I.V.M. I survived four years of engineering college in Kerala without a single drop of alcohol. Wow. Yeah.
And I'm Naren and my random fact is I have hair growing out of my ears. It was not normally the case. I'm not sure how to treat this new piece of information that we have. And yeah, this is me, Sriketh.
My random fact is that I went through my first year of college without missing a single class. So without other ways, Simplified is a show, as long-time listeners would know. It's a show where we take things that happen around us, deconstruct them using lots of Wikipedia references and attempted humor. Emphasis on attempted.
So while you might not be on PSP, the subject that we speak about, you will be marginally better than when you started. Marginally emphasized over there. And it is generally a great tagline for preschools. You will be marginally better than when you started.
Or maybe not. Today we start off with the show with a segment we call, The Profundity of the Week. I like how we are not even consistent with that. Sometimes it's Profundity of the Week.
Sometimes it's Profundity of the Day or whatever. We should do like a best of. So in this segment, what we do is we take the choices of WhatsApp for words that each of us have had the misfortune of receiving over the past fortnight. So I shall share mine today.
This is an image which is rather blue in color with eyes closed. And this following text on it. Why do we close our eyes when we pray, cry, kiss, dream? Because the most beautiful things in life are not seen but only felt by heart.
Good morning. Wow. Deep deep. 8.53 a.m.
We also, but if you think about it, we also mostly close our eyes when you're facepalming getting injection or when there's a dust storm or when you're getting back on the head. It's nice your mind went there because you also close your eyes when you're having an orgasm there. Sriketh, do you know when else you should close your eyes? I don't know, Chuck.
Tell me. When looking at the sun without protection during solar eclipse. Ha ha ha. You mean wearing a condom?
No, you fool. Next page. I mean you need to use special glasses when looking at sun during solar eclipse. Oh, like Donald Trump looked at the sun.
Yes. Ha ha ha. Worst segue. Okay, so this week we are going to talk about solar eclipses as you would have figured out.
So you remember solar eclipses as being a 5-mark question during your 5th standard science exam, but I've pretty much forgotten about it ever since. And since a few weeks ago, one went past the United States creating a lot of furor. So we thought this episode could be taking a deeper look at it. Exactly.
So what exactly is a solar eclipse? It's when the moon becomes a kabab mehati basically between the earth and the sun, or orbit my planetary body might be more appropriate. Forgive my Hindi. And comes between the earth and the sun, blocking the sun.
So basically, come in the sun. It's still threesome. Pretty much. Just that it's like very, very far apart.
It's one large bed. This might be like, this might be a great tool for sex ed, you know, in some way. Like, explain through planetary bodies what happens with human bodies. And we're not even going for the Uranus joke.
So you might... Okay, so basically, the moon comes between the earth and the sun. So that's when a solar eclipse gets hit. You might think that something like this is pretty common.
Like, all these bodies have nothing else to do except bob around in space. Yeah, it's not like you're going to make a pitch presentation or write a podcast episode or something. You think the moon's parents look at it and worry about it and say, look at Sharma Jika Beta's planet or something. Oh god, beat the planet.
Anyway, so basically, that's what happens during the eclipse. The moon comes between the earth and the sun. And the moon comes to the sun fairly often. But why there's a huge fuss in the US right now, and there's a lot of conversation about it, is because a few weeks back, they experienced what was called a total eclipse.
Wow, nice sound effect. Thank you, I've been taking vocal exercises. The orchestra comes along with it. Possibly.
So there are four types of eclipses, all right? We should clarify everything that we're going to talk about. So basically, the moon covers the sun, right? Now, the moon revolves around the earth once every month.
So it might be logical to ask, why don't we have an eclipse once every month? And I will explain. And didn't ask, but the suspense is killing me. Staring directly at the sun during an eclipse will basically fry your retinal cells, okay?
There are two shadows the moon casts on the earth. Pictures, if you will. The sun, then a teeny moon, then the earth, right? The sun is emitting light.
Can you picture this, Viquette? Yeah, I can. The moon is in the way, which casts a sort of shadow, which sort of goes in, right? It's like a, think of it as a little pointy hat towards the earth.
And then there is a larger shadow, which sort of branches out. Able to picture this? Okay? The smaller concentrated shadow is called the Umbra, and the larger shadow is called the Penumbra.
Umbra, you say? Yes, not to be confused with Umbra, which is the English sports brand. Or Burra, which is Dalai Mendi. Or Umbra, which is Indian sick for everything.
