Today I Learned

[Orodruin]

For some reason this brought me to look up apparent magnitudes of different objects in the sky. Found this on Wikipedia:

Apparently Betelgeuse is expected to be almost as bright as a full Moon when it goes boom. Easily visible during the day (assuming it is on the right side).

Just imagine all we would learn from the neutrino signal alone! Some precision neutrino astronomy right there, waiting to be made.

 

[Hornbein]

Nova, not supernova.

A star that goes supernova will not do so again.

Neutron stars near an ordinary star may suck off hydrogen until the intense gravity and heat triggers a star-wide thermonuclear explosion. They can do that over and over. I don't know what the catchword is.

 

[jack action]

After witnessing the eclipse, I tried to imagine how terrifying it would appear to people not knowing what was happening. TIL it actually may have stopped a war:

The Battle of the Eclipse (or Battle of Halys) was fought in the early 6th century BC in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) between the Medes and the Lydians. According to ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the battle was interrupted by "day turning into night" – presumably a solar eclipse – and the result was a draw which led to both parties negotiating a peace treaty and ending a six-year war.

 

[BillTre]

TIL about ancient technology:

 

[jtbell]

TIL that the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency still uses 5.25 inch floppy disks to boot up its Automatic Train Control System that runs light-rail trains in the Market Street subway.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...-to-help-run-san-francisco-trains-until-2030/

 

[Swamp Thing]

TIL that the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency still uses 5.25 inch floppy disks to boot up its Automatic Train Control System that runs light-rail trains in the Market Street subway.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...-to-help-run-san-francisco-trains-until-2030/

There are enough expensive legacy systems operating, that someone would surely have come up with a floppy drive emulator interface that would plug into the older buses (e.g. IDE, IIRC)? You could then use a USB drive to run those old machines. This would delay the expense of redeveloping a high investment solution from scratch, of course. For example there are some very expensive microwave test instruments that are perfectly good but use obsolete operating systems and removable storage.

 

[Hornbein]

TIL that Harvard has returned to requiring standardized test results in admissions applications. They observed that while such results are biased, grades and letters of recommendation and personal essays are even more biased. Daddy Warbucks could hire a coach to help Annie with that essay.

Henry Ford II got kicked out of college after he handed in his senior thesis. Within the sheets was an invoice from the writing service.

 

[BillTre]

Things are getting warmer: