The Daystar Boiled My Frog
Posted January 15th, 2009 by Howard TaylerYes, it is true: the Daystar boiled my frog.
Bear with me. I’m mixing and matching memes here.
First up: let’s start with an inconvenient fact: I do my best at-the-computer work (scripting and coloring) before 10am. If I haven’t started by 10am sometimes I can’t start at all. My head goes all stupid, and I get headaches. Getting up earlier does seem to help, so that’s been my solution. Get up early, work hard until 10am, take a nap, and then get out of the house for penciling and inking.
Next Up: Boiling frogs. I don’t know if this is true or not, but as the myth goes if you drop a live frog in boiling water it will leap out. It might even live. If, however, you drop the frog in tepid water and then slowly heat it you will be able to boil the frog. The moral? Slow changes, even deadly ones, may not be noticed by the victim.
Third, the Geek meme: We all know geeks hate direct sunlight. The Daystar, it burns us. This Penny-Arcade sums up many people’s feelings on the matter.
Now… let’s tie these together.
As it turns out, by 10am it has gotten quite bright behind my house, especially on a sunny day when there is lots of snow on the ground. There is a window in my office almost directly behind my monitors.
This morning at 11:00am I was lamenting the late start, the lack of productivity, and while nursing a headache at my desk I chanced to shield my eyes. Almost instantly the headache was gone, and awareness dawned on me like… well, like dawn, but I don’t want to cast the Daystar in a pleasant light. It makes enough darn light, thankyouverymuch.
Apparently I’m not self-aware enough to notice the gradual increase in Daystar-induced pain while I’m working.
Tomorrow’s productivity tool: drawn drapes! As it happens, the migraine-inducing radiation of the Daystar can be blocked with a single layer of tightly-woven, heavy, and above all opaque fabric.
Explore posts in the same categories: Cartooning, Health, Humor
January 15th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
The Bright Orange Ball is named Bob. Cursed be his name.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Sorry, the frog thing is entirely incorrect. Frogs will try to escape as soon as the water becomes too warm. The myth was put to rest by Victor H. Hutchison, from the University of Oklahoma.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Are you implying frogs are smarter than Howard.
Them’s sound like fighting words…
January 15th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to my bowl of Frog Soup.
Regardless of the veracity of the boiled frog myth, it stands as a useful metaphor for human behavior.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Some how the fraise seems to sum up my day nicely without explination.
Ona
January 15th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
I always learned (as a PC installer) that having a sun-facing window behind your monitor was a very non-OH&S thing to do. For exactly the reason of headaches and eye-strain. Lots and lots of people do it though. Window to the side is best (behind swamps the monitor’s output which is even worse).
Drapes are good too – that is what I do at home since there isn’t much wall-space WITHOUT windows here (except on the sea-view side where the kitchen and bathroom have tiny tiny windows – stupid building designer!).
January 15th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
There is an element of truth to the myth: the temperature threshold at which frogs will try to escape is higher if the warming is gradual. It’s still safely below lethal. Not boiled frog, but uncomfortably warm frog.
The Daystar uncomfortably warmed Howard’s frog.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Note: the window in question faces northeast, and in the winter that means the sun NEVER shines directly through it. In the summer I get maybe two hours of direct sunlight in one corner of the office.
I’m not quite stupid enough to stare into the sun while I work. I am, however, stupid enough to go snowblind.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
HeHe. Just adjusting sun-relative directions to account for that I live in Australia where the sun is to the north (or right above at the moment) and snow-blindness is not such an issue ;-D
I must admit that if I am doing an installation with the user absent I even turn off the office fluros. The lightsss they hurt itsss eyesss they doesss.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
** gollum **
Sorry, couldn’t resist after reading LaeMing’s post.
Anyway, Howard: have you ever considered that you’re just especially light-sensitive, and maybe that’s even the reason your productivity drops off after 10am? Maybe just darkening your office, softening the artificial light, and putting an anti-glare filter on your monitor would help … :)
January 16th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Might I suggest real drapes instead? I suspect that they might block the light better than if you just draw them there.
Really bad humor aside, you have my sympathies. Still attempting to adjust to the midnight shift seven months later, I have only recently found the ability to sleep decently about one third of the time with four layers of black curtains velcroed to the perimeter of the window, three layers over the bedroom door, two layers of smoked plastic over the LED display of my alarm clock, a white-noise generator, and magnesium supplements to make the most of the few hours of sleep that I do manage to get.
