refraction

"It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it." -Carl Sagan I would argue the exact opposite, in fact: the beauty of a sunset, in all of its varieties and variations, is only enhanced the more you know about it. Image credit: Dan Schroeder, via Picasa. The next time you watch the Sun descend through the sky, towards the horizon, you might marvel at how the Sun remains the same size all the way down. At just slightly over half-a-degree, the Sun appears to drop at a constant rate throughout the afternoon and into early evening. But there are some small changes…
So I am preparing an audition video to be Dangerman this weekend, which will go up on youtube and get posted here next week. In the meantime, as promised for the weekend, I have a new weekend diversion for you: the archer fish, a.k.a. toxotes jaculatrix (hee hee). But what makes it so cool? Oh, I don't know, how about this slow-motion video: Did you see that?? It's a fish that hunts insects by shooting them with water, and then eating them when they fall into the water, often catching them before they ever leave the air! What's really amazing about this is that the fish needs to be able to "…