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| Chasing |
 Title text: Certain hybrid events can only happen in certain locations where all the conditions are present; chasers flock to the area in and around Kansas known as tumbleweed-colliding-with-possum alley. |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a GNAT enthusiast - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. |
This comic is a scatter plot comparing how exciting it is to see various things with how possible it is to chase them using a convoy of coordinated vehicles.
The least chasable are stationary places like the Grand Canyon or International Date Line. It makes no sense to chase them because they don't move around, you simply go to their known locations. At the other end of the chasability spectrum are animals that move around rapidly, and fleeting astronomical and atmospherical phenomena like clouds, meteors, and aurora. However, some of these are difficult to chase because they're small and hard to detect from a moving vehicle, e.g. gnats.
| Entity | Estimate of... | Explanation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chasing | Excitement | ||
| The Grand Canyon | 10% | 90% | Stationary place in Arizona. It's the largest canyon in the US (but not the world), in addition to being very beautiful due to its depth and the color changes from different geological strata. Seeing a famous tourist attraction in person is exciting.[citation needed] |
| Niagara Falls | 15% | 75% | Stationary place on the border of US and Canada, between the state of New York and the province of Ontario. The waterfall is the largest in North America by width and water volume, making it very beautiful to watch. |
| Tourist attractions | 15% | 55% | Other stationary places that attract many tourists (e.g. national parks, monuments, and historic places) are exciting to see [citation needed]. |
| Tourist traps | 10% | 40% | Stationary places that market themselves as tourist attractions, but don't really have much to offer and exist mainly to sell food and souvenirs. |
| Sand trap | 15% | 25% | Pits of sand in golf courses. If your golf ball lands in one, it's more difficult to hit it out to the grassy portions (fairways or greens), which is why it's a "trap". |
| The International Date Line | 15% | 10% | A jagged conceptual line running from the North to South poles around 180 degrees of longitude, used to separate the time zones that start and end each day. There's nothing to see at these locations, as the line is a concept and does not actually coincide with anything in real life, as well as mostly being in the Pacific Ocean, by-passing actual landfall, as well as across the Arctic Southern Oceans. The zones for time in Antarctica are already more pragmatically simplified or just fall-back to Coordinated Universal Time. |
| Meteors | 35% | 95% | Also called "shooting stars". These are fleeting streaks of light that are visible when bits of rock or dust enter the atmosphere and burn up. These are generally rare, making them exciting to see, but there are meteor showers when many are visible due to the Earth passing through a large cloud of dust (usually the remnants of a comet). To astronomy buffs, these can be like natural fireworks shows. Because each meteor streak lasts for a fraction of a second, it's not generally possible to chase them, although if the rock is large enough it may survive to the ground and become a meteorite, which chasers may be able to find by tracking its path through the sky. |
| Rainbows | 35% | 90% | A visual effect that occurs when sunlight is refracted by water droplets in the air, spreading the light into a spectrum of different colors. Their 'location' is relative to each observer, so long as the necessary components combine correctly in the first place, so any coordinated movement is restricted to finding the right sort of standpoint from which a rainbow is visible. |
| Comets | 40% | 85% | Comets are chunks of rock and ice that orbit the sun, usually in highly eccentric orbits that take them from the inner Solar System to the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud at the extreme outskirts of the Solar System. Few of them are visible to the naked eye. They're exciting to see because they're rare, and one of the few astronomical objects that looks like more than just a tiny dot because there's a glowing "tail". While they're moving very rapidly through the Solar System, from the Earth they don't appear to move much faster than planets. So there's no need to chase them; when near the Earth, they will be visible from much of the planet for days or weeks. |
| Sunsets | 35% | 75% | Disappearance of the Sun below the horizon, should happen usually once every 24 hours (except close to the poles). Depending on weather conditions, they can sometimes be very pretty. Traveling around the Earth from east to west is needed for a continuous view of a sunset. |
| The Moon | 40% | 70% | Earth's only natural satellite with a predictable orbit. Only 12 people (the Apollo astronauts) have actually visited it in person; the rest of us see it from about 250,000 miles away. Weather permitting, it's visible for about half of every day/night cycle (though may be more obvious when this occurs significantly in the night sky, for several reasons). It doesn't move quickly in the sky, by apparent movement, so little chasing is necessary. A 'supermoon' is when the Moon looks the largest and shiniest, occurring when a full moon appears closest to the Earth in its orbit, though Randall doesn't consider this phenomenon impressive (How To, chapter 21). |
| Unusual clouds | 40% | 55% | Clouds with unique forms or shapes, like Lenticular clouds. |
| Regular clouds | 35% | 40% | Aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets |
| Fog | 30% | 25% | Atmospheric condition where water droplets are very dense near the Earth's surface, resulting in a visible haze. Very few people will chase fog.[citation needed] |
