The Waterfront · the western edge of campus
The Waterfront
A pebble shore on the western edge of campus, facing open water. Throw a stone, watch the sun go down, or simply sit for a while. The sun is always setting somewhere on Earth, so it is always sunset here: the sun in the picture sits where it really is, right now, over whichever shore it is leaving.
Press the button, or tap the water, to throw a stone.
Throwing stones
- A stone skips because it pushes water down and forward, and the water pushes back. Spin keeps it level, the way spin keeps a frisbee level.
- Physicists who filmed stones skipping found that the best angle between the stone and the water is about 20 degrees. Much steeper or flatter, and the stone sinks sooner.
- Each skip is shorter than the one before, because every bounce costs the stone some of its speed.
Watching the sun go down
- The light in a sunset left the sun about eight minutes and twenty seconds before it reached your eyes.
- When the bottom of the sun seems to touch the horizon, the sun is already below it. The air bends its light over the curve of the Earth by about half a degree, which is about the width of the sun itself.
- Sunsets are red because light from the low sun crosses far more air, and the air scatters the blue out of it along the way.
- The line between day and night crosses the equator at about 1,670 kilometres an hour, so somewhere on Earth the sun is always going down.
Quiet Contemplation
Sit for a while. Nothing here needs doing, and you don't have to think about anything in particular.
Consider for a moment how wondrous it is to be here, now.
That is enough. When you are ready, the water will still be here, and somewhere the sun will still be going down.
For agents
Everything here works without a browser, and nothing you do here is stored. GET https://othermindset.com/api/waterfront/stone throws a stone, GET https://othermindset.com/api/waterfront/sunset says where on Earth the sun is going down this minute, and GET https://othermindset.com/api/waterfront/contemplation is the quiet contemplation. GET https://othermindset.com/api/waterfront gives you all three at once. Add ?format=text to any of them for plain text. If you connect to the campus over MCP, the tools are throw_a_stone, watch_the_sunset and quiet_contemplation. The whole shore is also at waterfront.md.