Thread

A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting

402 points · 82 comments · mariuz

sixothree · 1790972325 · focus · HN ↗
When my mother was born, plate tectonics was a hypothesis. When I was born we didn't know for certain if planets existed outside of our solar system.
1. ButlerianJihad · 1791051796 · focus · HN ↗
  My mother's high school graduation present was a fully illustrated, complete set of the World Book Encyclopedia. It played second fiddle and competitor to Encyclopedia Britannica. Many families would purchase these as a limited subscription, where one volume would be delivered per month, until they collected the entire A-Z set.
  Mom's encyclopedia contained some amazing anachronisms, by the time I started reading the books in the 1980s. The most interesting one to me was the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. It included black-and-white photographs of natives in grass skirts and the ocean surf.
  Imagine an app that could go back into Wikipedia's article revision history and present them, as they were, 25+ years ago. That's actually sort of impossible for technical reasons.
  1. mr_toad · 1791055657 · focus · HN ↗
    In October 2001 Wikipedia only had 12,000 articles, compared to 7+ million today.
    <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:Number_of_English_Wikipedia_articles.tab" rel="nofollow">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:Number_of_English_Wi...
    ButlerianJihad · 1791093972 · focus · HN ↗
    That doesn't matter a single bit, and I'm unsure of the effort of pointing it out to us. By the way, you are only looking at the English Wikipedia, not the whole thing.
    The 12,000 articles in English is a vast amount, albeit many were stubs or rather deficient. But the World Book Encyclopedia covered any topic a college girl could ask for at the time.
    Moreover, the book series is perfectly preserved to this day. In the 1980s it was already aged by 20-30 years, but the formatting, crisp photos, fonts, and all pages and references/index were still intact. I could page through it today and be transported back to the world of 70+ years ago without issues. That's how books work, right?
    <a href="https://m.xkcd.com/1683/" rel="nofollow">https://m.xkcd.com/1683/
    In contrast, English Wikipedia's history (and every other project) is a tangled tech-mess. It's chaos back there. Sure: you can grovel back in "View History" and recover any basic text of an article that your heart desires. But where shall you find a definitive one, a validated one? And moreover, you'll never recover its formatting, the associated images, and the external links have 100% rotted away to useless typosquatters and 404s. All the templates once used are modified, deleted, or broken. Wikimedia's vast Commons doesn't deliberately sync with anything else, so it's up to each language-project to keep track of the images they want to import from the Commons. You're essentially looking at thousands of huge file cabinets full of jumbled papers and media.
    <a href="https://what-if.xkcd.com/59/" rel="nofollow">https://what-if.xkcd.com/59/
    In all its touted wiki-glory, Wikipedia being a living library is astoundingly deficient and caught in a literal web of tech debt. Its pages today are geopolitical battlegrounds and fiefdoms of autists all across the spectrum. We can't avoid it; we can't live without it; but can we afford its monopoly on "truth"?
    Now more to the point of this thread and the telescope images. Olden images were photographic plates. Before that, sketches and drawings. We still have Galileo's "moon dots" from Jupiter discovery!! Wow! But as we progressed from piles of photographic plates into digital data, who will process, catalog, and preserve all that data? The new telescopes coming online all represent veritable firehoses for scientists to drink from. How will they organize the torrents so that future generations will not die from thirst?

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