Or Umbra, which is a small town near Calendia. Or Umbra, which is what comes between, oh, yes, and oh, shit. Very, very nice. That's a good segment.
Or Umbra, which is Mexican. Of course. Now, can we please talk about the Umbra? So, okay, so small dark, okay, so if you lost an entire segment, small dark shadow, Umbra, larger, lighter shadow, Penumbra, all right?
So now during the movement of the moon and earth, what happens is the Umbra moves along the earth, not in one particular place. So if you happen to be in the Umbra, what happens is you see the moon fully covering the sun. All right, so the Umbra is basically this moving shadow across the earth. There's an Umbra everywhere at some point of time, but except during a total eclipse, it happens to be on the earth.
And at very few points of time, because the earth, most of it is water, very little of a populated earth actually gets to be in the path of the Umbra. That path is called the path of rotality. It's like a very, it's like a Joss Whedon type phrase that they've created for it. So if the moon covers the sun fully, you can't see any of the sun.
It's almost like perfect. It just fits nicely. That's called a total eclipse. So that's just one type of eclipse.
What are the others? So there are three other types. So if you stand in the Penumbral shadow, which is in the lighter shadow area, you see the moon just sort of just missed, you know, it's like it doesn't cover it enough, but it's just like, it's very annoying if you're OCD. Like too perfect, but it's just, you know, OCD.
Yeah, exactly. So this is a partial eclipse. Then there's something else called an annular eclipse that happens when the moon passes in front of the sun, but doesn't cover it fully. So path is correct, but size was wrong.
Previous one, size was right, path was wrong. Isn't like some three little pigs argument, three little pigs, the goldilocks argument is like, not to, not to, not to, that's right. And yeah, I can imagine a lot of astronomers getting very fidgety as a result of all this. By the way, so this annular thing, it's the annular doesn't mean that it happens every year, this is what I thought, annular means ring.
And this happens because the moon's orbit isn't perfectly round. So that's the reason why we don't have solar eclipse, or eclipse is rather that often. Sometimes it's closer to Earth, sometimes it's far away, which is why we don't have perfect solar eclipse every year. The moon's orbit is at a slight angle, which also complicates things a little bit.
So basically the chances of seeing a perfect total solar eclipse are very rare, which is why there's a lot of us in the US right now, because it's happening after a period of a few decades, and the next one will happen after a few decades. Yeah, so basically what you're saying is that at all points of time, there is an umbra, it's just that this umbra posts its shadow on the Earth very rarely. Yeah, exactly. So that's basically about it.
So the umbra moves across the Earth, which is the path of totality. And there's also something called a rare hybrid eclipse. That seems total solar eclipse in some parts, and annular solar eclipse in the other parts of the path of totality. This is very rare, and we can ignore that for all practical purposes.
And so there we have it, four eclipses and all, and there's a lot of news because it's just passed in the US right now, so we'll take a little break and look at solar eclipses, or not. Let's take another side of this break, and we will tell you why. I even host a panel discussion called Cock and Bull, where we dive into current affairs and wonder why anyone even cares at all. And Friday releases are always surprise episodes for you all, so tune in to Cyrus Affairs on YouTube and all audio streaming platforms.
Are you looking for financial products and services that can enhance your personal finance experience? Are you looking for a space to talk about your financial product or service? And are you looking for a crisp talk show where the conversation is all about money? Well, your search ends here.
Hi, my name is Anupad Gupta, and I host over the Paira Paira Podcast, and I invite you for the conversation about your personal finance on each Monday on the IBM Podcast app or the website, or on any podcast streaming platforms. See you, folks. Welcome back to part two of Simplified. In this episode, we are looking at solar eclipses.
Rather, we should not look at solar eclipses. Like the Tandri Tund did. What? I have no idea what you're talking about.
But yes, so we'll explain. So before this, we spoke about how solar eclipses happen. There are four types, et cetera, et cetera. And let's talk about total solar eclipses over here, which is when the moon perfectly covers the sun.
And yeah, it is a pretty awesome phenomenon. Like I've never seen one myself. But yeah, just imagine during the day, the moon just coming and blocking out the sun entirely, and everything just goes dark for a couple of minutes or so. I mean, I can imagine how awesome that would be.
So this happened in the continental US right now about a couple of weeks back, and there was a lot of fuss around, which is why it hit media so much, right? There were lots of viewing parties that were organized for this. It was all over the news, obviously. And this is the first one that has crossed the US in almost a century, 99 years.
