lunchtime musings
It's really sunny out today. Painfully bright, to me. (My threshold is pretty low.) I'd really like someone to invent user-adjustable sunglasses. I don't mean photogray, where you can't control how dark or light they are, or clip-on sunglasses, which only have two settings (on and off); I want to be able to turn a dial and get more or less tint in real time. Amber, as long as I'm dreaming.
There appears to be no good protocol when the person at the head of the checkout line has a problem (like a price dispute). The default seems to be to hold up the line while dealing with it; this is especially frustrating when it's the express lane and all you want to do is pay for your salad and go. It appears that the Giant Eagle registers do not support a "buffer" function that would let them ring up the next person while someone checks the price on the shelf. They could tell the person to pay for the food and then go to the customer-service desk to discuss it and maybe get a refund, but that's also unsatisfactory (and probably has him standing in line a second time when all he wanted to do was pay for *his* food and get out).
Why is the week-to-week variance in sunset times (and presumably sunrise as well) highest near equinoxes and lowest near solstices? There's one week in December (and another in June, to match) where it doesn't really budge for several days. Currently, we're getting variances of 10-12 minutes (this is in Pittsburgh; I know lattitude matters). Why isn't it consistent year-round? I assume it has something to do with the discrepancy between local noon and true noon, just as the solstice problem [*] does, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the geometry.
[*] The winter solstice is not the day with the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset. Here in Pittsburgh, and I presume all points north of the Tropic of Cancer, the events occur in the following order (~2 weeks apart here): earliest sunset, solstice, latest sunrise. There's a corresponding phenomenon in June, of course.
There appears to be no good protocol when the person at the head of the checkout line has a problem (like a price dispute). The default seems to be to hold up the line while dealing with it; this is especially frustrating when it's the express lane and all you want to do is pay for your salad and go. It appears that the Giant Eagle registers do not support a "buffer" function that would let them ring up the next person while someone checks the price on the shelf. They could tell the person to pay for the food and then go to the customer-service desk to discuss it and maybe get a refund, but that's also unsatisfactory (and probably has him standing in line a second time when all he wanted to do was pay for *his* food and get out).
Why is the week-to-week variance in sunset times (and presumably sunrise as well) highest near equinoxes and lowest near solstices? There's one week in December (and another in June, to match) where it doesn't really budge for several days. Currently, we're getting variances of 10-12 minutes (this is in Pittsburgh; I know lattitude matters). Why isn't it consistent year-round? I assume it has something to do with the discrepancy between local noon and true noon, just as the solstice problem [*] does, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the geometry.
[*] The winter solstice is not the day with the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset. Here in Pittsburgh, and I presume all points north of the Tropic of Cancer, the events occur in the following order (~2 weeks apart here): earliest sunset, solstice, latest sunrise. There's a corresponding phenomenon in June, of course.