~~~

Day’s Verse:

According to all that God had commanded him, so he did.

Genesis 6:22

~~~

Yesterday I made a connection that never occurred to me before, possibly because of my small volume of experience with snow. On the walk back from class to our apartment there is a snowy place where a snowblower scooped up some dirt and blew it onto the whiteness. Lately the sun has shone and temperatures have soared above freezing even into the 40’s. I happened to notice that the dirty, dark patch of snow had melted more quickly than the white area around it and suddenly I realized that the albedo of snow had changed because of the absorptive properties of a dark color on that snow. Probably that dirty spot actually got warmer than the surrounding snow, which tends to reflect sunlight, because the dirt absorbed a greater amount of energy from the sun’s rays. Then I noticed a bunch of other smaller dirtier patches that had also melted more quickly than the clean areas around it, and that bolstered my hypothesis. There’s no telling if I’m right, though, because I’d be jiggered if anybody had seriously cared to do a scientific investigation of the phenomena.

1. Is that possible?

2. Is my thinking about this topic too nerdy for words?

3. Is my using the word “albedo” also too nerdy for words?

In other quasi-scientific news, the Seattle Times ran an interesting article that said in jobs, men were consistently overrated and women consistently underrated. If a man and woman were described doing identical jobs, the man would be considered competent while the woman was considered unlikable: “But both men and women rated the highly competent woman as much less likable than her male counterpart, and considerably more hostile.”

To round out the scientific news, a new procedure is being developed to give people with retinitis pigmentosa the opportunity to see again, thanks to a 2 mm-long solar-sensitive microchip (link here). Apparently it is still in the early stages, but some improvements have been seen to a previously untreatable disease that ultimately and slowly causes total blindness.

– KF –

8 thoughts on “The Pursuit of Knowledge (Avaliable Here)

  1. A lot of women who are in leadership try to be masculine to handle their positions… they use the same techniques men do, but obviously it doesn’t come across well. I think that women have a lot of leadership potential in their womanliness– I’ve seen it. It looks different but is quite successful.

Leave a Reply to fxbx Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.