Geh. Some days I hate The Daystar almost as much as my job (yeah – I’m working on that one, too).
January 16th, 2009 at 1:28 am
“See how often the Simple Solutions elude us.” [G. Carlin]
My SO is a Morning Person, and cannot comprehend how anyone can
live without ever actually seeing, or worse *feeling*, Sunbeams. (Of
course, she will admit she was “practically raised by cats”….) I, on
the other hand, like this time of year in this latitude — some days, I
quite literally never see the light of day…. :)
January 16th, 2009 at 3:07 am
Daystar? You let the evil radiation INTO your livingspace? My whiphe, my co-workers all know that Oryx Works In Darkness. It takes at least a month to train new hires, “Oryx keeps the light OFF in his office, leave it that way.”
What you experience upon returning to the blessed, soft darkness is completely normal — that’s why your body signals you with a migraine.
Welcome back, Howard… and I STILL want a tee with the last 2 panels of 2-Jan-2009 in XXX!!
January 16th, 2009 at 4:10 am
In summertime, I block some of my windows — especially the ones that turn one staircase into a chimney — with aluminium foil. A friend saw that, though immediately of the proverbial tinfoil hats, and teasingly asked whether the foil on the windows was to block government mind-control rays. I replied, “No, it’s there to stop Evil Heat-The-House Rays from Outer Space.” He had to concede that insolation was a real phenomenon and the source was well outside the atmosphere…
When I was contracted out to a Fortune 500 company, on-site, I mostly kept my office overhead lights off, though I did also disable the fixture over my desk so that I could switch on the lights in the other half of the office if I worked past sunset, without glare on my screen. Maintenance kept trying to come in and ‘repair’ the light fixture or replace the ‘burned out’ bulbs, no matter how many times I explained.
Back in the offices of my employer — the company that had rented me out to the aforementioned Fortune 500 company — I similarly disabled the fluorescent light that wanted to throw painful glare on my screen. One o my superiors noticed, asked whether I _ever_ used that light, and upon hearing my negative reply, had that fixture relocated to a spot in his office that had too little light.
Even when I was working for the Army, I spent a bit of effort trying to avoid glare that made my screen hard to read — and there they had Very High ceilings, so the light causing me trouble could be quite some distance away, over somebody else’s desk. At one point I had a small table sitting on top of my desk to provide a sort of roof over my monitor.
So much has been all about the glare. And I was constantly mystified by the fact that most of the people around me _weren’t_ trying to solve it, just putting up with it, squinting, and taking aspirin instead.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:47 am
My boss finally took me seriously about the glare when I started wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap at my desk. She had Maintenance disable the lights above my cubicle, and all was well. Fluorescent lights are the worst.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:50 am
So it’s curtains for Howard?
January 16th, 2009 at 4:56 am
I have found that the best solution to all the pesky light problem is to start work at 0200 in the morning, then I just have to worry about that annoying light at the end of the day when I am trying to get to bed.
Fear not Howard, one day I will drag you out to a shot, and with all that pre-dawn at your disposal, you may well pen the entire next book.
Well, that and getting to see tons of rock and dirt flung into the air is inspiring.
January 16th, 2009 at 5:10 am
Oh, well, if we’re talking about ourselves…
I used to be a night person – often up till dawn, and I did my best work after 2am. Unfortunately, it was fairly rare for me to get any work done, because I’d usually keep doing whatever I’d been doing earlier that night (during the ad breaks, if there was anything on TV). In an effort to be more productive, I started getting up early (yes, there’s a 7:30 in the morning too) and doing work during the day. I’ve found it quite effective (in conjunction with pre-breakfast exercise), but one side-effect is that I’ve gone from shunning bright light to needing it in order to function. Just as long as there’s no glare on the screen, and none of the lights flicker.
Me six months ago would not understand me now.
I still enjoy darkness (I find the mesopic range, where both rods and cones work, quite beautiful), but only when I’m relaxing at the end of the day.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:42 am
Tomorrow’s productivity tool: drawn drapes! As it happens, the migraine-inducing radiation of the Daystar can be blocked with a single layer of tightly-woven, heavy, and above all opaque fabric.
I like black vinyl fabric myself… Usually the fabric shops or discounts shops have it on the discount “as low as dollar-a-yard” table in flatfolds. Works great, highly recommended. :)
January 16th, 2009 at 11:02 am
@zenkitty: Why did you have to wait for the boss or maintenance? My dotcom era employees took matters into their own hands and removed all the fluorescent tubules in the entire developer wing where my team was housed (thereafter referred to as The Dark Side). As you can imagine, they worked hard and worked late, but getting most of them to show up before the crack of noon was a chore.
