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Noctilucent Clouds Spread and Mystify
Wired has a feature on noctilucent clouds, once seen only at high latitudes but increasingly visible now lower down the globe. The clouds result from ice crystals at altitudes of 50 miles, higher than five 9s of the atmosphere. What water ice is doing up there, in a region 100 million times drier than the Sahara desert, is only one of the mysteries associated with the clouds. They are a recent phenomenon: the first scientific description of noctilucent clouds was penned in 1885. For a time it was believed that the clouds were an effect resulting from the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano two years before. Since 2002, the clouds have been sighted — and photographed — as far south as Oregon, Colorado, and Utah. Some scientists believe that human-caused climate change is playing a role, but others doubt this. Two satellites are in orbit to study the clouds; NASA's AIM generated this day-by-day movie of clouds in the vicinity of the North Pole during 2008.
Just this afternoon I was driving my family to see the Harry Potter movie, and talk turned toward which Harry Potter characters we'd choose to be friends with. Everybody in my family agreed they'd like to be friends with Luna Lovegood. Then I dropped my bombshell: When I was a teenager, I was friends with somebody who was just like Luna.
"He believed anything he heard, as long as it was weird," I said.
"Like what?" they wanted to know.
"Oh, pyramid power, alien abductions, elves, ghosts and fairies, anything like that. No, seriously. He was really into cryptobiology. You know, Yeti, sea monsters, tribes of strange little people who live in the woods."
"You mean, like in South America?"
"No, near Boston, down toward Plymouth I think. Oh, yes, he believed in clouds."
"Clouds?"
"Oh, I mean sentient clouds. Intelligent ones. They supposedly have a civilization but they're so different from us we don't understand it. He had plans to build some electronic gizmo so he could listen to them. Or that might have been the ghosts. Probably both. Funny, I hadn't thought of him in years."
"What happened to him?"
"I lost touch with him, then I ran into him some years later. He told me he'd joined a satanist cult, but they'd messed his head up really bad."
Which was true. You could tell: he still believed anything weird he heard, but now that made him miserable.
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It's not piss. It's chubby rain.