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Day’s Verse:
According to all that God had commanded him, so he did.
Genesis 6:22
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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.