And finally today, I’ve been spending a lot less time on Twitter lately. Too much anger on Twitter, which sometimes excites too much anger in me. Then I saw something a friend had re-tweeted:
Your mind is your
internal vision board.
Don't fill it with things
you fear or want to avoid.
Focus on good things.
Nice, right? Not something I was going to mention here, but nice.
Within a couple of minutes of seeing that, I got an email from a friend of mine - Dr. Robert Hurt. He’s a visualization scientist at Caltech/IPAC working with missions like NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
You heard about the black hole, right? According to a piece from the BBC, “Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy.” And we all got to see that picture on Wednesday. Well, Robert wrote to me, saying:
…I was thinking about you this morning during your podcast and was musing whether there was a way to connect today’s amazing black hole imaging results to Mac news, given a general prevalence of Macs amongst astronomers.
“Then a colleague pointed out this moment-of-discovery tweet,” which Robert then pointed out to me. Tamy Emma Pepin posted:
Congratulations to Katie Bouman to whom we owe the first photograph of a black hole ever. Not seeing her name circulate nearly enough in the press.
Amazing work. And here’s to more women in science (getting their credit and being remembered in history)
That Tweet had a picture of Bouman - looking ecstatic, as she should. According to Heavy.com, she’s “the researcher who led the creation of an algorithm that allowed scientists to capture images of a black hole for the very first time.”
And the picture in the Tweet - of Bouman showing the world what a black hole looks like: I can’t make out the model, but she is most definitely sitting in front of some sort of MacBook.
“There’s a feel-good news story for you that won’t be on MacRumors,” wrote Robert. And there’s focus on a good thing.
I hope your day is wonderful.