Soccer Dad

They'll be working overtime at nasa's eeo office

The Dallas City Hall Blog reports via memeorandum:

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Jammy Wearing Fool simply observes:

Seems we'll never escape this politically correct insanity.

A commenter at Michelle Malkin's wonders:

Commenter annursa: "I'm confused. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee insists that hurricanes should be given "African-American names" such as 'Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn.' Which natural phenomena are to be associated with a particular color or race ... and which aren't?"

I suspect that this will cause some problems at NASA.

Chandra observations of the galaxy NGC 1365 have captured a remarkable eclipse of the supermassive black hole at its center. A dense cloud of gas passed in front of the black hole, which blocked high-energy X-rays from material close to the black hole. This serendipitous alignment allowed astronomers to measure the size of the disk of material around the black hole, a relatively tiny structure on galactic scales. The Chandra image (shown in the inset) contains a bright X-ray source in the middle, which reveals the position of the supermassive black hole. An optical view of the galaxy from the European Space Observatory's Very Large Telescope shows the context of the Chandra data.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/INAF/Risaliti Optical: ESO/VLT

This composite image shows the jet from a black hole at the center of a galaxy striking the edge of another galaxy, the first time such an interaction has been found. In the image, data from several wavelengths have been combined. X-rays from Chandra (colored purple), optical and ultraviolet (UV) data from Hubble (red and orange), and radio emission from the Very Large Array (VLA) and MERLIN (blue) show how the jet from the main galaxy on the lower left is striking its companion galaxy to the upper right. The jet impacts the companion galaxy at its edge and is then disrupted and deflected, much like how a stream of water from a hose will splay out after hitting a wall at an angle.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/D.Evans et al.; Optical/UV: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/VLA/CfA/D.Evans et al., STFC/JBO/MERLIN

Results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, combined with new theoretical calculations, provide one of the best pieces of evidence yet that many supermassive black holes are spinning extremely rapidly. The images on the left show 4 out of the 9 large galaxies included in the Chandra study, each containing a supermassive black hole in its center.

The Chandra images show pairs of huge bubbles, or cavities, in the hot gaseous atmospheres of the galaxies, created in each case by jets produced by a central supermassive black hole. Studying these cavities allows the power output of the jets to be calculated. This sets constraints on the spin of the black holes when combined with theoretical models.

The Chandra images were also used to estimate how much fuel is available for each supermassive black hole, using a simple model for the way matter falls towards such an object. The artist's impression on the right side of the main graphic shows gas within a "sphere of influence" falling straight inwards towards a black hole before joining a rapidly spinning disk of matter near the center. Most of the material in this disk is swallowed by the black hole, but some of it is swept outwards in jets (colored blue) by quickly spinning magnetic fields close to the black hole.

Previous work with these Chandra data showed that the higher the rate at which matter falls towards these supermassive black holes, the higher their power output is in jets. However, without detailed theory the implications of this result for black hole behavior were unclear. The new study uses these Chandra results combined with leading theoretical models for the production of jets, plus general relativity, to show that the supermassive black holes in these galaxies must be spinning at close to the maximum rate. If black holes are spinning at this limit, material can be dragged around them at close to the speed of light, the speed limit from Einstein's theory of relativity.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC Illustration: CXC/M. Weiss

(Emphases mine, in the above captions.)

Remember "niggardly?"

UPDATE: Whoops, I forgot to credit Snapped Shot where I first saw this.

UPDATE II: Thanks to Kip (see comments) for a link to the video. And thanks to the great Taranto for finding the definition of a "white hole."