Just as I suspected. Viewed in a different light, North America vanishes. In the upper left is the North American Nebula as seen in the visible light spectrum. Obviously, it looks just like North America:
But when viewed in different parts of the spectra, it goes away. Read the story and see the pretty pictures at NASA.
More like this
The big, current, story in the Atlantic is, of course, hurrican/tropical storm (there is some confusion on the status of the storm over the last 12 hours) Ingrid. Regardless of how it is classified, Ingrid is going to cause major flooding in Mexico.
We've not said anything about the North Korean nuclear issue before but we are doing so now, joining with Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) in expressing our concern over the spread of nuclear weapons and the apparent failure of the Bush administration
That was my first thought when I read this entry, but then I noticed that the clotted, precious style didn't quite fit.
This is interesting:
not an illusion, but a consensual fiction.
Paulino, you're conflating "North America" with "the United States of America." Not that I blame you--I do it myself, speaking colloquially--but North America preceded the USA by millennia (a lot of them) and will almost certainly outlive the USA too.
Unless you were being much more metaphysical, and asserting that the world is a consensus reality. I've wrestled with the idea myself ("I reject your reality and substitute my own"), but it seems one of those untestable things on runs across now and then. An intriguing thought-experiment (and fodder for science fiction authors), but not particularly useful.
"one runs across," of course. BlackBerry is much harder to use than a proper keyboard...