Snow started falling sometime late last night.
By the time we awoke, everything was covered
in a layer thin and pristine white,
and snow was still drifting, it was dancing on down,
glittering in the early morning light.
"It's pretty outside," she said,
and I looked
at this picturesque scene pulled straight from a book,
although probably not a book many have bothered to read.
I saw fractal snowflakes, bursting and bold,
spinning their self-similar sides in the cold.
Though, it behooves me to say...
Not fractal in the formal sense,
not like Cantor's middle thirds,
nor that box of Peano's,
and despite being apropos,
nothing at all like curve of Van Koch's,
nicknamed "snowflake" by some.
I saw a vector field of at least four dimensions,
temperature could make five,
or if you prefer, seven.
Another three -- maybe two -- if directional facings of snowflakes
are somehow important.
But that's harder to see
this early in the morning.
I thought about assigning each snowflake a color
and tracing the paths that each one would take,
to watch them unfurl like ten thousand dancers' ribbons,
outlining a dedicated jogger's wake
before tumbling to the ground to rest
along some stable manifold.
Better yet, I wondered if this field could be reversed,
if I could follow each flake back up to the clouds,
to find conditions under which
two that start so close could drift so far apart,
or how a pair that began so differently could find themselves so close,
sipping their coffee before it gets cold.
What was it she had said..?
"It's pretty outside."
I looked.
"I think so, too."
Apr 8, 2015
Apr 8, 2015 at 1:08 PM UTC
Snow started falling sometime late last night.
By the time we awoke, everything was covered
in a layer thin and pristine white,
and snow was still drifting, it was dancing on down,
glittering in the early morning light.
"It's pretty outside," she said,
and I looked
at this picturesque scene pulled straight from a book,
although probably not a book many have bothered to read.
I saw fractal snowflakes, bursting and bold,
spinning their self-similar sides in the cold.
Though, it behooves me to say...
Not fractal in the formal sense,
not like Cantor's middle thirds,
nor that box of Peano's,
and despite being apropos,
nothing at all like curve of Van Koch's,
nicknamed "snowflake" by some.
I saw a vector field of at least four dimensions,
temperature could make five,
or if you prefer, seven.
Another three -- maybe two -- if directional facings of snowflakes
are somehow important.
But that's harder to see
this early in the morning.
I thought about assigning each snowflake a color
and tracing the paths that each one would take,
to watch them unfurl like ten thousand dancers' ribbons,
outlining a dedicated jogger's wake
before tumbling to the ground to rest
along some stable manifold.
Better yet, I wondered if this field could be reversed,
if I could follow each flake back up to the clouds,
to find conditions under which
two that start so close could drift so far apart,
or how a pair that began so differently could find themselves so close,
sipping their coffee before it gets cold.
What was it she had said..?
"It's pretty outside."
I looked.
"I think so, too."
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