this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
116 points (93.3% liked)

Showerthoughts

29325 readers
3 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I could swear I knew the answer in grade 5 and no longer remember but like at what point is it one step to the right and no wind and suddenly wind a step further. Like rain starts from the clouds (and I assume thunder too) but what about wind.

top 45 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 year ago (2 children)

“Wind forms when the sun heats one part of the atmosphere differently than another part. This causes expansion of warmer air, making less pressure where it is warm than where it is cooler. Air always moves from high pressure to lower pressure, and this movement of air is wind.” source

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

aka the sun's discrimination makes air go woosh

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Now do farts...?

Edit: Sorry, just seeing your username. Excuse the ridiculous question.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

lol it’s cool, girls are not automatically offended by the concept of or actual farts. Farts would be too small to produce a significant breeze but there would be a very small air disruption from both the fart itself and the temperature change it would impart

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think he meant that scientifically girls don't have the ability to fart. /s

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Or breaking wind. This one has so many layers

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Did you forget that girls don't fart??

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

What does your username mean?

Guy In Real Life?

Sorry im from reddit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
[–] AdmiralShat 47 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When one area cools, the air their contracts, when another area warms, it expands

When it contacts, it pulls, when it warms, it pushes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

According to the link in the top comment (sorry for caps, copied it out of the image): COOL AIR TRAVELS TOWARDS WARM AIR OVER LAND.

So the warm air does push, but it pushes upwards (rises). Cool, low pressure air, then fills the void.

This clarification brought to you by another non-expert in the field. Ha

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. Born below the ever cloud-capped peaks that gave the mountains their name, the wind blew east, out across the Sand Hills, once the shore of a great ocean, before the Breaking of the World.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't care what anyone says about the show I'm pumped to watch s2e6 tonight.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's not the greatest but it's still decent fantasy TV. There's so much crap that I'm happy with decent 😂

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I haven't gotten around to watching it yet!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It can be very disappointing if you've read the books.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I thought season 1 was okay. Weird Perrin had a wife.. don't know how that will play out later. Did they use matches at the beginning? I guess that plot is gone but it was minor enough I guess. Additional romance stuff was typical to gain a broader audience I suppose. Overall I was relatively happy. Much better than Sword of Truth's show adaptation.

Didn't know season 2 had started, is it further from the books?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They didn't have matches in the books prior to Mat traveling with the Illuminator who invented the cannons. She also invented the matches.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seriously no one is going to give the title? Everyone just assuming everyone gets the reference?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Wheel of Time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Get around to it.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

To add to others, wind also is generated when a rain "microburst" occurs.This happens frequently in the southwest U.S.

A microburst is when a very large amount of water is dropped out of the clouds. The gaining rain speed pushes the air below it out of the way. The air is pushed outward horizontal to the ground, which in essence is a massive wall of wind.

Often in the Sonoron desert a microburst causes the wind to push a lot of dirt from the ground surface to be blown out with the wind. When this happens it's called a haboob. The wall of thick dust and particles can be up to a mile high and as wide as a city.

Below is a link to an image of a haboob over Phoenix, Arizona.

Haboob over Phoenix AZ USA

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thats interesting.

Wait a minute..... is that the photo

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

It's easier to think about it in terms of where is the wind going.

Air moves into adjacent regions that have lower pressure. It begins everywhere but is moving towards these areas of lower pressure.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Pressure differential from high and low pressure systems in the weather pattern.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All weather is a result of heat exchange and pressure differentials caused by an unequally heated atmosphere. (The side toward the sun is warmer.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For mere mortals: various exposed land masses gets heated by sunlight, and the air in contact with that land gets heated too.

When air gets warmer it expands (because atoms move and collide faster). That makes it less dense, so colder and denser air (with its slower atoms) falls in under the warm air and pushes the warm air up. If the ground is still warmer then that cold air gets heated too.

When that happens just at one point it makes air move around that warm ground in a "donut shape", up in the center and out and down and back in.

When that happens at many different locations then those air movements collide with each other, and now we have complicated weather which takes big supercomputers to simulate.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Where does an ocean wave start?

All currents are circular when you zoom out far enough, and are driven by inequalities in energy. Inequalities in thermal energy, for wind, and wind energy, for waves. Inequalities in voltage drive electrical current, which is remarkable fluid like, in its behavior.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Terry Pratchett taught me that wind is caused by all of the trees waving about.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Now that one makes sense

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Where does a circle start? Just pick a point on the cycle and go around from there.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

After last night’s beans

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Coriolis force contributes to large-scale wind movements such as hurricanes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's relevant to the creation of the wind. Just its direction.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The Wind Waker

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Based on the 1 shitty course in applied mathematics I nearly flunked, I imagine the velocity of wind is a solution to some kind of differential equation induced by the temperature, and since the sun's heat is moderately spread around (like you don't get a hyper-heated cmxcm square or something) these solutions have reasonable continuity properties, so that with 'one step to the right' you can feel slightly less wind, but not a huge difference. Maybe five thousand of these can take you from strong wind to no wind at all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Uh, the sun? Wind is continuous

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Wind has many sources from a meteorological/climatological standpoint. Breaking wind, however, is a biiiiit more specific.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

With the beginning of the universe, mate.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

its about temperature, hot air rises. the air changing temperature causes abrupt movement in columns of air