Orrin Reblogs All!

I'm sick of seeing that lie peddled by clickbait news sites and popular accounts trying to ridicule her with "Oh you didn't expect coffee to be hot?".

What actually happened should radicalise you.

In 1994, Stella Liebeck, who was 79 years old, spilled coffee on her lap while in the passengers seat of the car. The coffee was dangerously hot and caused third-degree burns over 16% of her body including her inner thighs and genitals.

*Warning - Very graphic images of the burns*

Image 1.

Image 2.

Stella originally tried to settle with McDonald's for the cost of her medical care - $20,000. They only offered her $800.

Throughout the case it was discovered that McDonald's were selling coffee between 30-40 degrees higher than other places. That change in temperature causes third-degree burns much faster, if it had been from somewhere else she would have had roughly 20 seconds to wipe away the coffee and avoid third-degree burns.

Working at Harvard in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as a “Computer”, Annie Jump Cannon cataloged stars using their spectra from photographic plates, in an effort to understand the mysteries and peculiarities of stellar spectra.

This was hard, detailed, nuanced work. By 1889, three years into her work, she had classified over 1,000 stars. By 1913, she could classify 200 stars an hour. She could classify three stars a minute, just by sight. Using a magnifying glass, she could classify stars down to 9th magnitude, 16 times fainter than the human eye can see. And she did this all with exceptional accuracy.

Over the course of her career, she personally classified more than 350,000 stars, accounting for a mind-boggling 98% of all contemporary stellar spectra classifications, a feat that wouldn’t be bested until the 1990’s with automated digital sky surveys.

Cannon used these classifications to develop the Harvard spectral classification system (O–B–A–F–G–K–M), organizing stars by surface temperature and physical properties.

It is hard to overstate just how foundational her work was to modern astronomy and astrophysics. Her classifications have enabled more than a century of breakthroughs in stellar structure and evolution, including the understanding of how stars change over time and how temperature, luminosity, and composition are related. The system underpins the Hertzsprung–Russell (HR) diagram, one of the most important tools in astrophysics, and remains embedded in modern research, from stellar population studies to galaxy evolution.