this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Lie on the beach in winter: the sun is pathetically un-warm.
Adjusting the angle at which you recline won't make the sun any warmer.
So your intuition is off here.
Imagine someone puts an opaque shell around the earth at cruising altitude, and cuts a metre-square window in it.
Put that window directly over the equator, wait for noon. You will have a metre-square patch of sunlight on the ground.
As the sun heads towards the horizon, the patch of sunlight stretches into a long east-west tail, just like a long shadow.
The same amount of energy is coming through the window, but it's spread over a much larger area on the surface, so there's fewer watts-per-square-cm hitting the ground.
Now move that window north 30 degrees. Wait until noon, and the patch is already smeared into a long tail north-south, and that's before applying any east-west smear. As the sun heads for the horizon, it's going to be even more spread out into a great big enormous oblong, extended in both directions.
Now, entirely replace that shell with windows, and through the raytracing gets more involved, the same principles are at work.
That's why mornings and evenings are cold, that's why winter is cold, that's why it gets colder towards the poles. You're getting a smaller and smaller share of the sunlight hitting the area where the earth is.
Really great visuals.