They were kind enough to leave me with Plausible Deniability™ of any involvement the fluorescent affair, though. They even successfully held off the building maintenance staff, the human resources department, the fire marshals and the executive management team using only l33t haxx0r skillz and geek ingenuity to “keep the lights out” until we ran out of money and had to sell the company to Prudential…
January 16th, 2009 at 11:32 am
I see LaeMing beat me to it. Howard, if you’re going to go all out in shielding the light from the window, you might as well get the *thermal* drapes so that your house stays nicely warm all winter. The rule is that you shade the *north* windows of the house in Winter and the *south* windows in Summer. (Although that may be the opposite sides for the Aussies.)
Either that or you come down here to FL – it’s a nice (for you) 60F down here – 57F with the wind chill.
and no snow to blind you. ;)
January 16th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I use high density solid oxidised ceramic blocks (AKA Bricks) to keep the daystar out. Then again, I am in the loft, so the only light is the skylight, and the ONLY times the sun is at such an angle as to come through that, it won’t be hitting my PC screen or anywhere near me (my cat’s favorate sleeping spot, however….)
January 16th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
If only there were some way to trick the Danes into funding some kind of giant solar shield which would reduce the amount of sunlight entering Earth’s environment…what would be a plausible emergency, I wonder…how could we get the bulk of humans to understand the deadly light and heat of the sun as we do?
It’s no good. I’ll just stay here in my basement.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Oh, by the way, the frog thing isn’t true of frogs (which are wonderfully adapted to all things having to do with water), but it does work rather well on humans. If you drop a human into a bath of fatally hot water the self-preservation instinct is activated. But if you start with a cool bath and slowly warm it, your human subject will relax as body temperature is reached and will actually fall asleep (or faint) at fifteen twenty degrees Fahrenheit above body temperature. Death occurs somewhere past 150, and you can boil the carcass (if you really like that sort of thing–I personally think humans are icky). This particular trick even works on most other primates and quite a few mammals if the local air temperature is uncomfortably low. I imagine that the observation was first made of human behavior and then turned into a fable, thence entering popular opinion as a observation about animal behavior. Humans are curious that way.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
“…wareness dawned on you like…” …the Ghanj-rho orbital lance coming over the horizon? Unless of course, it can blast clear through the planet’s crust to get to you.
*hides* XD
January 16th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Are you sure you aren’t descended from Israel Justus Clark in some way? It sounds like you got the same migraine gene I did.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
On today’s comic: Rule 6 was already established as something else.
So, are we dealing with another list of rules? Or has the writer made a continuity error?
January 16th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
i find wrapping cardboard in aluminum foil (only the out side side matters) and placing it in the windows against the screen cuts down the light wonderfully and reduces my cooling costs noticeably. i do also tend to cover the window space with a textile i enjoy looking at. i don’t heat my place but when temperatures drop my electronics can keep the living spaces reasonably warm…
January 17th, 2009 at 1:11 am
Sam: It doesn’t appear to be an issue, because today’s comic quotes RULE 10, not rule 6.
Either that, or it quoted rule 6 and has since been edited.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:06 am
See how the space between “Rule” and “ten:” is one pixel narrower? Compare to “the target” if you’re thinking of blaming it on kerning.
I’m disappointed. I had hoped that Howard actually had a list of the rules somewhere that he was doling out as they became relevant.
January 17th, 2009 at 4:52 am
All of this lovely information flying around and not one comment, question, or concern about “Daystar”, aka Lucifer or the Devil or Old Nick or whatever term you so desire….
I’m somewhat disappointed, as well!
January 17th, 2009 at 5:34 am
JohnB: You mean Morningstar?
January 17th, 2009 at 6:39 am
I’m gonna take a wild stab and guess that you have blue-to-hazel eyes. You can get rid of a lot of that light-pain by having your optometrist give you UV-coated glasses (this will also help keep you from being so irritable when you visit stores with fluorescent lighting).
If I’m wrong, then, what the heck it was a wild stab.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:48 am
@Sam: Disappointed? PLEASE. I do have such a list, and it had an error in it. I was actually quite surprised to find I’d already used Six without it being logged, but that happens from time to time. Or rather, it has happened exactly ONE time. This one.
