On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > I thought this was amusing: > > There's a trick I like to pull on my friends. Standing in a large > city on an overcast night, I'll ask them to look down at the > sidewalk and tell me what color the sky is. They invariably will > say black or, sometimes, dark blue. Look up, I'll say. And to > their astonishment the sky is neither black nor blue, but a dull, > smoky red - reflecting the orange glow of all those sodium and > mercury vapor streetlights. > > Cut from an essay about SF & the future by Michael Swanwick: > > http://www.michaelswanwick.com/nonfic/future.html Swanwick should do this in Chicago - the sky can be pinkish-orange... Anyway, this doesn't work in SF for some reason. I don't know any chemistry and wonder if Dragaeran could have isolated sodium - my dictionary says this was done in 1807. Can static spells do work? Maybe they don't know about electricity per se, but perhaps a run-a-lightning-bolt-100-times-per-second-through-mercury spell would be within their grasp...