Coolness should be on a log scale there.
Eh, the scale needs to include zero, so as to include points outside the partial zone. And with a log scale, all you’d actually know would be that totality is some amount more times cool than partiality, without knowing how many times, while that can be indicated on a linear plot even without a marked scale.
And anyone who understands log scales probably already knows not to settle for 91%.
Well, the problem with it now is that it looks like a total eclipse is only, say, 30 times cooler than a 91% eclipse. But in fact it’s about a million times cooler. Everything outside totality should be less than a pixel high.
And I’d dispute that needs to go to 0. The sun is cool by itself. It’s just not very cool in comparison.
Betelgeuse is cool; the sun is warm. And Regulus is hot.
I can’t keep up with this thread, but I hope this is OK to post.
XKCD has been mentioned in The Economist
Question about totality from someone who’s never experienced it. Do sufficient stars appear that an observer might experience a Nightfall-like event (I’m assuming much less light pollution than a city-dweller normally gets, but I’m also mindful that it only lasts about four minutes)?
And if so, do they appear in other sectors of the sky?
It’ll be like just after sunset: You’ll definitely be able to see the brighter planets, if they’re up, and some of the brightest stars, but not the full panoply. But the whole sky will be that dark, so wherever the bright stars are, you’ll be able to see them.
If I am not mistaken, the “Nightfall” scenario is with 10x more visible stars, also more luminous, compared on Earth; then again, if there is that much light, how dark would it even get, especially with the multiple nearby stars in the solar system described in the story (eclipsed or not).
As to the first part, I imagined something like the total light output of Earth’s full Moon on a clear night. Or maybe half that. But coming from an utterly weird source to the inhabitants, and a very small fraction of the light they were used to.
So the weird source effect for them may be akin to how we react to watching a TSE. The amount of light is familiar to us, but the source is so strange as to be awe- (or terror-) inspiring depending on how much and how soon we each expect normalcy to return. One could certainly imagine mass hysteria events have occurred in human history triggered by TSEs. Although probably only short-lived ones.
What was the author’s imagination on this point? Hard to say.
Which raises the side point of how well the eye systems of any “people” or animals on that planet would be adapted to perceiving in the dark at all. Local evolution would have had little reason to “invest” in inventing and maintaining low-light vision.
Famously cats see far better than humans in normal terrestrial darkness. Might Nightfall be absolutely brighter than Earth’s full Moon, but to their eyes which have almost no low-light vision capability they’d be unable to see their “hand” in front of their “face”?
As to the second part, we experience about 12 hours of Terran eclipse every day when from our POV the Sun is occluded by the planet we’re standing on. Clearly any of the stars in that system which are well below the horizon at “nightfall” wouldn’t be contributing light. Any that were in a twilight condition would probably prevent the disaster scenario.
It’s only when all their system’s star(s) below the horizon were below the twilight band AND all their system’s star(s) above the twilight band and above horizon were simultaneously eclipsed by 3rd body(s) that the disaster is triggered.
I always liked the idea that the disaster recurred on intervals far longer than the inhabitants’ lifespans. So nobody lived through two, and only the ancient and garbled legend of the last one survived to the occurrence of the next.
As I recall, there was a novel-length expansion of the original short story that plugged a few logical holes in the original premise. Like how the inhabitants of that world could be so completely unfamiliar with darkness (miners anyone?) that it would trigger mass traumatic phobia.
So the basic idea is to come up with the most entertaining Rube Goldberg contraption that will get all the balls into the bottom drain? ETA: but they’re going to make the requirements more elaborate as time progresses.
It looks like the bottom drain isn’t the goal (at least, not for all of them). There are multiple color-coded drains: You’re supposed to get all the blue balls into the blue drain, etc.
This one seems to mostly be working for me (the fancy app XKCDs often don’t), but I’ve seen glimpses of explanatory popups, but they go away before I can read them, and I’m not sure how to get them back.
…And there’s more to it. It looks like the entire Machine is a very large grid of a great many of these individual panels, each with its own inputs and outputs. Everyone who views the page gets an as-yet unfinished panel at random, and has to get everything going where it’s supposed to in their panel. Once all of outputs are (mostly) correct, you have the option to submit it and add it to the entire Machine.
I’ve been in one total eclipse, and the thing that surprised me was that it wasn’t like at night, because I could see out beyond the Moon’s shadow to the horizon, where there was a band of light. It was sort of pinky, but for me the effect was like a really, really, heavy cloud cover.
ETA: Plus, suddenly colder.
OK, it looks like the whole grid is just gross.
Does anyone else see one in row 3, column 9 named “Crosswinds”? That was mine.
Does anyone else get the feeling that Randall Munroe has gone full supervillain and this elaborate machine is a way to outsource the decryption of the nuclear launch codes into manageable chunks for his minions to solve?
That was the thing that surprised me the most. How cold it got.