And it was central to the distance-redshift result proposed by Hubble and others (Robertson, Lemaître) before him, which eventually led to the conclusion that the Universe is expanding.

https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/109377812094733282

Happy birthday to Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who gave us the means to measure our Universe.

Without her discovery there would be one fewer rung on the Cosmic Distance Ladder!

Image: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s work allowed Harlow Shapley to conclude that our Sun is further from the Milky Way’s center than previously thought. Unfortunately, he gave her little credit.

The same was true for Edward Pickering, who published many of her findings under his own name.

Like her Harvard colleague Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt was deaf – the result of an illness she suffered after graduating from college but before she began her astronomy work.

Image: Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 1913 (Harvard University Library)

Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory, wrote back to inform Mittag-Leffler that Henrietta had passed away.

But, he pointed out, didn’t HE really deserve the credit for interpreting her results? As far as I know, Mittag-Leffler ignored Shapely’s distasteful reply.

So no one received a Nobel for her revolutionary work. But it did factor into the Physics Prize in 2011, awarded to Perlmutter, Riess, and Schmidt for discovering the accelerating Hubble expansion of the Universe.

Sorry everyone, I had a typo in my list. Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born on JULY 4th, not August 4th. I’ll leave this up a bit, then delete the thread.
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/112904815533642713

Look, I am 100% pro-vaccine, and I take seriously the campaigns and threats that sow distrust in them.

But this is objectively very funny.

@gvlx Further up in the thread. Trouble retrieving metadata, non-native Mac app is choppy with PDFs. Lots of other weird little inconsistencies which I think you chalk up to being just a ref manager rather than a full Library manager.

@jwleblan (Thank you for the rec, though. Always encouraged to re-try things when I hear about them working well for others!)

@jwleblan Yeah, I have used it to manage bib files before, and maybe I just need to switch back over. But I'd really like something all-in-one that handles the library, viewing, annotation, bibtex and other ref export, etc. Just doesn't seem to exist anymore outside of poor cross-platform tools.

Basically, my complaint is that I want the old @mekentosj version of Papers, which worked pretty well and didn't have most of these problems.

I hope those developers got paid when they sold to Springer, because their software has been absolutely ruined.

Looking at Bookends, and really pulling for it, but... trying to match a book chapter, and google scholar searches that work in a browser are coming up empty when I try to autofill metadata. Nothing coming up for authors named "Witten" or “Weinberg”.

On top of that, full screen is sort of a mess. This is one thing Papers gets right. But to open new pdfs in Bookends while in fullscreen mode I have to switch from compact view to widescreen view and then back. That seems wrong!

Some real, glaring problems with cross platform toolkits:

- They typically break some keyboard shortcuts by replacing expected behavior with something else. (To be fair, macOS has been breaking lots of its own expected behaviors over the past few versions.)

- The handling of pdfs is often choppy or laggy. I'm seeing that here. My 12 year old 1st gen iPad handled pdfs better than a lot of modern cross-platform desktop apps, because the software was thoughtfully optimized for the hardware.

Mendeley, owned by Elsevier, is an obvious non-starter.

(Even so, I tried to take a look for the sake of comparison, and you can't even log in to the Desktop app. It just keeps sending you to a web login that doesn’t inform the app.)

Tried Zotero. (Looks like it uses gtk3?)

- Still struggling to find metadata for stuff that comes right up in Google scholar with a title search.

- With six papers open I can't grab the window's title bar, because it's filled with tabs. What??

- The pdf viewer is laggy on an M1 MBP. Especially gestures, like pinch-to-zoom.

@knoppaz I really want to use it! But I think I'd still need to use something like Zotero to handle metadata and generate citations, right?

Alas, the Native part is really important. I know it's a failing on my part, but non-native apps just introduce a lot of friction for me.

This is my periodic post asking if anyone has found anything better than Papers for managing pdfs on Mac. Something native, that can actually look up metadata and get it right, that behaves the way you expect when you type ⌘-F or ⌘-x or whatever.

(I can't believe I pay for Papers.)

@hannah Huh. Never occurred to me that we have more than one occult bookstore here in Chicago.

@seachanged Yep, I was careless with the alt-text. But I bet you are right.