bsdphx - Slashdot User

Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 04, 2010 @04:59PM from the teach-them-to-foxtrot dept.

Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."

The Perfect Way To Slice a Pizza 282

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @01:09PM from the equal-distribution-of-the-pie dept.

iamapizza writes "New Scientist reports on the quest of two math boffins for the perfect way to slice a pizza. It's an interesting and in-depth article; 'The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-center, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-center cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighboring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?' This is useful, of course, if you're familiar with the concept of 'sharing' a pizza."

Yellowstone Supervolcano Larger Than First Thought 451

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @11:50AM from the even-superer dept.

drewtheman writes "New studies of the plumbing that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park shows the plume and the magma chamber under the volcano are larger than first thought and contradicts claims that only shallow hot rock exists. University of Utah research professor of geophysics Robert Smith led four separate studies that verify a plume of hot and molten rock at least 410 miles deep that rises at an angle from the northwest."

Haskell 2010 Announced 173

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @06:05PM from the eddie-and-the-beav dept.

paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."

Comment Re:about time... (Score 1) 203

by bsdphx on Thursday August 20, 2009 @10:57AM (#29133049) Attached to: NASA Probe Blasts 461 Gigabytes of Moon Data Daily

I'd like to see a REAL color photograph at some point and not something they recolored after...
and real video footage as opposed to footage put together from still images

There's no such thing as "real color photography" actually. Any color camera only approximates the color you see with your eyes, even old film cameras. Pick up any decent book and photography and you'll see mention of using filters to make things look more natural. With CCD cameras you're only counting photons. The detector itself can't tell a red photon from a blue photon, and it relies on an arrangement of band pass filters so that individual cells collect only a certain color range. So your point and shoot color CCD camera is like multiple black & white cameras with different color filters. The Wide Angle Camera (WAC) on LRO has 5 visual band filters and 2 ultraviolet band filters. They bands can be put together to give a "color" image. Even when you look at one of these color images you'll still see the gray Moon, so it's not very exciting visually. However, the response at different frequencies is very useful to scientists in determining properties of the imaged area.

As for video footage... egads! Nevermind that "real video" actually IS a series of still images, we have a firehose of data to deal with right now!

Submission + - Linux Driver Violates BSD License (undeadly.org)

Submitted by bsdphx on Tuesday August 28, 2007 @10:24PM

bsdphx writes: After years of encouragement from the OpenBSD community for others to use Reyk Floeter's free atheros wireless driver, it seems that the Linux world is finally listening. Unfortunately, they seem to think that they can strip the BSD license right out of it.

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