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PLEASE WEAR PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT
@luckytran look for too long even with eclipse glasses and your eyes will hurt.
This. I used both ISO certified eclipse glasses and a pair of filtered binoculars designed for solar observation and can attest that, even if you use eye protection, looking at the sun too long will make your eyes hurt.
So yeah... not really avoidable unless you only use indirect viewing methods such as a pinhole camera.
@tedward @theothersimo @luckytran
Also, the symptoms of eye damage due to looking at the sun directly are: blurry vision, spots, headache, etc, but not pain.
@luckytran Just read in an other article, that there was fake eclipse watching equipment beeing sold, that had no sufficient protection.
@luckytran i genuinely think that people thought they *were* wearing protective equipment. i think they got scammed into buying knockoffs. i encountered this at least once at my (pretty rural) viewing spot
@luckytran the ones i saw were i guess "overprotective", with lenses that looked like they were made of a different material to mine, and frames that looked like a normal pair of sunglasses. (i bought my own a few weeks in advance from the AAS list) i guess it was better that they got scammed into buying something they couldn't see anything out of, as opposed to the opposite, but i don't think that would be the case everywhere.
we got them set up with a proper pair from the local library
@callieroxy @luckytran A friend watched video of people watching the eclipse in the USA. Fae were astonished by the HUGE majority of people WITHOUT any protective equipement.
@MorganedeSiv @luckytran during totality, which i would guess is the part worth videoing, you are supposed to take the glasses off.
@callieroxy Videos of previous eclipses in other countries showed reversed percentages of people with and without protective equipment, so I'm not so sure it's about the totality moment. (filming people, not the eclipse = don't care about totality)
@MorganedeSiv i guess what’s irking me here is that i’m suggesting a systemic failure in how protective equipment is distributed/the quality control of online sellers, witnessed firsthand, and your reply is just “but what if americans are just uniquely stupid based on an anecdote someone else told me”
@callieroxy I don't say they're uniquely stupid, I say they're uneducated on things we consider common knowledge. That's a systemic failure, because education doesn't just happen by itself.
@callieroxy You're saying they have bad equipment, I'm saying they haven't been told they need equipment.
@luckytran Unfortunately, the best protective equipment is a functioning brain, and those appear to be in short supply.
...with shortages growing every day....
(In my more paranoid moments, I find myself wondering if that's actually accidental....)
@cavyherd @BruceMirken @luckytran
nah. I think about this too. Covid brain especially...and stuff like THIS this is the result.
@artisanrox @BruceMirken @luckytran
Yeah, I've actually had callers from the general public remarking on this sort of brain-fail. OH the next few years are going to be Interesting....
rather inavoidable
remember ghostbusters
ray: "don't look directly into the trap!"
ray opens trap
egon: "i looked directly into the trap"
@luckytran No one saw this coming...
@luckytran This was foreseeable… 
@luckytran Ha, again red states and districts as usual in their ignorant backward uneducated way their people look at the sun during an eclipse…Just like their demented fear inducing ruler D Trump. Goddess willing they will not be able to see the ballot
@luckytran to be fair it could just be us psychosomatics — I was checking webmd for anthrax symptoms in 2001
@thereelray @luckytran i was thinking a mix of this and the fact that it became a bit of a meme - I’ve seen more of this type of screenshot than i have eclipse photos
@luckytran I saw totality in Arkansas, exercised reasonable precautions. Everyone in my physics department that went up didn't have issues. This stuff isn't that difficult.
@beunice @luckytran hah! Says the physicist! The rest of us have IQ’s below 200, and how were we supposed to know the sun hurts your eyes! /j
@2d @luckytran It took years of humungo-brain research and made our heads hurt real bad, but we have come to the astounding conclusion that staring at a star at point blank range is too much for our eyes. The star will win every time.
@luckytran Fake eclipse glasses might also have been a factor in this (people who thought they were taking precautions but used inadequate protection).
@luckytran bad cases of Trump-eye-tis
@luckytran you can even identify the counties in western NY/PA where it was cloudy for the few hours around the eclipse
Ⓥ
So was the #ClimateCatastrophe, and yet here we are.
@luckytran It's as if there was no logical warning. 
@luckytran In the words of Louis Armstrong, "There's some folks that, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em."
@luckytran Is Natural Selection not working? Seems humans should have been eliminated eons ago.
@luckytran What are the units for "Google search volume" 0-100? Has this been normalized in some way?
@luckytran I think you think too highly of people if you believe this was avoidable.
I didn’t see one media hit talking about the eclipse without explicitly warning about eye pro. This was NOT a media failure.
To the degree that this was due to fraudulent eye protection being sold into an unregulated market, there might be a case that more stringent certification laws might have been preventative.
But in all likelihood this was mostly willful stupidity that was not preventable in any kind of meaningful way.
@larthallor
You're not wrong about the proliferation of uncertified eclipse glasses online. My roommate traveled to see the totality and he had a heck of a time shifting through all the garbage on Amazon to actually find certified good quality glasses. Once he found them it was no problem getting them but they were all buried behind hundred of listings for very cheap suspicious trash.
@luckytran Was this further broken down by party affiliation, since 45 had 'modeled the way?' https://duckduckgo.com/?q=trump+staring+at+solar+eclipse&t=vivaldim&iax=images&ia=images
@luckytran It is an amazing graphic that shows a tremendous opportunity. It shows that the scientific enterprise can forecast exactly where you need to be to witness a rare celestial event, and it can explain that event so that it does not cause it fear. That event obviously brought many different people together in awe and wonder. Now, rather than laugh about the coherence between the search locations and the path of totality, we need to remind people that the scientific enterprise is designed to look for truths in a myriad of falsehoods and can make our lives better by following its recommendations. Hopefully people can take such a lesson to decisions, bother personal and otherwise, about public health (#COVID) and #ClimateChange.
@Brad_Rosenheim @luckytran
I read that in Spock’s voice.
@luckytran Sadly, probably not. You have a lot of low information people out there...
@luckytran not really, most people are morons ;)
@luckytran Avoidable? Yes.
Predictable? Also yes.
@pootenski @luckytran I came to say this too
@luckytran Here's the link to explore these data on your own: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=US&q=My%20Eyes%20Hurt&hl=en
@jon @luckytran with all the news stories about eye damage, people might actually be more paranoid about their eyesight and look things up more than on another day (supposedly burnt retinas don't hurt because there are no pain receptors there)
@luckytran @jon no one in this thread read your article or understands why this happened. 
kakistocracy
@luckytran
I don't know if this is accurate. My area is in one of the orange 40-60 areas, (wasn't in totality path, but in partial area). We had total cloud cover, couldn't see the sun all day. Not one bit.
@luckytran @afewbugs
World’s biggest skid marks.
@luckytran but since the begin of the pandemic we allowed sociopathic Karens to make decisions...
@luckytran And some folks wonder why we're still in a pandemic. *sigh*