And Another Thing...

I’m not breaking a promise, because this isn’t the next post. It’s a p.s. on the last one.

I forgot to say that the weather forecaster went on to assure us of spectacular sunsets, courtesy of the dust cloud. He showed a picture of one from last night, ‘sent in by a viewer.’ A more innocuous bit of pale orange sky would be hard to imagine, but let that one pass. He went on to explain why the sunsets are spectacular. It’s because, he said, the particles in the atmosphere break up the light so that ‘we can see all the colours of the spectrum.’ No it isn’t. Sunsets are red because certain atmospheric conditions scatter the low frequency radiation at the blue end of the scale, thus allowing the light from the red end to predominate. Similar, but not the same thing. When was the last time you saw ‘all the colours of the spectrum’ in a sunset? He seems to be confusing sunsets with rainbows. He’s an expert, and we’re supposed to put our trust in him. And the sunset where I live was rather less than modest tonight.