A world map showing current sunlight and cloud cover
Appears to be rounded to the nearest hour.
The hemispherical projection lets you more readily see the effect of the earth’s tilt
Daily Archives: August 5, 2009
The Eye of the Beholder
A wife-carrying contest is actually a lot like it sounds. Men, carrying wives, race through an obstacle course that includes sand, water and fences. The prize for winning the race is the wife’s weight in beer.
Thinking Outside the Ball
Physicists trap light in a bottle
To get light into an optical cavity, it has to fit. That is, when the photon travels a complete circuit of the sphere, it must travel a whole number of half-wavelengths. The spheres are tiny, so the color difference between two wavelengths that fit is huge. This becomes a problem because we can’t precisely control the size of the spheres during manufacture, and nature chooses which colors of light atoms will interact with—the two rarely end up matching.
The usual solution is to make a bajillion spheres and find one that is close to right. Then you can heat the sphere so that it expands until you get to exactly the right color. It would be much better to just have a resonator that could adapt itself to any color of light.