amount of hours worked are probably insane. I wouldn't be surprised if
she was in her lab 12 hours a day for her whole post-doc or something like
that.

Many people are intelligent enough, but are not going to work hard enough.

~~~
roguecoder
Reading about this reminds me of Dawn Wall. The guy who climbed it was
absolutely one of the best climbers in the world, but the reason he was the
one to succeed was because he was the one of those best climbers who spent
seven years obsessed with a single wall.

She became interested in this problem in _high school_ and stuck with it all
the way through. She is a genius, and also the genius who did the work that
let this happen.

------
dvtrn
Title ought to reflect the fact that this woman has a doctorate from MIT and
should rightfully be addressed as _Dr._ Katie Bouman.

~~~
ominous
Her name is Katie Bouman. She can also be addressed as Dr. Katie Bouman.

~~~
dvtrn
Sure.

But in a published headline, one _ought_ to be addressed by their formal
title.

Differences exist between casual conversation and publication. A distinction I
shouldn’t have to point out as one that exists.

~~~
CydeWeys
In the headline? They call her "Dr" just a few sentences into the article. The
rule of headlines is to use as few words as possible, and every one of them
should be necessary. I've never heard that formal titles MUST be used in
headlines, and indeed in practice this doesn't seem to be the case. Shaquille
O'Neal has a PhD and I've never seen him referenced as Dr. Shaquille O'Neal,
in a headline or otherwise (and no, I'm not joking, this is apparently real).

I don't think this is an attempt to minimize her accomplishments, unlike many
of the comments here in this very thread.

~~~
thecatspaw
I agree with you, however the difference is that her Dr is relevant to the
article, and Shaq's Phd usually isnt.

~~~
CydeWeys
Neil deGrasse Tyson has a PhD in astrophysics and isn't typically referred to
as "Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson" in headlines either. Same for Carl Sagan, Stephen
Hawking, and many others. Titles simply tend to be dropped in headlines and
casual conversations; they certainly aren't universally used, or even close to
it.

~~~
dvtrn
Are you at all, in any way willing to entertain a viewpoint that suggests that
those gentlemen have their titles dropped possibly because they have become
synonymous with their crafts and a lifetime of achievement that-at least in
the case of Dr. Sagan has spanned generations (Dr. deGrasse-Tyson's work and
personality on the cusp of enjoying the exact same), and their names closely
associated with a deep personal connection to the dissemination of science as
a form of consumable entertainment (that also happens to inform) and that this
maybe serves as an important distinction between someone who is appreciating
their first bit of notoriety for their scientific accomplishments?

I personally think they should all be addressed by the titles they've worked
lifetimes to earn, that _anyone_ who holds a formal title such as Doctor
should be addressed as such in a non-casual/non-informal environment, but I'm
also willing to entertain that this is a possibility for why the difference
may exist between Dr.'s Sagan, deGrasse-Tyson, and Bouman. And yes, there are
probably, most likely others that are far less nuanced and charitable.

Would you be willing to entertain that viewpoint?

~~~
jimbokun
"Are you at all, in any way willing to entertain a viewpoint that suggests
that those gentlemen have their titles dropped possibly because they have
become synonymous with their crafts and a lifetime of achievement that-at
least in the case of Dr. Sagan has spanned generations (Dr. deGrasse-Tyson's
work and personality on the cusp of enjoying the exact same), and their names
closely associated with a deep personal connection to the dissemination of
science as a form of consumable entertainment (that also happens to inform)
and that this maybe serves as an important distinction between someone who is
appreciating their first bit of notoriety for their scientific
accomplishments?"

Nope.

I think you are now beating a dead horse with this argument.

~~~
dvtrn
May I take it with me to the grave. I think someone who is, in fact, a doctor
ought to be addressed as such. Regardless of their gender.

Apparently that is a problem for some in this community which is a damn shame.

~~~
CydeWeys
Eh, I think it's kind of pretentious to demand using a special title when
referring to people like this. It's just a degree. I don't demand people refer
to me by using my work title in front of my name and I've been doing this for
a lot longer than 5-7 years. The people I've met who correct you on how to
address them by their title invariably come off as (and usually are) arrogant
assholes.

