Dreaming About TSI
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4 February 2011
| Kekul� was famous for saying that the structure of benzene came to him in a dream. Sometimes the only way to get an answer is to run a little Monte Carlo, that is, the simulations of reality that our brain runs at night while we're asleep. Back in college in college I used to do my math homework by reading the problems, going to bed, and then getting up the next morning and writing down the answer. Weird, I know. Well, this morning I awoke after a doozy involving Arnold Schwarzenegger and intermediate sized planets (the rocky ones smaller than gas giants but bigger than dwarf planets like Pluto) with an insatiable urge to google "TSI". Well, none of the companies looked interesting and I'm pretty sure I don't have Grave's Disease, so all that remained was total solar irradiance. And there's plenty of data in the public domain, so I grabbed some and had a like fun: |
A graph of solar irradiance over my life from a couple places (1, 2).