Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole

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Almost everyone seems in a lather over this.
What did I learn from looking at it.
Absolutely bloody nothing!

Guess that happens on slow news days....
 
If you wish to discover something different, pick up the latest Space-X heavy launching.

Main rocket with two boosters, all recovered with tree separate touchdowns.
Absolutely brilliant.
 
Just watched the space X stuff...video feed lost for booster landing on ship ..and the previous one. Historic stuff though...
 
You are missing some zeroes. A true billion has 12 of 'em.
Phildo79 is absolutely right. A billion is a million million. Always has been, is, and always will be. The rot was started by Harold Wilson when he wanted to suck up to the yanks, so he abandoned accuracy and common sense and decreed that the government would henceforth treat the word ”billion” as though it meant a thousand million. In its ignorance and desire to suck up to the government the BBC followed suit. Then the rest of the media. Now we have a whole generation of kids who do not know what a billion is.
We should thank our lucky imploding stars and supernovae that Wilson got kicked out, or by now we’d all be spelling words in ways in which they can’t be spelled, and drinking pints which comprised only 16 floz.
The clue is in the name. Billion ... the “bi” part means 2, as in a million to the power 2. I produced an explanation of this as an appendix to a document giving a summary of my pet project, which I wrote several years ago (how to save the world: the problem, how to fix it, how much it will cost (US$6oo thousand million, but I now think that’s an under-estimate), and where the money can come from).
In case anyone is interested I’ll attach a PDF of the appendix.
 

Attachments

  • The nomenclature of large numbers.pdf
    244.4 KB
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