Titles in general seem quaint and obsolete to me (and to many others). Seems
like a relic from centuries ago, like from monarchies. I don't see why not
participating in this is a "problem" or a "damn shame".

~~~
Blaisorblade0
The title of Doctor witnesses that the owner advanced humanity’s knowledge,
and often turned the impossible into possible (as here). It’s not “just” a
degree. It’s also not inherited. That you compare work titles with that
suggests you have no idea on what you’re talking about.

One can make intelligent arguments about the use of such titles. These aren’t.

------
realradicalwash
Her story is trully inspiring! She seems like a really likable person, has
been hard working, with great results, making a major contribution. The photo
with her and the hard drives is amazing and I am sure she will inspire many to
enter science.

However, I think to call her "the woman behind the first black hole image" is
a hyperbole. It makes it sound as if she was _the one person_ responsible that
all this came about. -- But that is not the case. Arguably, there are others
who have contributed as much if not more. This is what makes me somewhat feel
that this focus on her is not quite fair.

Coverage in mainland Europe has been different so far: Prof Falcke gets a lot
of credit for the image/project. Falcke is heading one of the major teams that
contributed to the project. In fact, many here attribute the conception of the
project to him. But how many in the English speaking sphere have heard or will
ever hear about Falcke? Why is that?

My personal guess is that the reason for this is: 1) The Anglo-american media
were looking for inspiring EHT scientists from the English-speaking world. 2)
Bouman fit that description best.

So, imv, something like "The inspiring story of Katie Bouman" and some credit
to some of the other major figures like Falcke would have been fairer.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
> This is what makes me somewhat feel that this focus on her is not quite
> fair.

Thought experiment: if you saw an article titled "Jony Ive: The Man Behind The
iPhone" would you be commenting on how unfair it is to single him out? After
all, he just designed the thing, a huge team of people built the software and
the hardware that actually made it possible.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
Yes, absolutely. I've made comments before to the effect of: I cringe hard
enough to actually feel physical discomfort every time a headline refers to a
team effort of SpaceX as "Elon Musk's Rocket."

~~~
wklauss
Ok, how about "Turing: the genius that cracked the ENIGMA code"?

~~~
belorn
I would start by informing them that ENIGMA was actually broken by Poland, and
they invited the British two weeks before the German invasions to show them
how it worked and give them a prototype enigma breaking machine. They didn't
want the technique and knowledge in how to break enigma to be lost after
Germany invaded. The French also got a copy, and it was actually the French
intelligence service that had gathered the initial data and it was unknown to
them that this enabled the polish to break ENIGMA.

What turning did was to take the initial prototype they received and build a
even more powerful and refined version. In particular he improved the
technique so it broke the naval version of enigma which was more complicated
than the army version that the polish had broken earlier. This was in part
possible because the British had captured a working naval enigma from a German
submarine.

(A lot of this comes a book called The Code Book by Simon Singh. The last
chapter on modern ciphers is a bit dated but the chapters on enigma was quite
good.

------
matt4077
Here's a HN story from a while back titled "The Man Behind Windows
PowerShell"[0].

Of the 129 comments on that story, _not one_ discussed how software
development at Microsoft is always a team effort. Or checked any repositories
counting LoC to quantify the value of his contribution.

Meanwhile, in this thread, I see 6 of 73 comments as of now _not_ discussing a
woman's relative contribution to a team effort, and how she does or does not
deserve praise.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349)

~~~
ralfd
Not really a fitting comparison. Snover is describing himself as inventor of
power shell, he pushed the project against resistance of his peers/superiors
in Microsoft and implemented the first prototype. Without him it simply
wouldn’t exist.

~~~
roguecoder
Without her, this wouldn’t exist.

------
mpfundstein
Is it me or is the article written like for 5 year olds? It feels like I am
reading a child book.

However, this is such a great achievement. Would be awesome to learn more
about the algorithm.

~~~
sajib3
Because it is. If it reads like a child book they did a great job. If you
studied journalism you’d know making it as easy as possible for all audiences
is a key skill each journalist needs to have. It’s not a science journal that
it needs to be full of jargon. It’s meant for general audience and they did a
great job. If you want a hard piece go read the journal papers that got
published.

~~~
inflatableDodo
There are degrees of this. If you compare science reporting against the
mainstream financial news it is like chalk and cheese. If the numbers
represent money, technical jargon is everywhere, if the subject is scientific,
even the numbers are considered scary, never mind a technical discussion
around them.

------
hgannita
It doesn't really work like this. It's a team of scientists that make these
contributions, not one person.

~~~
threeseed
And nobody is saying that it was done by one person.

It specifically lists the teams in the article.

------
zadwang
THE woman? I am not sure how other women team members should feel about the
article. Or even men. She may made important contribution but so did many
others. Attributing the credit to a single person in such a large scale
project is not fair to any team member. I am sure it is not her fault but
whoever pushed to have BBC publish a story like this is hurting the science
endeavor overall more than helping it.

~~~
simonh
We see articles about 'the man behind' stuff all the time. Just go to Google
News and search for 'the man behind', you'll see pages and pages of them just
for the last few weeks. In fact, check out articles with 'the man behind' in
the title on HN[0]. It's a common shorthand which I think most of us recognise
as not necessarily disrespectful to a team they might have lead.

[0][https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%27the%20man%20behind%27&sort=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%27the%20man%20behind%27&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

But uh oh, now there's a woman behind something all of a sudden it's a huge
problem and the thread is packed with complaints about it. I wonder why that
is?

------
zorbagreek
She actually wrote 2k lines of code. Alex Chael wrote 850.000 out of the 900k
total, but is ignored.

Katie's lines of code did two things: 1) integrated the code of others 2)
allowed you to change the font-size

------
Gpetrium
Reading some of the comments in here and in previous texts, I think everyone
should try to heed to the following guidelines:

\- When an individual/team's work is emphasized by their biological
characteristics, it is often meant for clicks or to drive emotions (positive &
negative)

\- When that happens, ask yourself whether the author of the paper did it for
nefarious reasons or not.

\- If the cause doesn't seem nefarious, ask yourself whether the society
around you has outgrown the biases towards X biological characteristics

\- When interacting with others, do not base your actions and thoughts on
their biological characteristics.

\- Celebrate, debate and criticize the work that the individual/team did, the
work the author of the article did and the comments.

~~~
nardi
Seems to me that you are the one emphasizing “biological characteristics”. The
article does not. Are you projecting, maybe?

~~~
Gpetrium
The Ycombinator text doesn't say it, but the link does. I think a lot of the
negative reaction in here comes from the way people have started to perceive
the narrative created by the media and personal feelings of threat (which is
often unfounded).

I am all in for getting more people from all backgrounds into Computer &
Sciences. I also agree that sometimes it is beneficial to have 'biological
characteristics' added to articles to get certain groups to find someone to
look up to. Humans are biologically set-up to do that, what the guideline
implies is for everyone to do 'at least that' before creating biased comments.

Care to explain how the 'guidelines' comment is projecting?

~~~
nardi
> The Ycombinator text doesn’t say it, but the link does.

The title of the article as of this moment is, “Katie Bouman: The woman behind
the first black hole image.” Saying, “the woman behind X” doesn’t emphasize
gender any more than saying “the man behind X” does. Again, this is you
projecting, perhaps because you think “normal” is male, and thus “woman” is
somehow making a statement?

