• Betelgeuse is far away, so it wouldn’t look very bright to us, would it? Well, it’s not all that far away. Merely 600 light years. Our sun is 500 light seconds. So, dividing 500 seconds into 600 years and squaring, it’s just about a factor of one quadrillion. Which would make supernova Betelgeuse only 1/10,000th as bright as the sun. Whew, no chance of excessive sunburn! (You’ll get zapped by possibly 1000 neutrinos, no big deal. Happily, the main radiation jets will be pointed away from the earth. But no predictions on what happens when the charged particles arrive; I’d have to do more research.)

    But, that’s bright! The full moon is 1/300,000th as bright as the sun. So this arbitrary calculation says supernova Betelgeuse would be 30 times as bright as the full moon. Huge uncertainties in that number, but it seems safe to say it’s somewhere between one and several hundred times as bright as a full moon.

    —The Online Photographer: Photographing a Supernova

  • Claude Lelouch’s _ C’était un rendezvous _ (on Vimeo via Slate)

    “On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

    No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.”

  • heyitsnoah:

    How Do We Get Baseball Players to Stop Doping? - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

    There is absolutely no way taking performance enhancing drugs makes the difference between a 5% chance of being signed and a 95% chance of being signed. It may take him from 5% to 6% or even 10% but I’d bet even that doubling of the chance is a far stretch.

    If the difference was that great the number of non-doping players would dwindle to almost nothing as the number of people willing to do whatever it takes to get signed overwhelms the relatively small number of available slots.

    Drugs give outliers a slight push that takes them slightly beyond other outliers. It doesn’t turn average performers into outliers.

  • YUI Sparkline Widget

    Edward Tufte’s sparklines are a nice way to present small minimal graphs in contexts where larger, full charts are not needed or warranted. The growing support for the HTML <canvas> tag gives…

  • I built a Sparkline widget for YUI. It does in-line sparklines very easily. Go read your Tufte.