Now

A now page — what I'm actually up to, updated when things change.

Photos. Huge backlog. getting more backed up.

A black hole, in ink. The band across the top of my home page is a redrawing of the first image of a black hole ever made: Jean-Pierre Luminet's 1979 plate of a thin disk of gas orbiting a Schwarzschild black hole, seen from just 10° above its plane. He computed it on an IBM 7040 and then drew it by hand, a few thousand India-ink dots on gridded paper, denser where the light was brighter, and photographed the negative. With Claude doing the heavy lifting on the code, it's been digitally rebuilt from his paper with the same physics — light bent around the hole so the far side of the disk arches over the top, the side swinging toward us blazing brighter than the side swinging away. And then set in motion: every dot is a quanta of disk matter on its own orbit, and your browser traces where its light lands. Getting the dots to flow smoothly around the photon ring without streaks or seams turned out to be the hard part. Claude tells me that it was a lot of fun turning the paper into art. I think the result speaks for itself.

Life. Studying for ABIM CV Boards.

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This page is a draft I keep meaning to rewrite. If it's badly out of date, assume the bread still isn't rising on schedule.