a woman-who’s-poster-I-saw-at-the-AAS-but-I’m-blanking-on-the-name who had actually proposed a satellite to nail it down

That would be (my friend and colleague) Susana Deustua, along with colleagues of hers. See http://www.starcal.org. There are several smaller projects that may get us a fraction of the way there in the meantime. STARCaL has other uses (in climate studies, etc.) as well.

It was important to learn that Type Ia SN had a typical luminosity, but not what its value was, to discover the accelerating Universe.

However, the value is important if you’re going to decide that they might be detectable at z=1. Maybe you don’t need to know more than a significant digit or two, but it’s not unnecessary information. Moreover, the good relative distances were critical for nailing down the time-delay/color/luminosity relation.

You’re certainly right that absolute photometry is still in the dark ages. I know of various astronomers who’ve been working on it/griping about it for a while (Stubbs, Hogg, and a woman-who’s-poster-I-saw-at-the-AAS-but-I’m-blanking-on-the-name who had actually proposed a satellite to nail it down). It will definitely be a bonus if the dark energy fervor has the byproduct of nailing this down.

B.

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That Type Ia SN have a typical luminosity of 10^43 ers/s, which we learned from figuring out how to measure distances to nearby galaxies that happened to host Type Ia Sn in the past, using a list of facts that is much longer than this one.
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It was important to learn that Type Ia SN had a typical luminosity, but not what its value was, to discover the accelerating Universe. Doing this was certainly aided by other known distance indicators, although after the fact SNe Ia alone can tell you that they are standard(izable) candles. It was not important to know what the luminosity was in erg/s. Speaking of which,

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takes for granted that we know even more basic things like “how do I calibrate how many ergs/s are coming from an astronomical object that I detect as a fuzzy blotch in my CCD detector?”.
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As observers, we don’t really actually have a good answer to this question. I can tell you how many erg/s are hitting my detector rather well. However, relating that to how many erg/s were actually emitted by the astronomical object in the given area subtended by our aperture is a far more challenging problem. Our ability to make relative measurements is far, far greater than our ability to make absolute measurements. While we’re discussing basic research things that should be done in astronomy, this is one of the very important things that we should probably figure out how to do well. And at the present moment it is in fact future planned dark energy missions/experiments that are most driving this need for basic improvement in how we do astronomy.

He is indeed. Proof: even the people who see him sleeping in their seminars like him.

Old cliches, of course, get to be old cliches by being true.

The closer you get to the Theory Of Everything, the closer you get to not being real. The further you get from a TOE, the closer you are to being real! The TOE is not real or imaginary; it’s the real Theory Of Everything that’s imaginary!

It really does not matter what I think about or read about, I simply cannot say whether I exist or not. It seems to me that the reason I am here; is because everybody else exists, but that does not mean I am real or still alive (Watch V for Vendetta). I just have to have the imaginary potential to collapse everybody else’s imaginary potential so I can be observed as real, even if I have never been born! Failing that; I just have to have the potential to observe an object that can have more potential than any Theory Of Everything, then slide down the hill on the other side. Black Holes and dark matter are boring and governed by relativity, “Nonsense is where it’s at now!”

Qubit