| Rain | 35% | 20% | Water droplets falling from clouds. In most of the world, this is a pretty common occurrence. Unless the volume is extremely high, there's rarely much excitement due to them, but extreme cases may cause flooding that can be dangerous. The only people who typically chase them are weather reporters. |
| Gnats | 35% | 5% | Hardly anybody wants to track down gnats, as they are annoying to chase and difficult to see, but people could theoretically use advanced instruments to do so. |
| Aurora | 60% | 95% | Impressive light displays that result from excitement of the Earth's magnetosphere by charged particles in the solar wind. These are generally only visible in high latitudes, so most people do not live where they're visible. Their visibility can be tracked and forecasted via monitoring of solar wind output from the sun, and particularly intense episodes can be predicted (as well as locations for viewing) on the basis of the solar cycle and solar flare activity. The release of this comic coincided with the strongest geomagnetic storm warning forecasted by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 20 years [1] (May 2024 solar storms). |
| Your favorite band's shows | 60% | 80% | Musical acts often plan tours, where they go around the country (or world) putting on shows every few days. Extreme fans with time on their hands may "chase" them by going to a series of their shows. Since the tour dates are planned and publicized well in advance, the shows are easy to find. However, depending on the popularity of your favorite band, this might be an expensive hobby, especially for optimal viewing. |
| Rare birds | 60% | 60% | Many birders will "twitch" to see rare birds, and this requires a fair amount of checking location, behavior, etc. Also, rare birds tend to be exciting to see. |
| Regular birds | 55% | 40% | These are easier to see than rare birds.[citation needed] |
| Regular balloons | 55% | 25% | Both children and adults accidentally let go of balloons, and may attempt to chase after them to retrieve them. |
| Tumbleweeds | 60% | 15% | A roughly spherical portion of certain plants that breaks off from its roots and rolls along the ground, propelled by winds. Most people don't find them very interesting to look at. They don't usually travel very quickly, so it would be possible to chase them if you were so inclined (they may be of interest to plant biologists and ecologists). |
| Speed traps | 65% | 5% | A section of a road where police often wait for passing drivers who are exceeding the speed limit, so they can catch them and issue speeding tickets. Frequent drivers, especially truck drivers, have developed systems to warn each other of these locations (citizens band radios were once the most popular method, now this can be done using mobile phone using services like Waze). |
| Tornadoes | 85% | 95% | Wanting to witness a tornado is a typical objective of storm chasers. |
| Whales | 85%% | 90% | Widely distributed and diverse group of marine mammals. They are some of the largest animals to ever live, and often travel in groups, making them exciting and easy to see (when active at the surface). |
| Icebergs | 85% | 75% | Piece of freshwater ice broken off a glacier or ice shelf. These come in many sizes and shapes, making it interesting to see a new one. |
| Hot air balloons | 80% | 60% | An aircraft whose bag is filled with heated air. Hot air balloons are ridden for a variety of reasons (entertainment, sport, advertisement, etc.) and they usually involve a "chase crew" of people on the ground. To an uninvolved observer, catching an unexpected glimpse of an airborne balloon is a moderately exciting event; giving chase is not advised, however, as it may interfere with the chase crew's operation and may be perceived as a hostile act, thereby creating uncomfortable levels of excitement. |
| Radiosondes | 85% | 50% | Small instruments carried in weather balloons to gather and transmit atmospheric parameters. There's not much to see in them, but they're easy to track with a proper receiver. |
| Neighborhood possums | 85% | 35% | "Possum" is a common term for Virginia opossums, the only species of opossum found in North America. In urban areas they will get into human garbage, and may carry diseases, so many may consider them pests and hunt them. A coordinate group of hunters can track them. |
| Ice cream trucks | 85% | 25% | Vans that sell ice cream. They're easy to chase because they often play music and/or ring a loud bell so customers will know they're coming, and make frequent stops to allow customers to make purchases. Young "chasers" also often scream when they hear the trucks coming, so others nearby (particularly parents or caregivers who are needed to provide the money) will be aware. |
| Other chasers | 90% | 10% | May result in an awkward encounter if met in person. |
Transcript
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This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
- [An X Y axis graph]
- [Y axis label:]
- Exciting to see in person
- [X axis label:]
- Possible to chase in a convoy of vehicles coordinating over radio and using instruments and data to find optimal viewing locations?
- [X and Y axis values (from bottom left):]
- No
- Yes
- [Top left quarter:]
- The Grand Canyon
- Meteors
- Rainbow
- Comets
- Niagara Falls
- Sunsets
- The Moon
- Tourist attractions
- Unusual clouds
- [Top right quarter:]
- Aurora
- Tornadoes
- Whales
- Your favorite band's shows
- Icebergs
- Rare birds
- Hot air balloons
- [Bottom left quarter:]
- Tourist traps
- Regular clouds
- Sand traps
- Fog
- Rain
- The International Date Line
- Gnats
- [Bottom right quarter:]
- Regular birds
- Radiosondes
- Neighborhood possums
- Regular balloons
- Ice cream trucks
- Tumbleweeds
- Speed traps
- Other chasers
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