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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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traingang
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Post as many train pictures as possible.
All about urbanism and transportation, including freight transportation.
Home of train gang
:arm-L::train-shining::arm-R:
Talk about supply chain issues here!
List of cool books and videos about urbanism, transit, and other cool things
Titles must be informative. Please do not title your post "lmao" or use the tired "_____ challenge" format.
Archive links for reactionary sites, including the BBC.
LANDLORDS COWER IN FEAR OF MAOTRAIN
"that train pic is too powerful lmao" - u/Cadende
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That's exactly the sort of neat stuff I hoped to see with my new glasses. All the supposed negative effects on Reddit just sounded really interesting to me. Maybe I will get a second pair of sunglasses
. I've only ever owned one pair of glasses at a time but after discovering how cheaply you can order them online from China I've already got several
Reminds me of the old ProZD skit about enthusiast subreddits
Enjoy looking deep into water as you knock out all the polarised light from Brewster's angle that gets reflected off the surface.
Also you can see stress in transparent plastics as rainbows!
Another interesting thing you can look for is the band of polarized light in the sky created by Rayleigh scattering. Just look anywhere that's 90 degrees away from the sun.
Not sure if it's related but I have noticed the entire sky sometimes darkening when tilting my head to the side. Some manhole covers shimmer, so presumably other metal surfaces can do so too. I have another phone which doesn't have the foil effect, instead the screen just goes black when I turn it sideways. Very cool!
Yeah, the whole sky darkening should also be related to Rayleigh scattering, since all sunlight that gets scattered by the atmosphere will get polarized to some extent. The effect is just most intense 90 degrees from the light source.
The shimmery foil effect is likely due to birefringence. Basically some materials have a different index of refraction depending on the polarization and direction of travel, causing the light passing through to get split based on its polarization. Not sure exactly where the color shimmer comes from though tbh. I'm thinking it's some sort of interference pattern created by the polarized light components recombining out of phase or something like that, but I could be wrong about that. It's been like 4 years since I graduated with my physics degree, and optics was never my strong suit lol.
(I am taking an intro to materials science class right now though, and one of the main ways to create birefringence is passing light through a non-cubic crystal structure, so I imagine we'll probably cover that once we cover optical properties in the next few weeks. Speaking of which, martensite is the only microstructural variant of steel that I'm aware of that has a non-cubic crystal structure, so I wonder if those manhole covers you're seeing are made of martensitic steel.)
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: