On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 19:31, Philip Hart wrote: > 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. In Sunnyvale, I can *read* by the skyglow on a cloudy night. And that was the phenomenon that sprang to mind the first time I read of the overcast over the Dragaeran Empire... -- %% Max Rible http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %% %% "The duty of the patriot is to protect his country from its %% %% government." -- Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_ %%