XKCD: It's more than a comic

The partial eclipse zone is also literally less cool, as less sunlight is blocked and therefore the air is warmer than beneath totality.

Well, this makes me feel just great. I’m just outside totality, didn’t make plans because of my work situation, had a brief span of time where I thought I could get off after all, but that doesn’t looks like it’ll happen.

What if you swam in a nuclear storage pool?

Continuing the animated What If series, we come to one of the non-apocalyptic ones that illustrates how easy it is for "common wisdom" to be completely wrong. In short, while you might drown if you stayed in too long, you'd be perfectly safe from radiation unless you got within centimeters of the fuel... or the water is contaminated by corrosion, which isn't generally supposed to happen. But don't drink it, just to be safe.

My favorite part of this one is at the end, when a researcher at a real nuclear reactor points out that, if you tried to swim in one of their spent-fuel pools, you'd die from gunshot wounds before you got anywhere near it.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 2nd 2024 at 1:30:20 PM

That final sentence of Spent Fuel Pool is an all time classic What If line.

I'm in the band of totality and almost had a conflict with work.

For me it happens at about 3:15 and I was originally scheduled to work (which is entirely indoors with no real view of the sky) 7:00 to 3:30.

Fortunately my workplace accepts "I don't want to miss a once-in-a-lifetime event" as a valid reason to move my shift slightly so I get out at 3:00 instead.

#2915: Eclipse Clouds

Yes, I want to see something block out the Sun that is not clouds. Sue me.

Sue me too. The possibility of something blocking something blocking the sun is concerningly likely where I am.

I was half expecting a Mooning joke in the alt text...

I've seen clouds come very close to solar eclipse levels of darkness. It is quite a sight to see it get almost dark at five in the afternoon in summer, and then rain starts pouring like a firehose...

The April Fool's Day project has gone up a few days late

If you see one called "Ramps and Walls", that's mine.

What in the hell? This is amazing! I managed to crash it while editing my project, though.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 6th 2024 at 3:29:00 PM

There's a hard cap on the number of balls on the screen, and it's rather low, especially for how big the play field is. What's the point of having such a large space when I don't get to make a huge pile of the things?

First time I opened it I got one immediately solved. After the next reload, I had a more complex one. I solved it, named it "Criss-cross", but didn't get very creative with decorations and all.

Edit: Hm, I made another one, and my previous one disappeared.

Edited by petersohn on Apr 6th 2024 at 10:49:14 AM

I drive 40 minutes northwest to get to work and I was surprised to find that buys me over a minute more totality.

They're giving people flexibility to go out and look during work, as (furry) patients allow. But that seems to mean that not everybody will get to experience totality since it's still less than three minutes where we are.

Types of Eclipse Photo

I would go to the Moon just to watch the Earth eclipse the Sun. It must be spectacular.

Wikipedia has an article on that, of course.

It's not nearly as spectacular as our moon-sun eclipses, since the earth is much larger relative to the sun from the moon. It's basically a "new earth" at eclipse, though you do see some of the outermost corona of the sun.

The start and end of the eclipse could be a lot more interesting though, since the earth has an atmosphere.

Tick Marks

I’m not sure what the necessity of concealment is here, though.

Oh, oh! I get it now.

Activity falls off post-deadline, and because the graph's tick marks intrude into it (a graphical design faux pas), the data plot perfectly overlays the tick marks on the X axis.

Not sure why someone would want to do that, but hey.

#2919: Sitting in a Tree

C-O-O-K-I-N-G

Not sure what's so alarming about e-filing in a tree.

Yeah, this seems like just random silliness.

As long as it’s not Black Hat Man doing it, we’ll be fine.

Efiling is innocuous, maybe, but X-Raying? And molting is just downright disturbing.

#2920: Survey Marker

I love it when Randall goes far afield for his nerdy humor. Very few comedians can pull off jokes about geological survey markers.

What if everyone jumped at once?

Ah yes, another classic What If? I was irritated with this one when it came out, and still am, because the people jumping are exchanging gravitational potential energy for kinetic energy and back again. It's not that the Earth doesn't move much. It doesn't move at all. It's the same thing when you launch rockets to orbit, or fly helicopters. There is no net change of momentum in the combined system of Earth-rocket or Earth-helicopter.

You'd accomplish more by moving all that weight to Rhode Island in the first place. The planet's center of gravity would change ever so slightly, inducing precession as it found a new equilibrium along its axis of rotation. Not much precession of course, but we measure similar effects when earthquakes happen.

Also, this is one of those "nearly everyone dies" answers that starts out more innocuous than most.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 2:31:03 PM

Those markers are a good example where a degree of imprecision is actually helpful, because it allows for the inherent measurement uncertainty due to things like continental drift and rising/sinking ground.

Also, never mind the What IF?, what I really love there is the shaded map representing the population distribution of humans on Earth. That is such a great picture, I want that on my wall.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:34:06 PM