I only found out about Rayleigh scattering recently. It's an interesting phenomenon. In essence, light from the sun is scattered on its way coming from the sun. We, with the way our eyes and nervous systems are oriented, perceive this distorted light as a blue sky.
So is the sky blue? There are other ways that it could be perceived, and the cause is something else. But yes. The sky is blue to us, and that counts for something.
It's refreshing to see Tucker cutting loose. If he'd said anything like this when he was employed at Fox News they would have shot him into the sun. It is true that he backtracks on Bari Weiss specifically, and I'm not really focusing on her here. But it's definitely true that a lot of people who pose as champions of free speech suddenly get suspicious of it when their pet issue is at stake.
The narration in this clip is more than a little melodramatic. But the part about platypuses being considered a hoax when they were discovered. English naturalist George Shaw took some convincing.
The platypus is a throwback among mammals, and not just because they lay eggs. Arising during the time of the dinosaurs, they formed before the most common forms of mammal life were established. That's why they still have bird and reptile/amphibian traits. That and the fact that they can survive with such.
I had occasion yesterday to go to Chalkstone Avenue, which is one of the big streets in the North End of Providence. It looked a little different than I remembered it from my previous visit. The neighborhood has been trending Latino for a while now, and there are a couple more signs of that.
The Castle Cinema used to be a great second run movie theatre. It ran dry years ago because there's no parking around it and because no one wants to walk anywhere. (Maybe the end of peak oil will change that?) Anyway, when I saw the building a few months back it was housing a pizza restaurant. Now it's a church. By my guess Evangelical of some kind, definitely not Catholic.
On the other side of the street is what for a long time was a Dunkin' Donuts. Now it's something called the Caliente Grill, next door to a chicken restaurant. Both places looked like they serve good food. If you have a hankering for the coffee chain that now insists on calling itself just plain Dunkin' there are plenty of locations still around, including one close by on Smith Street.
Saguaro cacti are only found in the Sonora Desert, which covers much of the Southwestern US and part of Mexico. Yet much of the public thinks plants like this can be found in any desert. They've become intertwined with the whole idea of deserts.
There's some irony in that. Think of the Spanish explorers who surveyed the Sonora Desert. They were familiar with the concept of deserts. They were not prepared, however, to see these giant, spiny, non-trees. We think of them as generic but they were once wildly novel.