And the next one is going to be seen only in 2024. Yeah, so it's just around like, maybe just after the Trump presidency gets done. So two terms left. And it's amazing to see how much consumerism is there actually around this particular solar eclipse.
Like everyone's treating it like a grand festival. Like there were t-shirts that were distributed with the logo on it. And obviously there was a huge market for solar eclipse glasses, and why those are important we'll get to in a while. And you also had lots of great YouTube videos, right?
You had guys who were chasing the eclipse, right? So across the path of totality, they were chasing the eclipse as it happened across the stretch of the continent in the US. There were some lovely videos of guys in cars just going to the streets of the city as the eclipse happened, and everybody's cheering around them. And it was quite a phenomenal sight.
This has been a very consumerized solar eclipse to the extent where a lot of people are actually pissed off by saying people are, but on the other side of the argument is, well, people are paying attention to this enough to create consumerism around it. And one of the most interesting angles was, again, drawing to the Trump presidency where, I mean, there was this amazing video of the last time the total solar eclipse happened in the US, which was in the 1970s. And there's a clip of a news anchor, the news anchor from back then, who actually said that the next one will happen in 2017, by which time we hope that there is peace on Earth, or something like that, which was a quote which he ended with before he signed off from the broadcast at that time. And there everyone was basically saying that, oh, look, Donald Trump and everyone is willing to accept that the solar eclipse is happening, just like the scientists have predicted, referencing to his lack of acknowledgement of global warming and climate change.
So the eclipse isn't just about darkness and like, like two minutes of darkness. No, it's not actually. So it's actually, it's very important for science, which is why a lot of scientists, people are getting kicked about it. I mean, it's a great natural phenomenon just as an observer, but there's a lot of science and other things that happen along with it as well.
One of the most fascinating, which I would love to see, is something called a 360 degree sunrise and sunset. So what happens, so currently, just imagine like you're on a beach or something and the sun is going down. Sunset you see only happening in that area, like the area in front of you. But what happens in an eclipse is the entire 360 degrees around you is, you see the same colors everywhere.
Just imagine like a ring of sunset and sunrise happening around you. So that happens during a total solar eclipse. And sometimes you will see the stars and planets during the day because it goes temporarily dark. And for some reason, it's a particularly good time to see other planets as well during a total solar eclipse.
And obviously there's a temperature change. It drops during a solar eclipse and things like that. Another interesting phenomenon that happens during a total solar eclipse is something called shadow snakes, which is still not explained properly. So what happens is if you take a sort of like a white sheet of paper during a total solar eclipse, you see these patterns that form on it and just go up and down.
It's like, imagine like bands of snakes going up and down like a weird gif on a white sheet of paper. This for some reason happens during solar eclipses and scientists aren't very sure as to why it happens. Again, one of those, it's called shadow snakes because it looks like, the wavy motion looks like snakes hithering on a white ground. So people aren't exactly sure why that happens, but I thought that was pretty fascinating.
So a bunch of things actually happened during a total solar eclipse. And one of the most important things is the glasses. So I think now it's extraordinary in popular culture because the tangerine turd looked at the sky during a total solar eclipse without glasses after being told that that's literally the only thing that you need to do. There are two things that you need to do while watching a total solar eclipse.
One use glasses and two breathe as normal. Don't do anything else and you manage to screw that up. So these glasses, why they make it safe to see this totality because they have special purpose solar filters on them. They are called eclipse glasses.
So basically what happens is during the last moments of a total solar eclipse, it becomes incredibly bright because the moon is blocking it out. It becomes incredibly bright and looking at that directly can burn your retina, which is why it is unsafe to look at a total solar eclipse. It's also a lot of non-visible spectacles. So all that gets concentrated at that final point of time is why that last few moments before totality is very dangerous to look at the sun.
So now a little bit of a backstory. I mean, everyone feels pain, right? And pain is the body's way of telling you, dude, like, calm down. If you back yourself on the head, it hurts because your brain is trying to tell you, go away from whatever is whacking your head because it will hurt your skull.
Similarly, if you get kicked in the balls, then it's nature's way of saying, dude, if you want, like, well. Although if you do kicker's way of saying, you're an asshole. So basically pain is our body's way of telling us, dude, you are in danger. Please move away from what is causing that pain to you or you will physiologically be screwed, right?
