Linked List: February 11, 2016

Thursday, 11 February 2016

Fun follow-up to today’s big news — a cartoon explaining how gravitational waves work.

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them ★

Great piece by Nicola Twilley for The New Yorker on the team that made this discovery:

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again.

NYT: Pandora Is Said to Have Held Talks About Selling Itself ★

Leslie Picker and Ben Sisario, reporting for the NYT:

Pandora Media, the largest Internet radio service, has held discussions about selling the company, according to people briefed on the talks. […]

For Pandora, it would be a curious time to sell. Its shares are yielding a market value of $1.8 billion, down from more than $7 billion two years ago. The stock has fallen more than 60 percent since October.

Pandora has the largest number of users for music streaming, but the competition is encroaching. Spotify is said to be arming itself with another $500 million in capital, and Apple Music recently surpassed 10 million paying users. Pandora’s users peaked at 81.5 million at the end of 2014, declining to 78.1 million in the third quarter.

The streaming business is cutthroat.

Time Inc. Acquires Myspace ★

Lara O’Reilly, reporting for Business Insider:

Time Inc., the owner of Time, Fortune, and People magazines, has acquired Viant, the parent company of Myspace. Joe Ripp, chairman and CEO of Time Inc., described the acquisition as “game changing” in a press release.

What year is it?

American Pharoah’s Second Life as a $200k-a-Night Stud ★

Fascinating feature by Monte Reel for Bloomberg on the business and process of putting champion thoroughbred horses out to stud:

The verb to use in polite company is “cover.” The stud covers the mare. Or: About 11 months after she was covered, the mare gave birth to a healthy foal.

The deed itself, here in the hills of Kentucky horse country, is governed by strict rules. Section V, paragraph D of The American Stud Book Principal Rules and Requirements is clear: “Any foal resulting from or produced by the processes of Artificial Insemination, Embryo Transfer or Transplant, Cloning or any other form of genetic manipulation not herein specified, shall not be eligible for registration.” No shortcuts, no gimmicks. All thoroughbreds must be the product of live, all-natural, horse-on-horse action.

There are some guys in this industry with really, really weird jobs.

(Via Dave Pell’s excellent NextDraft.)

Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory ★

Dennis Overbye, reporting for the NYT:

A team of physicists who can now count themselves as astronomers announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prophecy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago (Listen to it here.). And it is a ringing (pun intended) confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.

More generally, it means that scientists have finally tapped into the deepest register of physical reality, where the weirdest and wildest implications of Einstein’s universe become manifest.

Remarkable science, and a testimony to Einstein’s extraordinary genius.

Don’t skip the video — it’s wonderful.