Sine post
For me working on a math problem is like doing calisthenics in a cathedral - great exercise done in a transcendent place. It's the magical place where the physical and the abstract shake hands. So lately I've been spending time every day doing a little bit of trigonometry, working with sine waves.
Sine waves! They're what you see on an oscilloscope, rolling up and down out to infinity with perfect precision. They are the very picture of dependability and harmony, and you can use them to predict the behavior of swings, springs, and all kinds of things that rotate. Sine waves themselves behave according to the properties of a circle, which I find surprising and beautiful.
Today on my morning woods-walk, still tipsy with sine-wine from doing math, I decided to look for a circle in nature.
What a wild goose chase (or more accurately, goose-egg chase). I found plenty of magnificent patterns, but they were complex, recombinant, fractal. In nature I saw nothing as simple as a circle, for example, like the lowercase "o" on the keyboard beside my ring finger.
Almost all of the circular objects I can think of are man-made. Wheels, bottle-tops, eyelets for shoestrings, clock dials - all are human-designed. Which makes sense, circles being by definition a product of the mind. We build them, and use them to approximate or build things.
More particularly, the natural circles I can think of lose their circle-ness when I look closely. The shape of the sun or the moon, for example, appear in the sky as perfect circles. But up close, I know there's nothing circular about the moon's cratered skin or the vertiginous cliffs of flame on the sun. Nature is too complex, too long elaborated, to sustain for long something as simple as a circle.
Later on during the day I saw on the webcam that the waves at our neighborhood beach had turned smooth and glassy, with long stretches of calm between. Each wave seemed drawn with a single brush stroke, half a sine curve swimming slowly beachward.
So I suited right up, grabbed the paddleboard, and headed out. After I had a few warm-up rides, the ocean delivered one of the smoothest, most perfectly shaped, and biggest waves I have ever caught. I glided down its front, a human data point on a sine wave, both entities intensely alive.
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