The retina, for some reason, does not have pain cells. And that is, so what happens is you can keep looking at a strong light for a long time and your retina will slowly start screwing up, but you don't recognize it because you don't get the pain feedback instantly. What happens if you immediately look at a bright light, is your iris starts contracting very sharp and the iris has pain cells. So that quick contraction, your iris is telling you that, okay, dude, like, it's because of that quick contraction that your eyes start hurting, not your retina.
Your iris is doing that. What happens during a total solar eclipse is it's so concentrated that it will burn your retina without you realizing it, which is why a lot of people realize that your eyes are damaged only much later because there is no pain. Only the after effect has happened. So to prevent this from happening, what you need is, you, you, it's pretty scary.
It's very scary, right? It's very scary. Your sunglasses are not enough for this. Many people think that you can get away by just using regular sunglasses because that doesn't work.
So these special eclipse glasses are basically sunglasses times many, much, much darker, which make it perfectly safe for you to see the eclipse or see the final few minutes of totality. So there are a few safe ways of seeing a eclipse. One is using a eclipse. The other is using welding.
The other is because it's too unwieldy, too expensive. And you can't see anything. And you can't see anything. And the other way is of actually using a pinhole projection, like old school camera.
We were taught that when I was a kid in the 70s, we had an eclipse and we were taught how to use pinhole. So when was the last eclipse in India? You remember? 70s sometime.
That's what I remember. We knew how to, we were taught how to make a pinhole camera. That's cool. Yeah, actually the same thing.
So India's last total solar eclipse was in 99. And I think at that time, I was in Ahmedabad, so we had this very kindly uncle who was from Visto. who worked at ISRO who had actually come and got us a whole ISRO kit on how to make their own pinhole cameras and all of that stuff and got us glasses and a whole very nice eclipse kit for all the kids in the building. So we were all really excited and went on the roof.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of clouds so we couldn't do anything. But what we did see was how it got dark very quickly and what was really amazing to see was how all the birds started flying back home because they thought it was night suddenly. So all the birds started flying in the other direction and suddenly it got bright again so the birds were all like in the middle. So that reminds me of there's a phenomenon called the crossing of Venus if I'm not mistaken saying this to see how devastatingly unfair life can be.
There's this astronomer based in France who wanted to and the best place to watch this crossing of Venus was in India. So he gets on a ship comes all the way to India and decides to set up his equipment and he realizes the main thing that he was supposed to have got has been misplaced on the ship it's not there. So he can't observe the crossing so he goes back because he knows two years later it's going to happen again. So he goes back and gets more equipment and this time he makes sure everything is safe and two years later he comes he sets up everything it's a lovely day all his instruments are in place and just as Venus decides to cross the sun one big cloud comes and stands right in front of that for the entire duration of the crossing and when the cloud goes the crossing has happened and it's not going to happen again for another century.
So that's how devastatingly bad so if you guys any of you think you had a bad day at work think of this poor astronomer I mean clouds have a way of coming and asking any cricketers how clouds can come and disrupting time I'm segwaying into a cricket joke and so there's this witch doctor in Africa who was diagnosed with a bad appendix and the missionary tells him that it's going to kill you unless you go to England and have an operation so witch doctor is an important guy so they put him on a ship send him to England and in England they do that appendix for him and he's got some time to recover so one of his doctors says would you like to come and he's not fit enough to walk around so let's go and watch some cricket so witch doctor don't know what that is but he says I'll come along and then after watching that he's very impressed and he's come back to his African village and he's telling his flock about it and he says these white people they have the most amazing magic I tell you so what happens so these people they cure me off my stomach and then they take me to this beautiful field with green grass on it and people come and then they put three sticks about 22 yards apart and then they go away then two more people come dressed in black coats and white hats and they come and stand then 11 people come and spread out all over the field and after some time two people come with wooden clubs in their hand and then one of the men 11 men takes a red cherry in his hand and he polishes on his leg and he starts running towards the other and beautiful magic it starts raining so very powerful magic the white man he doesn't have a so anyway the next total solar eclipse is going to happen in 2019 December across the world the next one will happen in 2019 December which is going to be visible from Central Argentina and Chile and the next total solar eclipse in India is in 2034 so that should be a fun wait simplified episode number 7,916 like that famous astronomer we shall be here with our microphones look forward to that see you in 37 years to all of our one loyalist thank you so much for tuning in and signing off is Chak Naren and Siket see you guys next bye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye Thank you.