This is so unrelated to anything of interest to most people, I’m not sure I should even post it. But hey, this is my bandwidth, and I get to put what I want. So, up goes the story of the black hole flight simulator (New York times web site – registration required).
The “Black Hole Flight Simulator” was created by Andrew Hamilton, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado, for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The 23-minute show contains segments that required 90 hours of supercomputer calculation for each on-screen second. You can see the trailer here (and look out for the guy in the canoe).
Wow! A 23 minute show that required 90 hours of computation for each second displayed? Let’s see, that’s 23 minutes times 60 second per minute times 90 hours per second showed. Work that out, and you get something like, ummmm, a whole buncha-lotta-wowza time required to build that (actually, I think it comes to about 16.5 years of computing time required to build the video).
I’m going to have to watch that video when I get some time to sit and watch it all. Sounds fascinating. Now, when will they make a game out of this?
[tags]Black hole, Flight simulator, event horizon[/tags]