For Your Eyes Only..

Astronaut Bruce McCandless II floats untethered away from the safety of the space shuttle, with nothing but his Manned Maneuvering Unit keeping him alive. The first person in history to do so.

We thought that they did because they have 12 different molecules for photoreceptors, whereas humans have only 3. BIG difference, right??

Nope. Turns out that they simply do not have the mental wherewithal to blend, and so needed a separate receptor for each color. The human brain adds color emissions together to create a singular representative color, like reverse engineered printing. Shrimp can’t do that. They can’t take light emitting “green” and light emitting “red” and come back with “yellow”, like we do. They have to have a receptor for yellow, and are relatively horrible at distinguishing shades of colors.

i grew up in a little desert valley called Tucson, Arizona, where it only rains 2 inches a year on average. the majority of the city’s water is pumped from an underground aquifer, which took millions of years to fill. one of the biggest conservation efforts in our city was for water, naturally, and i spent a lot of time learning about low flow toilets and 5 minute showers. i learned that filling your sink basin and washing your dishes in that water is less costly than running the tap. i learned that it only takes 2 days without water on the desert for someone to die

the city was sinking as the aquifer drained. neighborhoods fell into flood zones that didnt exist 10 years ago

there’s a road called Golf Links in the city and it is lined with golf courses. miles of green grass where grass doesn’t grow, in a valley where it doesn’t rain. why? because the rich white retirees who moved there to stop the aching in their joints decided they should also get to play golf. meanwhile our public schools taught small children like me that taking long showers would kill the world

Each one consumes ~312,000 gallons of water per day.

That consumption is equivalent to 55+ million humans per day in the United States… roughly 1/6 the entire population.