There will be no outdoor activities between the hours of 9:00 am and noon. That means no outdoor lunch, recess or PE. Parents who choose to keep students home on August 21 may contact the school to have the absence excused. However, if you do choose to send your student to school, there may be opportunities to learn more about the eclipse, but from the safety of the classroom. [More]Can't have the snowflakes melting.
In re the eclipse, the local WalMart told me last week their glasses were recalled, Best Buy wanted to upsell toother gear, and the bottom line is, I ended up using a cereal box and foil to make a camera obscura, which produces really unimpressvie results. I also took some "selfies," which you couldn't really tell anything from as the blackout here was far from complete. My regrets are I did not have a nearby primitive tribe I could convince I was a god, or a supply of old 3-D glasses I could stamp "ISO 9000" on and tell the local Young Marxist Losers for Annihilation chapter I liberated them from fascist oppressors.
I did notice it didn't feel anywhere near as hot during maximum occultation as before and after, but I'd better not talk about that because I don't want to be called a denier for suggesting the sun might have anything to do with "climate change."
I haven't been this underwhelmed since Y2K (which was actually good for my family, as the better half was a mainframe programmer consultant in high demand in the years before).
[Via Henry Bowman]
I would have thought that 97.4% obscuration would have produced a darker bit of world around me. But ... no.
ReplyDeleteLooks like the school district edited their handout, possibly due to public reaction. The original handout said:
ReplyDelete"Additionally, from the house of 10:00 am through 11:00 am we will be in modified lockdown. This means that learning will still be taking place but no one will be allowed to leave the building."
Yes, Virginia, schools now equal prisons.
The thing to remember about a camera obscura is that the size of the image it will produce is in direct proportion to the distance between the pinhole and the screen. The farther away the screen is, the larger the image will be. If you use a small box, you will get a small image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera_model
ReplyDeleteYes indeed, I found the whole eclipse thing underwhelming. Watched the hype for months, and had decided to ignore it. Predicted 97% totality here, for whatever that's worth. My sister called from California, so excited about the whole thing, insisting I tell her what was happening here. The sky got a little gray, didn't have any "glasses" so didn't even try to look at it. My car on the west side of the house had some bright reflections that never even faded. The birds all went about their usual thing pecking at whatever on the ground and flying up to the elect wires from time to time. The dog slept through the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteI can't figure out why in the world anyone would get excited about it, but oh well. Different strokes for different folks.
At least all of the tourist businesses got some good from it. The number of people coming to town for the Sturgis bike rally was down seriously this year, so I'm hoping the eclipse thing made up the difference in some places, at least.
Much ado about nothing, far as I can see. But I suspect with the dumbed down population at government "schools," keeping the little idiots home or confined during the "show" was probably smart. No need for a whole bunch of blind little idiots. I'm sure the ERs across the country were busy anyway with all sizes of idiots...