Bat house

Jordan was giving me a tour of the Wedgwood Elementary garden, in which he has a proprietary interest because his class does a lot of planting and other projects there. He especially wanted to show me the bird houses and the bat houses. (I have to write "bat house" as two words or you might be misled into thinking he was showing me a bath house.) Jordan pointed out how the bat houses are open on the bottom and have metal mesh on the back, because bats like to hang and their claws would slide off smooth wood. He also pointed out to me that the bat houses are black.

Jordan: That's because black things have more, they attract more of the sunlight so the bat house is warm. The black color brings in the power. When the house is painted black it soaks up the energy more and makes it warmer in there.
Rachel: It soaks up the energy, I totally get what you're saying. Soaks it up like a sponge.
Jordan: Right, yes, like a sponge. Except that the light is not wet.
Rachel: Right, it's not water. I meant if there could be a sponge for light.
Jordan: No actually, not a sponge. A vacuum cleaner.

Now I wonder if maybe he said "suck up the energy," not soak up.

I thought, how fascinating that he thinks the energy is actively sucked into the bat house, instead of just being better absorbed, the way I think of it. But Hunter says that energetically, both suction in a vacuum cleaner and capillary action in a sponge are active processes, with parallel entropy effects. I would have to think about that.

Also, I love how totally unproblematic it is to talk about whether the black bat house is like a sponge or like a vacuum cleaner. We think in metaphors.