I knew it, internet searches cause eclipses.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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People's eyes were hurting, so the sun goddess decided to go easy on them.
Two stupid people. One slightly less stupid than the other.
Doing relative stupidity comparisons with Trump is kinda like doing math with infinity. Anything divided by infinity is basically zero. Any moron standing next to Trump is the smartest person in the room and a relative genius.
Case in point, this photo was one of the THREE times that he looked directly into the eclipse AFTER taking off his glasses. The second time he does it he points directly at the sun because he wanted everyone to know what he was looking at? i don't know, he's too stupid to analyze, but its literally the origin of the photo in this sticker.
Serious: a Google data scientist has legitimately written a book on this topic lol. Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (see his Wikipedia page)
The book didn't age super well because they got the causation direction wrong; in terms of real-world implementation Google Trends turned out to be pretty bad at actually predicting flu
Google Trends turned out to be pretty bad at actually predicting flu
did anyone claim it tried to predict anything? foreseeing the future is indeed hard, but catching something once it happens as fast as possible is different story.
Why would we care about April 3rd thru the 7th?
google gives you this data in one week blocks if i remember correctly
A) google does this analysis by week-long blocks, so all the searches from 8th will be i this block.
B) I have legit seen people stare at the sun BEFORE an eclipse as if to get some baseline for what the sun looks like? Just talking about the sun makes people do this.
The question is does it differentiate between "eyes hurt" and just watches that contain those two words. Like if someone asked "How can I look at the eclipse and not hurt my eyes" would it show up in this bucket too.
To test whether stupid people are psychic, or, if the smart part of their brain (that refuses to help their conscious mind or, more likely, is actively ignored) foresaw what was coming?
Trump looked directly at it, stands to reason his fans did too 🤷
Texas had heavy cloud cover, which is why it doesn't look as dumb as it is.
according to my friend who was in houston that day (i was in austin for the first half of the day and yes, it was cloudy) the clouds cleared partway through the day
Snap, I was in Austin too! Your friend may have been lucky, the cloud cover maps showed most populated areas covered with Dallas being a notable exception.
Another good eclipse map is the one showing the massive traffic jams that start right after local totality
I drove what should have been a 2 hour trip in 4 hours to see the 2017 one.
I figured "let's get some lunch, walk around some local parks, and maybe go walk around the local shops for a few hour before trying to go home" because I knew traffic would be bad. I even spent most of an afternoon plotting my course back home to avoid major roads and highways.
Even after 5ish hours, traffic was terrible. Every highway we passed was stopped. People were flooding back roads, it was slow but moving faster than the highways.
12 hours later, I pulled into my driveway and decided next time I ever travel for an eclipse, I'm bringing a tent and staying a few days.
It took some friends if mine 14 hours to get home and they didn't even leave their state.
I must have been lucky in 2024 then. Drove 8 hours to see it, stayed until about an hour after totality, took about 10 hours to get back. Not bad considering it was 500 miles one-way.
Drove a few hours for both the 2017 and 2024 eclipse.
Waited several hours afterwards to go home both times.
The 2024 eclipse was a much easier drive home (though still not great).
My wife and I have kind of turned into eclipse chasers, we did TN in 2016, Montreal 2024, and in a couple days we're off to Iceland for another.
We always plan on not doing much the day of the eclipse, figuring that traffic and such would be a nightmare, and leave ourselves a couple days on either side of the eclipse to hopefully avoid even more traffic.
I don't remember exactly what days we did for TN, but I remember on our way home a couple days later we still hit what seemed like a weird amount of traffic for the area we were in.
Day of the 2017 eclipse we really lucked out. We stayed at a little campground a little bit outside of Nashville, and about 10 minutes away from there we found some sort of wildlife conservation area. It was gated and I'm not totally clear if it was really supposed open to the public, but as luck would have it just as we were pulling up to the gate some sort of conservation officer/ranger/game warden type guy also pulled up there. We asked if we were allowed in, he asked what we were gonna do and we said we basically just planned to set up a couple camp chairs and a camera on a tripod and look and watch the eclipse and he gave us the go-ahead, so we had a big open field to ourselves.
For Montreal, we took the train up from NYC, and the AirBnB we booked had a really nice rooftop deck, so we just posted up there.
We'll see where we end up in Reykjavik, fingers crossed the weather cooperates.
I drove seven hours to TN to get maximum totality. The drive home was 14 hours. Just a sea of cars as far as the eye could see.
Worth it.
I took the train from Mississippi to Illinois for the last one I saw. Had to wait a bit for the train going back since it was scheduled for something like 1AM the morning after the eclipse, but I just found a quiet spot in the local college’s activity center to nap until then. Was definitely much more enjoyable than driving would have been, I think.
Can confirm. Drove about 1.5 hours to Ohio for the eclipse, driving back in traffic took about 5 hours.
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Was trying to find a good map to post and came across this study
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198224002112
Look I gotta admit this. I was using 80x sea binoculars to focus in on the eclipse with my eclipse glasses in behind the binoculars on my face. Fried a hole through the eclipse glasses and into my retina not horrible but similar to a plastic sand-which back looking through for a few hours. Got my eyes checked by a dr. Said it was minor ish. Got lucky. It was during totality. Hate Magats. But damn I was dumb.
If it was during totality, and you were actually in the path of totality, there is no harm looking at the sun, even with magnification. But ONLY during totality and ONLY if you are firmly within the path.
During the last solar eclipse, I had my telescope set up and knew we had just over 4 minutes. Once it went dark, I quickly got it aimed and saw the corona in all its glory. Literally the most incredible thing I have ever seen in my life. But I also had a stopwatch going as soon as totality started, and at 3 minutes I stopped and wouldn't let anyone look through anymore. Even the tiniest sliver would be enough for serious eye damage.
So yea, it's safe, but not a single second before, and not a single second after.
Some of those people might have fallen for scam glasses too
I used a welding helmet I happened to have laying around. It worked great.
Yeah my eyes started hurting 5 days before the eclipse too......
Well if they were curious enough about whether they could look at the sun during an eclipse, maybe they tried looking at the sun leading up to the eclipse
You can't just stare at an eclipse willy nilly, you gotta train your eyes for something like that. Glance at the sun a few seconds at a time, and work your way up to a minute.
Or people searching "will looking at a total eclipse hurt my eyes" when they found out they were getting one. Which is a legitimate question, because technically it won't, but in practice, its dangerous.
No one wants to miss it, what if it came early?
Best check...
Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, but every instance of causation is accompanied by at least one correlation.
Disregarding correlation entirely is equally fallacious.
Any causation is accompanied by someone reminding everyone that correlation doesn’t imply causation.
Oh, not every. But the correlation is really high for some reason.
I mean, you do still need to subtract this:
yes, but the above is clearly more than that
ok, I get the population density matters a lot in this kind of query,which explains LA, but WTF was going on here: 
FLORIDA hurt itself in
its confusion.
Is there a comparirson against other countries to confirm my bias?
Only Americans would do such a thing
Same thing happened in 2016!
let’s see whether it occurs again next week in Spain
I assume in Arizona your eyes always hurt.
I could kinda see LA sprawl having so many people you get google for everything, the desert sure.. i'm more concerned with west florida.
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