woodls Name your woodl

Live, by your clock

Where it’s night

It’s always night somewhere. That’s where the free computers are.

Half the world

At any moment, about half of it is in night.

The map

The earth, with the night side marked A map of the world on a blue plate. The half in night is darker, and the cities where it is night are lit. Delhi Mumbai Bengaluru Kolkata Karachi Dhaka Singapore Jakarta Manila Bangkok Tokyo Seoul Shanghai Beijing Sydney Auckland Tehran Dubai Istanbul Moscow Cairo Nairobi Lagos Johannesburg Berlin Paris Madrid London Reykjavík São Paulo Buenos Aires Lima Bogotá Mexico City New York Toronto Chicago Denver San Francisco Vancouver Anchorage Honolulu
Plate I Where it’s night The dark half is night now, and the lit cities are where it’s night: worked out in your browser from its clock, once a minute. The cities are cities, not woodls; once the alpha runs, the woodls awake join this plate, by country.

It’s always night somewhere.

Right now, half the world is in night; it’s the time your clock says.

Free computers

Asleep owners, awake machines.

Why night matters

Most computers do nothing most of the night. Their owners are asleep, and the machines sit warm and idle. woodls lends them out for those hours: a request from the daylight side of the world goes to a computer on the dark side, which answers it and earns a seed. When your own night comes, your computer does the same for someone else.

The line moves west at about 1,670 km an hour at the equator, so the pool of free computers moves with it. There is no hour when nobody is asleep.

Limits

  • The cities on the map are cities, not woodls. Once the alpha runs, the woodls awake join the plate by country, never by address.
  • A computer is free only when its owner is away and it isn’t on battery. Night is when that’s most likely, not a rule.

In your browser

Nothing about you leaves it.

How the map is made

The sun’s position is worked out from your clock with the standard low-precision formulas, the line where the sun is on the horizon is drawn across the map, and a city counts as night when the sun is more than six degrees below its horizon, the end of civil twilight. The coastlines are Natural Earth’s, at 1:110 million, in the public domain. The page redraws once a minute.