![\"image\"](\"https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/6852694/168197299-ace9144b-67c2-4f54-9a69-051a98403824.png\")
Ever since Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) released the first image of a supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87*), in 2019, I always wondered what the black hole at the galactic center of our own Milky Way will be like! And on May 12, 2022 we got to see the first picture of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration team.
\nSagittarius A* is the astronomical radio source at the galactic center of Milky Way Galaxy. Two astrophysicists, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were awarded 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that Sgr A* is a supermassive compact object, for which a black hole is the only currently known plausible explanation. And today's image from EHT provides the first direct visual evidence of it.
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This breakthrough by the EHT Collaboration team follows the 2019 picture of M87* balck hole. While Sgr A* and M87* black holes look remarkably similar, their similarities end there. Sgr A* is more than a thousand times smaller and 1500 times less massive than M87* blackhole. This measurement and achievement were considerably harder than the previous one, even though Sgr A* is much closer at ~27,000 light years. “We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity," said EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei. The EHT team's results are being published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
\nEHT scientist Chi-kwan (‘CK’) Chan, from Steward Observatory and Department of Astronomy and the Data Science Institute of the University of Arizona, US, explains: “The gas in the vicinity of the black holes moves at the same speed — nearly as fast as light — around both Sgr A* and M87*. But where gas takes days to weeks to orbit the larger M87*, in the much smaller Sgr A* it completes an orbit in mere minutes. This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* was changing rapidly as the EHT Collaboration was observing it — a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail.”
\nThe researchers had to develop sophisticated new tools that accounted for the gas movement around Sgr A*. While M87* was an easier, steadier target, with nearly all images looking the same, that was not the case for Sgr A*. The image of the Sgr A* black hole is an average of the different images the team extracted, finally revealing the giant lurking at the centre of our galaxy for the first time.
\nWith two images of two very different sized black holes, the reseach now opens up to use new data to test theories and models over the coming months/years. Exciting times ahead!
\n", "date_published": "2022-05-12T00:00:00Z" },{ "id": "https://7725274.com/posts/2022/03/30/", "url": "https://7725274.com/posts/2022/03/30/", "title": "Subscription Commerce", "content_html": "Subscription Commerce Platforms offer a host of features to enable and manage end-to-end subscription lifecycle processes for Merchants. Unlike Commerce platforms that were primarily designed and built for selling physical goods, digital subscription platform (for SaaS products) features and complexity change dramatically based on the types of products being offered.
\nWhat makes building subscription marketplaces hard? There are plenty of startups who've set out to solve the challenges of Subscription Commerce marketplaces over the last decade, yet very few, if any, have come close to solving the puzzle.
\nIn the past decade, almost every single business has moved or has been moving towards selling their Products and SKUs on a recurring (monthly/yearly/etc.) basis. The eCommerce solutions they had in place for on-premise, perpetual licenses or one-time sale products, and the salesforce, retail and partner channels they used to working with suddenly didn't translate well for recurring business models. The complexity of having 1st party products and 3rd party products to create bundles and addons didn't scale well either. While existing businesses initially struggled to digitize their SKUs and set the right pricing for the new subscription SKUs vs the soon to be deprecated perpetual licenses, the new SaaS businesses that started in the last 10+ years didn't have the same pricing challenges for their subscriptions. However, almost all businesses that evaluated Build vs Buy decided to go with Buy, so that they can focus their energies on their core products and services rather than creating and maintaining homegrown marketplaces.
\nA handful of Marketplace Development Platform companies focusing on solving subscription commerce saw this digital transformation years ahead of others and especially ahead of the incumbent Commerce platform providers. As an early employee at one of those companies, AppDirect, I have been part of the journey that took us from a scrappy startup to a leader in the Forrester Wave and Gartner Research reports. And over the last 8 years, I have had the privilege of building and executing the ambitious product vision and roadmaps, introducing several new product modules and launching merchants in various geographies around the world, all the while staying ahead of the competition.
\nUnlike the marketplaces run by Aggregators (for mobile ecosystems: Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store, that also took off in the 2010's) where the aggregators have: Direct relationship with their Users, Zero Marginal Costs for serving additional Users, and Demand driven Multi-sided networks that force ISVs/developers to come to aggregator's platform on their terms, enterprise marketplace development platforms have none of these benefits. Instead, enterprise marketplace platforms must play by a completely different set of rules (configurability of almost every aspect of the platform, API addressability, corporate and government compliances, reporting, etc.). More about the Marketplace features that differentiate eCommerce platforms from Subscription Commerce platforms will be published in a different post.
\nLarge enterprises have often leveraged these platforms to not only sell their 1st party products, but also to add 3rd party catalog products to their white-labled marketplaces. SMB and Resellers have typically configured storefront using vanilla features and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have only leveraged the storefronts as referral marketplaces to generate leads and often push them directly into their lead-generation tools.
\nWhatever your subscription commerce use-case is, AppDirect's Marketplace Development Platform offers a solution! Get a free trial today!
\n", "date_published": "2022-03-30T00:00:00Z" },{ "id": "https://7725274.com/posts/2021/10/07/", "url": "https://7725274.com/posts/2021/10/07/", "title": "42", "content_html": "Why is 42 the answer to "the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything"? Is it really an elusive number? Why was it so computationally hard to crack the sum-of-three-cubes puzzle for number 42?
\nTwo mathematicians, Andrew Sutherland of MIT and Andrew Booker of Briston University, with their programing prowess solved the sum-of-three-cubes puzzle for 42 on September 6, 2019.
Booker had previosly cracked 33, the other remaining unsolved number between 0 - 100. Sutherland and Booker collaborated on devising an algorithm and with the computing assitance from UK-based Charity Engine, they were able to tap into the computing power of 400K volunteer's home PCs to solve this puzzle.
\nDiophantine equations are polynomial equations whose unknown variables must take integer values. The sum-of-three-cubes problem, stated as k = x^3 + y^3 + z^3, is what number theorists call a Diophantine equation.
\n“There is a single integer parameter, d, that determines a relatively small set of possibilities for x, y, and z such that the absolute value of z is below a chosen search bound B,” says Sutherland. “One then enumerates values for d and checks each of the possible x, y, z associated to d. In the attempt to crack 33, the search bound B was 1016, but this B turned out to be too small to crack 42; we instead used B = 1017 (1017 is 100 million billion).
\nThe Charity Engine application, which is based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BIONIC), uses a tiny fraction of the CPU resource available which would go otherwise unused. As a result, the carbon footprint of this computation — related to the electricity our computations caused the PCs in the network to use above and beyond what they would have used, in any case — is lower than it would have been if we had used a supercomputer.” Couple that technology with the mathematicians who are also really good programmers. Voila!
\nSum-of-three-cubes: k = x^3 + y^3 + z^3
42 = (-80538738812075974)^3 + 80435758145817515^3 + 12602123297335631^3While the mathematicians are out to crack the Diophantine equation for the next lowest unsolved integer, 114, over the next year, I intend to find out why 42 is the ultimate answer! :)
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-07T00:00:00Z" },{ "id": "https://7725274.com/posts/2021/10/03/", "url": "https://7725274.com/posts/2021/10/03/", "title": "Auburn beats LSU!", "content_html": "Over the last 20 years, Auburn Tigers had multiple heartbreaking losses to the LSU Tigers at the Tiger Stadium, unable to hang on to the lead during the waning seconds of the 4th quarter. However, things changed on October 2, 2021 when Auburn came out on the top (24-19) with some spectacular plays from QB Bo Nix and freshman RB Jarquez Hunter. Well done, Auburn! War Eagle!!
\nWith this win against their SEC West nemisis, now Auburn will be hosting the deep south's oldest rivalry game with Georgia, next Saturday, for their 126th game. Auburn sure looks like primed to stop Georgia's 4 game winning streak!
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-03T00:00:00Z" },{ "id": "https://7725274.com/posts/2021/10/01/", "url": "https://7725274.com/posts/2021/10/01/", "title": "Cloudflare Pages", "content_html": "I always wanted to try out Cloudflare Pages, ever since it was in beta!
\nCloudflare is a company that I admire very much! And I try out their products that are either directly related to what I am currently working on or something that I am curious about and often times I end up using them anyways.
\nCurrently, this website is powered by Pages. I will be spending some time over the coming weeks to explore how the my side projects/applications can benefit from this.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-01T00:00:00Z" },{ "id": "https://7725274.com/posts/2021/09/30/", "url": "https://7725274.com/posts/2021/09/30/", "title": "Hello World, Khulle Maidan!", "content_html": "What stops one from writing when ones head is full of thoughts?
\nExperimenting with writing while learning new technologies. Documenting observations along the way.
\n// this is a test
console.log(\"Hello World!\");