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January 19, 2006

last gulps of free time

It’s a quiet night at home, the last non-schoolnight weeknight for quite some time, as classes kick into gear Monday. As if to make up for lost time over break, I’m in mental cramming mode, trying to squeeze in all the little bits of everyday life that are sure to pass me by once the grind starts again. Here’s a selection of what tonight found me doing…

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January 16, 2006

The Brick Testament

Someone has way too much free time on his hands.

The Brick Testament: a pictoral old testament in legos!

I love how there is actual sky the background…

(hat tip to BriBreakfastBlogger, the guy who taught me statistics last semester…)

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January 08, 2006

snow falling on Gore-Tex

New Year’s Eve Day found us on a ledge in western Massachusetts, overlooking Shelburne Falls and the Bridge of Flowers, catching snowflakes on our tongues. If you could have been one of the lucky snowflakes, drifting by yourself lazily down from the cold and muffled grey sky, I wager you would have tried to steer your way towards those four bundled figures, hovering closely to each other, admiring the miniature white lace decorating each others’ coats and fumbling with the large-fingered gloves to find the power button on the digital camera. For if you had found your way onto the Gore-Tex jet black or the soft brown velour or the green/blue Bugaboo, perhaps you would have had your shot at immortality. Forever frozen in still life and of digital storage, still unforgotten courtesy of the random photo screensaver.

Alas, the micro-nature photo inspirtation (thanks, gribley ) needed a magnifying glass, tripod, warm fingers, more patience, and some luck to materialize, so your snowflake incarnate would have been disappointed, for pictoral fame was not to be had (but blogdom fame—almost the equal!).

So damn if it wasn’t real nice then to just stop and admire these pristine little flakes, dropping out of the sky like you remember they did in second grade. But were these fine and individually falling flakes really unusual or was it our pace, the inhaled breath before ‘ought-six, the end-of-year pause and reflection, that made your fleeting flakes cling to every last ripstoppable fiber of my slippery black shell, or savor the velveteen folds before burrowing one of your six symmetric points and melting into the fur?

And then (oh no! attack of the nerds!) to find this passage in my routine reading two days later, describing the growth of the flake:
But snowflakes are not so random: their alluring beauty lies in their six-pointed symmetry, which was first clearly identified by the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler in 1610. This hexagonal symmetry is imposed by the regular arrangement of water molecules in ice: a crystal lattice that picks out six “special” directions in space. New branches of crystalline ice sprout preferentially in these directions. In effect, the growth of the crystals is constrained by an underlying hexagonal grid, such that the geometric orderliness at the molecular scale becomes manifest as a regularity evident at the much larger scale of the whole snowflake. This interplay of chance and regularity in snowflake growth is a subtle affair whose details came to be understood only in the 1980s. -Philip Ball, Critical Mass (p. 116)
So H-O-H dictates your six-pointed arrangement, but how does the symmetry remain consistent on each branch? How does a water molecule on one side of the flake know to copy one on the other side? Google could probably tell me, but the first mystery of 2006 can remain a childlike wonder for a while yet…

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