I’m actually proud of a decision I made to kick a can down the road.
I was writing assembly code in the 90s for a custom chip embedded in TVs. At some point I needed to determine if a year was a leap year. I knew perfectly well that the full rule for leap years was a year is a leap year if it’s divisible by 4, unless it’s also divisible by 100 but not by 400; and yet, I coded the test to simply check if the year was divisible by 4. When this was pointed out at a code review I told them if my code were still in use in 2100 I’d personally come back and fix it for free. (spoiler alert: It’s not still in use).
I believed in glass flowing until it was debunked by my AP Chem teacher in HS in 1984. It was during the lesson when he introduced the concept of Poise.
What surprised me was just how modern manufacturing methods to economically produce flat glass were. Before the Pilkington Process was developed in the 1950s, where molten glass is floated on a bed of tin, glass panes were either slightly irregular or very expensive.
My experience with verb tenses is also different since I meant to say “spent.”
I found generic terms (like “punch” and “flavored drink”) used in press accounts more frequently than Flavor-Ade. Hard time finding contemporary news footage, but in the two I watched, one said “Kool Aid” and the other said, “punch.”
I remember, decades ago, seeing ads for digital watches. This must have been at the time when they had just become cheap enough to sell on late-night TV. The ad said it automatically adjusted for leap years until 2000. It dawned on me how silly that was. If it had the 100-year-rule coded in, but not the 400-year-rule, you’d have to still have it in 2100 to make that worthwhile.
And from what I can tell, we have one George W. Morey of the then-called Carnegie Institution of Washington who did the research in the 1920s showed that glass is a liquid (by the science of the time). However, it appears that was already “known” among the scientific types because I saw a un unsourced reference from 1926.
And so far as Y2K type dates. I’m reposting something that I originally posted on this board back in 1999 (yeah, that’s right, a 99er):
Where I work, a large part of our Customer Information System (since replaced) was written in the mid-60’s, and most of the rest was written in the early '70’s.
When the year changed from 1989 to 1990, we had some programs giving bad information. We did some searching, and found that there was documentation that that same bug had occurred when the year changed form 1979 to 1980.
The programmer had just plugged it–not made a permanent change to fix it.
The problem: The system was designed (in the mid-'60’s) such that one of the dates in the files contained only a ONE-position year! They didn’t plan for a change in the decade, let alone the turn of the century.
As far as I know, the only impact in recorded history that started a fire was Tunguska, a massive, low-altitude air burst. Despite “burning" in the atmosphere, meteorites are cold. Even bolides don’t result in any heat reaching the surface.
There’s zero evidence of any meteor at all, let alone anything that could physically start mirror fires across the entire Great Lakes region.
I was surprised to learn that this is in fact the case with meteorites when I looked it up after @Darren_Garrison posted this upthread.
Apparently the outside gets very hot, even molten, and will typically ablate away as it enters the atmosphere. But because they are going so fast, the interaction with the atmosphere only takes a few seconds, so the cold interior never gets a chance to heat up.
Even iron meteorites, which have better conductivity, will typically only get a little warm.
I suppose all bets are off if the meteorite gets big enough, but the heat in that case is due to a large mass hitting the surface of the Earth at hypersonic speed, not necessarily due to air friction or compression.
ETA: Although the Tunguska event meteor reportedly scorched trees for miles when it exploded in the atmosphere before it hit the ground. In that case, the heat created was solely due to interaction with the atmosphere.
More technically correct is that they are at the equilibrium temperature for that type of meteoroid in space at the distance of Earth’s orbit. Which is usually below 0 celcius for stony meteorites but can be above 100 Celsius for iron meteorites. But never high enough to start a fire.
Google for equilibrium temperature of meteoroids at Earth orbit and look at the AI overview, which isn’t bad and gives links to various websites and to PDFs of original studies.
The myth is that Mozart died, forgotten, and was so poor he had to be buried in a pauper’s grave.
He was not forgotten. At all. Hell, his final year was his best one professionally (see below).
He was buried in a common grave because of funeral reforms carried out by Joseph II of Austria, not because he was broke and could only afford a ‘pauper’s grave’. The film Amadeus got this correct - one of the reforms was “reusable coffins” where you would be carried to the gravesite and then slid into the grave… with some lime added for good measure… with the coffin being reused for the next victim.
While Wolfie was famously bad with money, his final year he made about $500k equivalent (his best year ever, earnings-wise) and never made less than $100k equivalent in his Vienna period. A U of Georgia econ professor and I worked this out one 1995 afternoon using the figures contained in Solomon’s Mozart: A Life. We (well, he, mostly) used purchasing power parity techniques for this one - once we had a reliable citation on the cost of a loaf of bread in Vienna during the 1780s, that was pretty much that. His earnings varied quite a bit, but he always earned very well compared to the average Austrian of the period.
To be fair, I guess Wolfie made more in 2025 terms, but I’m not really interested in redoing the work.
Fun fact: Wolfgang’s wife was the Priscilla Presley of her generation. She organized his estate, fought unscrupulous music publishers who stole his work (using the tried and true “you’re going to steal from a WIDOW?” technique, both as a public relations pressure and some lawsuits), and started making serious bank.
Oh, and he was never called “Amadeus”. That was not part of his name and people who say “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” are, effectively, misnaming him. His full name was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.
The cite from Wikepidia does point at one reason the name Amadeus became what it is today, the change became more official when…. [Drum roll]
The Priscilla Presley of her generation asked for a pension to the Emperor.
In a letter dated December 11, 1791, Mozart’s widow Constanze, in severe financial straits, asked to be given a pension by the Emperor (the appeal was ultimately successful). She signed herself “Konstantia Mozart, née Weber, widow relict of the late Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” Imperial officials, replying to her request, used the same name.[9]
It was quite common at the time for people to use Latinized versions of their name. Amadeus is a Latinized version of Theophilus, both mean “loved by God”. Mozart did sometimes sign his name as Amadeus, possibly in jest, but preferred the French version Amadè.
One of my favorite little tidbits about Constanze:
Some years after Mozart’s death, Constanze married Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, who wrote one of the first biographies of Mozart. Nissen’s tombstone identifies him as “the husband of Mozart’s widow.”