Are you disappointed that I didn’t credit you for finding the mistake? I tell you what: pat yourself on the back three times, say “there’s no congratulations like self-congratulations,” and then make a wish. I mean, it’s a good catch and all, but someone alerted me via email about thirty seconds after the update.
For the record: shouting about possible continuity errors in an unrelated blog comment is not helping. It’s calling attention to how much more clever you are than the author. Emailing me? That’s helpful.
January 17th, 2009 at 9:52 am
What’s this big bright thing in the sky you keep talking about? “Daystar” you call it? We get to see the nightstar’s as its the only time the sky is clear (so all the heat can rush out), but never a “Daystar”. Just the even gray glow of the clouds above.
P.S. I come from Scotland.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:50 am
On the Rules: we now know of 6 & 10, and of course rule #1 — though *I* for one am ignorant of #1’s source.
Does anyone have a list of revealed Rules, and where they first occurred?
January 17th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
There is a fairly authoritative and well-documented list publicly available at Wikipedia. With no further ado I give you The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates as compiled by a finite number of monkeys.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
@Casual Notice: Two things —
1) Please don’t take wild stabs at my eyes.
2) They’re brown. You missed!
January 17th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Howard: Oh, of course. It only takes one mistake in the list to do that. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s not like I haven’t seen a numbered list with two threes…
Not disappointed about not being credited. The reason I posted here rather than emailing you is that I still have some bad habits from back when the only email access I had sucked. Sorry.
January 17th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Not strictly related, but… I can relate. I am an ‘ocular albino’, and due to that combined with otherwise minor neurological problems, my brain starts to seize up immediately when I’m under florescent lighting unless I’m under a lot of stress, in which case it holds out a few minutes, THEN caves in.
It took me until after I dropped out of highschool due stress-related illness (culminating in a blackout seizure), had multiple mental breakdowns in hospitals, and wasted thousands of my parents’ dollars to wither under the harsh glare of poorly-funded higher education to figure out that it was just the dumb floroescent lightbulbs every cheapskate on the planet seems to love that were ruining my life.
I think my frog melted into flaming goo.
January 17th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Sam: No problem. All is well.
January 18th, 2009 at 6:29 am
Sam – As in the Wikipedia entry for Lucifer: “Lucifer is a name frequently given to Satan in Christian belief. This usage stems from a particular interpretation, as a reference to a fallen angel, of a passage in the Bible (Isaiah 14:3-20) that speaks of someone who is given the name of “Day Star” or “Morning Star” (in Latin, Lucifer) as fallen from heaven.”
So- either or.
January 18th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Navian; How great is your world going to be once we all switch to CFL and have no other options. (by the way, I am still looking for the button that overlays the heavy sarcasm)
Wait, I see a solution!
Everyone in government is all about protecting the smallest number of us right now, so a person that has seizures induced by the flicker of florescent lights is is the perfect poster person for ending the tyranny of the mercury filled environmental and mental wellness hazards.
And there was much rejoicing…
January 18th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
@WEKM: The Environment™ must be saved for The Children™. Any one Small Minority™ (sans extentuating importance) shall be sacrificed, as necessary, in the name of the Greater Good™ and/or Mother Earth™.
Besides, banning Edison’s legacy has been good for GE’s stock price (financial crisis notwithstanding) and they have lots of lobbyists pushing CFLtalitarianism upon us all.
January 19th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I don’t mind new fluoros (except for my unease with the idea of something fragile with mercury in it). But it really annoys me that lights in public places often aren’t replaced until they break down completely – no matter how badly they flicker in the days before they go dark.
I’ll be so glad when LEDs or electroluminescence (or maybe something else) make fluoros obsolete. As long as the rectifiers have big enough capacitors so they don’t flicker, anyway.
January 19th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
New CFLs don’t have the annoying 60-cycle flicker or the weird color spectrum issues that the old ones do. From what I understand those were the big issues. Certainly the old ones give me headaches and I get disoriented if I can’t see daylight, but the new ones don’t bother me at all. Your experience may vary, of course.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I’m a geek who hasn’t hung around too many geeks, because I was raised in hicksville and thought I was the only truly weird person. Joined the Army and that didn’t change my outlook. Became a trucker, same thing.
Then I became a journalist, and light began to dawn. But now, i realize there’s this brotherhood I was never aware of, with people who share my inclinations for things cerebral, as well as my love of darkness. Every driving job I get that has a night shift available, I always volunteer — and usually it pays better because of the high number of light-loving freaks who like to work when the stores and offices are all open, and get off when everyone else is closing shop.
I have found friends!