Fact of the Day

     "Look at this!" he said in that voice of awe and amazement that she had come to expect the moment she heard the soft rip of a new page in the Bird-a-Day calendar.  

    Look at this was his predictable burst of wonder at the infinite variety of just one species of the creatures that inhabit our planet. Today's "this" was a Stellar Jay, solemn and regal on a pale, un-leafed birch branch--sharp beak, perpendicular brown head feathers, and a plumb body clothed in feathers that radiated a deep shade of blue. 

    "Beautiful," she said, automatically, because it was true, always true, and this bird was particularly beautiful, and perfectly named--the Steller's (because it was stellar?) Jay was indeed regal and deeply hued. "I'd love one of those feathers,": she said. "It's blue, my favorite color--I could wear it in my hair."

    He smiled knowingly at that. "Those feathers aren't really blue."     

    "What! Look at them. Of course they are!"

    "No," he said. "No blue bird feathers are truly blue. They don't contain a blue pigment, not an all."

    "Right," she said, "so I shouldn't believe my lying eyes?"

    He smiled, nodded, clicked something on his damn phone (adjective mentally supplied by her ever time he raised the damn thing to prove a point). "'The vibrant blue color we see is actually a result of structural coloration where the microscopic structure of the feather scatters light and amplifies blue wave lengths. The feathers themselves don't contain blue pigments.'"

    "That's ridiculous," she said.

    "Yep," he said, "and true. The actual pigment in a so-called blue feather is a shade of brown."

    "And I suppose the red-headed woodpecker's feather is actually . . . what? Green?"

    He laughed, shook his head. "No, a red feather is red because of the red pigment in the feather."

    Which made no sense--a red feather was really red, but a blue feather wasn't blue? Her instinct was to continue to argue the point but, after thirty years of these conversations, she knew that he'd looked it up. and he believed Google (powered by an invisible, untraceable AI--too formidable opponent at 7 am on a Wednesday morning).

    "Hmmm, interesting," she said. "Coffee's ready."

    "Great--thank you."

    She almost pointed out that black coffee was really orange because of the way the molecules diffused light or some such thing, but restrained herself, (admirably in her opinion), and they both went back to their phones and the morning paper--which, or course, isn't a paper at all, but, according to AI, is a series of "radio waves that carry data generated by antennae which create oscillating electrical and magnetic fields that propagate through space."