DINNER PARTY INTEL...

The topics you have to be able to discuss this week

1. Crowning achievement

After an almost two-year wait, Game of Thrones fans on Sunday put on a display of loyalty fit for a king, tuning into the season 8 premiere in record numbers. In the US alone, 17.4-million viewers watched the episode, and millions more tuned in from the 170 countries screening the show simultaneously to prevent spoilers. And that’s not counting those watching illegally (the Daily Mail reports that season 7 was illegally streamed about 1-billion times). It will warm the producers’ hearts: the series has also been the most expensive, costing about $15m to make. But it will all be over quickly: the six-episode final series is set to wrap up on May 19. And, with that, a stark viewing future looms for fans.

2. Risky spot for a selfie

Einstein was not always happy with the consequences of his ideas, or the science going on around him. Though the general theory of relativity led quickly to the notion that gravity could produce black holes, Einstein did not agree. But black holes have been a scientific cottage industry since the 1960s. Obviously you can’t see them (that’s the point — they suck light in), but we have been treated for years to artists’ impressions of the chaos in their immediate vicinity. Last week we got to see one. Or rather, a computercolourised image of the chaos around a black hole 55-million light years away. It has quickly been given the name Powehi, a Hawaiian word meaning “the adorned fathomless dark creation”. Einstein probably wouldn’t have liked that either.

3. Books we’ll never read

A 500-year-old library catalogue more than 25cm thick has been found in Copenhagen after more than 350 years. It was a catalogue for Hernando Colón’s 16th-century book collection, containing summaries of thousands of books. Only a quarter of them survive, housed in

Seville Cathedral. Colón made it his life’s work to create the world’s biggest library.