Miss Skellany

-- At The Federalist, Robert Tracinksi offers a list of seven things people should stop doing during the presidential candidate debates. Since these things are either manipulated by moderators in order to make all of the candidates look bad or manipulated by the candidates themselves to get their talking points in front of voters for free, I've got a list of one thing people should stop doing during the presidential debates: Watching them.

I win.

-- A supernova some 3.8 billion light years from Earth was more than five hundred billion times as bright as the sun when it blew up. In other words, this one object put out more light than the entire Milky Way galaxy. Scientists are still calculating the SPF number you would need to not burn to a crisp if you were anywhere near it.

-- The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently announced the nominees for the 2015 Oscars. Thanks to the good folks at Mental Floss, we can see eight nominations that were revoked. One of them was an Oscar that was actually awarded before being yanked when the Academy learned it had shown in a theater a year before the awards year in which it was nominated. This is a list that the Academy would probably rather you not pay too much attention. If it got into the habit of revoking undeserved awards, it would probably have to rent some storage space for all of the recovered statuettes.

-- Cadillac is putting a pause in its plans to release a self-driving vehicle. Rumors that this move comes in response to the Chauffeur's Union -- specifically, threats that GM execs who approve a self-driving Caddy might wind up fitted for cement driving gloves -- are as yet unfounded.

-- Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone and everyone can edit, turns 15 years old today! Whoops, I just checked. It was 14 years old. Nope, that was changed back to 15. Oh, wait, that will be 15 years tomorrow. No, it was 16 years yesterday. No, it's definitely 15 sexist, cisgender-white-male privileged years old, and it's today, and it's been locked so that is the definitive right year and day!