But I hated Earth Science!

In the course of looking something up on Google, I discovered that the Astronomy Picture of the Day has a terrestrial counterpart, the Earth Science Picture of the Day.

For some reason, I am incredibly biased against Earth Science. I think it traces to the fact that my high school Earth Science teacher was — well, he wasn’t a bad teacher by any means; he just didn’t make the subject interesting. At all. It’s weird, really. (Plus, he had Godawful fashion sense and he bore more than a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon.) Anyway, nearly any discussion of rocks and erosion and the like makes my eyes glaze over.

Oh, what was I looking up? Well, I looked at John Scalzi’s “cloud photo”, which he likes because he captured what he calls the “God light” — that scattering of sunlight behind a cloud into rays that seem to diverge from a single point. The technical term for this effect is “crepuscular rays”, but the name I’ve always known them by is the evocative phrase “the Rays of Buddha”. I don’t recall where I first heard this term, but there you go.