Blood is thicker than knowledge. ®
How deep is the ocean?
Very. At its deepest point, the Marianas Trench, even the tallest basketball player would be over his head. Remember Aunt Melba, who goes go on and on at family dinners about a stone in her shoe, or whatever, and talks right through the main course and half of dessert without inhaling? Well, even she couldn’t hold her breath long enough to reach the sea floor!
Congressional committees have vowed to “get to the bottom” of the ocean. So engineers developed a special reinforced chamber called a bathysphere (Gk.: “soap bubble”). Enclosed in this claustrophobic snow globe, oceanographers are lowered slowly down into the great Trench.
Light cannot penetrate water beneath a certain depth. Different colors are gradually filtered out until only absolute blackness remains. This happens within the first few minutes of the descent. For many passengers, the walls of the capsule can begin to close in.
To keep their spirits up, the first ocean scientists often maintained a running babble of useless commentary, like this sample from one of the earlier dives:
“Sphere to Base: Still descending.
Complete darkness has not changed.
Water appears to be pressing in from all sides.
Readings show pressure now sufficient to crush us to diamonds.
Something is watching from the blackness!
I’m sliding down the Devil’s gullet!!
Leave me my eyes! Ayeeeeeeeee!!!”
For that reason, later bathyspheres were equipped with a modified torpedo tube, allowing an anxious crew member to be separated from his or her colleagues.
The first explorers knew that they had reached the bottom thanks to readings from sensitive instrumentation (the “clunk meter.”) Entries in their recently discovered private diaries record there was actually nothing to be seen. (That was a surprise?) But they needed to keep their funding. So those daring pranksters released a few hundred Stephen King party favors and photographed some “denizens of the deep” with long nightmare teeth, glittery dots, and bulging eyes.
When you turn out the lights tonight, try to imagine what they saw — as the darkness bears down around you.
What causes the Northern Lights?
The Northern Lights are really used rainbows waving above the North Pole.
When rainbows fade away, they’re sent up north for refurbishing. First, they’re washed and then hung out to dry in the “solar wind.” This is the amazing sight reindeer herders see twisting and flapping in the night sky.
When they’re dry, they go to be refilled with colors. A giant prism splits the sunlight into different streams and each color fills a slot in the rainbow. It’s a bit like Nature’s printer cartridge. When everything is topped off and the ends of the rainbow all sealed up, it’s ready to reach across the sky after a rainstorm anywhere in the world.
What? Well, yeah, I suppose there are Southern Lights, too. Although the colors must be upside down.
Are you going to the South Pole? OK, so don’t worry about it.
How do you explain the platypus?
You can’t explain a platypus; you can only describe it.
You’ll come across a lot of “platypuses” in your life. Never take a job where you have to explain one.
Listen to your Dad on this.
Image: Michael Anderson Vincent in Pixabay
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Good one, Dad!
1) You’ll never see me in one of those bubbles.
2) I do hope Nature’s printer cartridge last longer than mine.
3) Most of my bosses were platypi. Or maybe not. I just like using that word.
Dad thanks you. (But should we encourage him?)