Category Archives: School and Education

Mercury Transit Tomorrow!

NPR The Two-Way: Mercury Will Cross In Front Of The Sun In A Rare Event. Here’s How To Watch.

Space.com: Transit of Mercury 2016: Full Coverage of the May 9 Event. They also have a viewing guide: Mercury Transit of the Sun on May 9: How to See It and What to Expect.

NASA has a simulation of how the transit will look from the US: 2016 Mercury Transit Path.

Astronomie.de: Merkurtransit 2016.

In Deutschland ist der Merkur-Transit zwischen 13:12 und 20:40 Uhr (mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit) zu beobachten. Leider ist der Merkur zu klein, als dass man ihm mit dem bloßen Auge sehen kann; man benötigt ein Fernglas oder ein Teleskop – aber natürlich mit geeignetem Sonnenschutz!

Chernobyl – Tschernobyl

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl.

McClatchy DC: Ruined Chernobyl nuclear plant will remain a threat for 3,000 years. “30 years since Chernobyl may seem like a long time, but it’s really just the start. Below reactor’s ruins is a 2,000-ton radioactive mass that can’t be removed. How do you protect a site for as long a time as Western civilization has existed?”

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty: The Chernobyl Disaster: How It Happened. “On April 26, 1986, a routine safety test at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine spiraled out of control. Follow the dramatic events that led to the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster.”

Links via the 30th anniversary commemoration thread on MetaFilter, which contains more excellent links and interesting discussion, as usual: “This was the day, of course, when we learned we were wrong.“

I posted about Chernobyl on my weblog several times in the past: April 26, 2006, 20th anniversary; May 2, 2006, Artikel aus der Zeit; May 28, 2007; April 26, 2010; November 18, 2010.

What’s the largest number you know?

Tim Urban posted some interesting articles on Wait but why that illustrate large numbers:

From 1 to 1 000 000 is the tame beginning, with visualizations of numbers up to a million.

From 1 000 000 to Graham’s Number continues the journey up to Graham’s Number, compared to which a Googol and even a Googolplex is just an epsilon.

In 7.3 Billion People, One Building, he explains how long a chain of all living humans would be, and how big a building would have to be to fit them all in.

These were posted in November 2014 and March 2015, but except for the number of humans on earth (which has been estimated at 7.4 billion in March of 2016) should still be current.