And one of the links of the IR goggles pages, if you plough through it long enough, claims that human retinas are sensitive to ultraviolet light and even have a fourth set of light-sensitive structures to detect it, inherited from the ancestral chordate stock. It’s the lens that doesn’t pass the UV. It goes on to say that there is some residual UV sensitivity in the 300-nanometre wavelength area, above the area blocked by the structure of the eye (350-500 nm).
Time to check all this out with some IR and UV LEDs… if it checks out, it’ll be cool indeed.
Gather 5 people together.
One sits in a chair.
The other four using index and middle fingers of each hand try to lift the person sitting in the chair.
Two people left and right put their four fingers under the leg of the sitting person and the other two do the same under the arm of the person.
Ok - it doesn’t work now does it?
Now, palms down first person places their hand a few inches above the sitting persons head, follow around each person putting their hand a few inches above the hand before.
Stay like this for a few moments then gently remove each hand one by one, as if trying not to disturb the air.
Do this part again:
Two people left and right put their four fingers under the leg of the sitting person and the other two do the same under the arm of the person.
You’ll believe a man can fly! Why does this happen? I have no idea. The lighter the person, the higher they go.
And maybe I’m morbid, but if the wasps that capture spiders to lay eggs inside their paralyzed bodies weren’t real, somebody would have to make them up.
Would this count as a third? Years ago, I was riding on a highway. At first light, the dewey fields that I was riding through begain to become visible, then were lit to a pale emerald green for a few seconds. Could the green flash shine brightly enough to color the landscape?
What’s truly bizarre about the Young experiment is that even if you only shoot ONE particle at a time at the slits (and one would tend to assume that it can only go through one slit or the other), you will still get the interference pattern after enough particle interactions have occured. As if it the particle passed through BOTH slits. And in some sense, it probably does.
Look out the window and what do you spy?
Rain falling out of a sunshiney sky
It’s turning to hailstones that weigh half a ton
With seven live frogs hopping out of each one
It’s not the Last Judgment, stop wailing of sin!
It’s only the gods at wine-tasting again!
So drink, drink, to Charlie Fort’s memory
Marvelous doings and marvelous sights
Drink, drink, we may as well join them
The gods are not crazy, they’re higher than kites!
I’ve seen the green flash. Flash is used in the sense of quickness, not brightness. It’s more cool to be able to say you’ve seen it, than the actual seeing.
I always found hermaphrodites and pseudohermaphrodites very interesting. Hermaphrodites really are both sexes at once and will have the sex characteristics of both unless surgery is done to correct some of the ambiguity. Pseudohermaphrodites have a genetic sex but the sexual differentiation process gets screwed up in one of several ways and they end up with some mix of brain, body, and genetic sex. Unfortunately, this can be a very traumatic condition but it tells us a sexual development, gender identity, and the role of sexual development in the brain.
I saw a book at Borders once—I think it was Weird Weather—that had a number of (documented, as I recall) odd weather incidents. Including luminescent tornadoes.
Other odd events…
The Vela Incident. (Not a natural, or continuing event, but hey…weird’s weird.)
Limnic Eruptions. (You know when you open a can of soda, and there’s a surge of bubbles as the CO2 comes out of solution? Imagine that happening with a lake.)
Cryovolcanos. (Doesn’t happen on this planet, though.)
Natural nuclear fission reactors. (Haven’t been around for about a billion and a half years, though. That’s not a figure of speech, either—it’s been about 1.5 billion years.)
One thing that I want to see in person before I die - wet salt flats after a rain ala this picture. I can’t imagine how cool this has to look in person.
