All the trees that have needles instead of leaves are called "coniferous", and all the trees that have leaves are called "deciduous". The deciduous trees shed their leaves in the fall and grow new ones in the spring. The conifers shed and replace a portion of their needles each year, but not all of them at once, except for the tamarack a.k.a. the larch. The coniferous trees have cones to produce their seeds, while the deciduous trees have flowers. Some of them may not look like flowers to the casual observer, but they are. Grasses have flowers too, that's the part that produces the grain or seeds.
I could plant wheat for my deer, but I think that rye is a little more hardy in our climate. Your local stores may not stock a lot of rye bread but, if you remember, the stores in our old neighborhood did. They were usually designated by nationality, like Bohemian rye, Russian rye, and pumpernickel, which is of Germanic origin. Rye flour doesn't rise with yeast like wheat flour, but there are two ways to get around this. One way is to mix rye flour and wheat flour together in your bread recipe, and the other way is to use a "starter" like they do with sourdough bread. If you mix your flours, the bread will be darker the more rye flour you proportionally use. That's why Russian rye and pumpernickel are darker that Bohemian rye. Generally, the farther north you go in Europe, the darker the rye bread will be. That's because rye is easier to grow, and thus cheaper, in northern climates.
Whole wheat flour is not as refined as white flour, and the bread is coarser as a result. Whole wheat flour won't rise with yeast either, so you have to either mix it or use starter like with rye bread. Starter is a portion of raw dough that you saved from the last batch of bread that you made. I think you can buy it commercially today but, originally, you had to get some from another bread baker. I have never used it, but I think it's some kind of enzyme culture. In the old days everybody used starter, the yeast you can buy in the store today has only been in production since the late 19th Century.
I think that all cats can interbreed with each other, but they seldom do because they hate each other. I'm not sure if their offspring would be sterile, but the guys who made the liger deliberately had it sterilized because they didn't want to start a whole new species, they just wanted to prove that it could be done. Somebody told me once that it is only the male mules that are sterile, the females can breed with a male horse or donkey, and their offspring would be only half mule. It just occurred to me that this might be the origin of the term "half-assed". See, when you get into a discussion like this, you never know where it might lead you. And my hypothetical wife says that it's a waste of time! By the way, a male mule is called a "Jack" and a female mule is called a "Jenny", in case you didn't know.
If God were to appear on a mountain top, He would not necessarily repeal the Theory of Evolution. Evolution, or any other science, does not deny the existence of God or dispute that He created the Heavens and the Earth, it just tries to explain some of the mechanics of how things work. While there is some discrepancy between the Biblical accounts of creation and the pronouncements of science, all that proves is that both sources, being the product of human beings, can be subject to error. If the whole Bible was conclusively proven to be false, it wouldn't prove anything about God, it would just prove that the people who wrote the Bible got it wrong.
What you said about parallel lines on a sphere reminds me of something I learned in that Meteorology course I am taking. Winds try to blow directly from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure, but they don't exactly do that. It's pretty complicated, and I don't completely understand it, but it has something to do with the Coriolis effect, named after French scientist Gaspard-Gutstave Coriolis, who discovered it. This causes straight line winds to veer to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere because of the rotation of the Earth. There is also another factor, based on the Earth's sphere shape, which works in the opposite direction. These two factors combined cause the winds to blow parallel to the isobars drawn around a high or low pressure center, all else being equal, but, like the prof says, "all else is never equal". Meteorology is a lot more complicated than I thought it was!
When you think about it, lines of latitude on a globe are parallel to each other, but they are not straight, while lines of longitude are neither parallel nor straight. You can't really draw a straight line on the surface of a sphere, although a flat map of the Earth makes it appear that you can. I am talking specifically about the old Mercator projection, which has been around for a long time. The way the Mercator accomplishes this is by warping the continents out of shape so that the land masses at the northern and southern extremes look disproportionately larger than the land masses near the equator. The lines of longitude and latitude on a Mercator map look like they are laid out in a rectangular pattern, which, of course, they are not. The thing about the Mercator is that it makes it possible to draw a straight line from point A to point B, put a protractor on it, and plot a compass course that will get you there. For this reason, the Mercator is still popular with mariners and aviators as a navigation tool, even though most people know that the Earth doesn't really look like that. Some have even suggested that the Mercator was deliberately designed by politically incorrect people to make the White people's countries, look disproportionately larger than the Black and Brown people's countries, but those guys are just paranoid.
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