I see nothing in the body of the article that mentions her gender in any way
other than using the pronoun “she.” It seems to me that you read an article
about a female scientist and projected some kind of ulterior motive on the
part of the author, which says a lot more about you than it does about the
author.

~~~
Gpetrium
Did you bother to read some of the comments people have written here and did
you even read my whole text or just hand-picked something that triggered you
and decided to argue?

Like I said before, based on OTHER PEOPLES COMMENTS, I recommended them to
consider those guidelines. I still have no idea why it became about me
projecting something.

Regardless, to cover your point, media companies use titles to instill
something in the reader and emotion is often a tool. "The woman behind..." or
"The man behind..." doesn't have any impact on the way I process the
information, however, it does for others (positive and negative). For a
children, it can be a source of inspiration, for someone else it can trigger
something negative based on the current environment of things. This tool has
been used to glorify astronauts, soldiers and many other areas. I didn't
project anything, I read OTHER PEOPLES COMMENTS and thought it was important
for them to consider what I said.

Hopefully in the future, everyone will stop putting so much emphasis in
biological characteristics (READ OTHER COMMENTS HERE AND ELSEWHERE) and take
it for what it is, a bright scientist gave us a snapshot of something we have
been curious to see for decades. Regardless, you should re-read my comments to
realize your points are null and you likely misconstrued my points based on
your preconceived notion and current state of mind. If you are willing to have
a healthy debate, I would be more than willing to dig into some of the topics
you may have, including the amazing work Dr. Katie Bouman did. Now if your aim
is to continue to attack me for something I didn't do, then I hope you have a
good day.

~~~
nardi
I’m pretty sure you are arguing in bad faith here, as your original comment
and your first reply are clearly referring to the article, and implying that
it is emphasizing her gender for clicks, when it does no such thing.

------
founderling
I posted a comment 10 minutes ago and it got immediately downvoted into
oblivion. Could you guys please tell me why it is such a bad question to ask?
Thank you! Here it is:

Does it really count as an image of a black hole? Since no light is reflected
by the black hole, all we see is light bend by the gravity of the black hole.

Haven't we seen that before? I have the strong feeling there have been photos
of star constellations that seem distorted because of black holes.

A quick googling brings up this article from 2014 for example:

[https://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/12/tech/black-hole-nasa-
nust...](https://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/12/tech/black-hole-nasa-nust..).

"Black hole bends light, space, time -- and NASA's NuSTAR can see it all
unfold"

~~~
yetihehe
> Could you guys please tell me why it is such a bad question to ask?

Because it's nitpicking[0]. When scientists show you results of several years
of work of many people, you effectively chose to ask question like "Is it
really violet? Seems more purple to me". You don't contribute anything to
discussion, but just want to sound smart-ass.

[0]
[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nitpicking](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nitpicking)

~~~
ummonk
No, it's a legit question. Before I read this article I heard mention of a new
picture of a black hole, and I was wondering how it was different from
previous pictures.

My understanding now is that this is the first time we've observed one
accurately enough to get a picture of the Einstein ring around a black hole.
And even there, it's heavily reconstructed using machine learning, which I
wouldn't call a "photo", more of a "AI artist rendition".

~~~
roguecoder
Any digital photo is a reconstruction. Consider all the pictures from the
Hubble telescope: these techniques are a far more sophisticated version of the
same kinds of techniques used to clean those up.

------
bartimus
Now let's try to generate some pics of the lunar landing sites.

~~~
bartimus
Can somebody explain why this got downvoted? I'm genuinly interested if this
is possible with the technology (using optical telescopes). This was my (poor)
attempt to start an open conversation about it.

------
amrrs
I'm not biased anyway but thinking Is it fair to attribute this entire thing
to one person leaving out the team of collaborators? Doesn't it sound like
what happens with Jobsism?

Edit: While I'm being rapidly downvoted, I'd like to clarify that I didn't
mean to demean this because it's a female nor any of the feat this research
has achieved. My point was only about why is it reported as if individual feat
while many of such things are a strong team work.

For some other questions - will you say the same about Elon musk - of course
i've argued this among my peers and that's exactly why I called it similar to
`Jobsism`

To Quote: Another recent incident, While AI Godfathers got Turing award, many
questioned why this person hasn't got and that person hasn't got.

My idea for this comment was a constructive discussion but it took a different
spin that my comment is against this woman which definitely not my intention.

~~~
klohto
~I feel bad for the team. I would rather see the whole team praised for the
success not just one person that fits the narrative "women in tech".~

People I right, I made an assumption based on the title and not the content.

~~~
wastedhours
"Elon Musk single handedly saves the world with electric cars and
revolutionises spaces travel"

The media have highlighted the lead, she credits the team, and the article
outlines the numbers who worked on it.

------
Waterluvian
So is the 200 people team a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Physics?

