Did you ever look at something that you've probably seen a million* times before and then see some minor detail about it that you just needed to sit and ponder?

About a week ago, I was pulling leaves out of my gutter and tossing them onto a big pile of snow next to the driveway.
A few days ago I just happend to notice, that the big clumps were sitting high and mighty on the pile (almost above it), but there were individual leaves that were sunk down up to 4 inches deep into the pile.

I never thought about it, but it seems as though an individual leaf is very poor at insulation. So; when the sun strikes the single (dark) leaf, it warms it up enough for the snow beneath it to melt.
But; add a layer or two of leaves, and the lower layers insulate the snow and keeps it from melting.

*Meaning: lots.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

It's not the additional leaves, but the air trapped between them that's the good insulator.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Yes. I wrote an essay including it. The opening portion is below:

The Uses of Poetry

Summer morning. Sitting on the low concrete wall next to the house, I sip coffee while listening to the horses nickering in the pasture across the road. I’m enjoying the early September warmth, putting off starting the yard chores as long as possible. Next to me, between the house and the metal box holding the heat exchanger I lean on, an orb spider is spinning a web

It’s hard to anthropomorphize a spider, built on a body plan that diverged from our own half a billion years ago. But taken on her own terms she is a handsome little beast, black-striped legs gleaming like patent leather, gaudy yellow abdomen. Her scaffolding is up, and she is working on her third or fourth circle of silk. I watch and admire the careful regularity she is creating. Then I catch myself and look closer, and watch most carefully. As the spider spins on the hairs on the back of my neck actually stir. In a shivery moment I realize that I have just been given the answer to a question I had never thought to voice, something totally obvious in retrospect, yet stunningly surprising at the same time: how does the spider make her web so perfectly?

The spider measures it.

Reaching out, she extends a slightly curled foreleg and pulls herself upward until the tip of the leg touches the next strand outward. Then she pauses, draws out silk, tacks it down with a hind leg and moves upward again, repeating the process. Given what passes for her brain, the performance is nothing short of astounding.

Make me a web, her genes whisper from the shadows of deep time. Make it fifty cubits by fifty cubits, smooth and regular, that you may be able to catch food and live, and reproduce in the manner of your own kind.

It is the moment of transcendence, the instant you are given a peek under the curtain of the world to glimpse the machinery behind it. It doesn’t matter if the peek is big or small, or if others have been there before you. What does matter is the experience of something bigger than yourself. I remember Blake:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

And an hour or so later I return to her now-finished web as she sits patiently in the middle, and throw her a fly. Thank you, madam.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

If you ever get bored, it's fun to imagine the room or whole building turning 90 or 180 degrees. What would slide to where? What could you grab to keep steady? What would you see walking on the ceiling. It's a fun thought excercise.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

That's lovely, Mike. Actually, it reminds me of certain passages in The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery. The main character reads a series of nature books with things like that in them.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Dark leaves on the snow.
A dark leaf within the snow.
Quick. Write a haiku!

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

Snow covered dark leaves
hides until the sun comes out
dark leaves in the snow.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

I know EXACTLY what you are talking about. For example, I woke up one morning to a screeching noise I had grown so accustomed to that it seemed a part of my life. It was then that I finally realized I had married Satan's daughter and never once saw it in over fifteen years of marriage.

Seriously though, yes, I've had that feeling many times. It seems it happens with words more often than other things. I'll look at a word I've used most of my life and suddenly wonder why it's so weird, and I'll have this momentary feeling that I'm seeing it for the first time.

I can't think of any other examples at the moment, probably because I'm tired, but I have had that feeling plenty of times.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

Mike, that is fabulous. Very useful poetry!

Going off on a tangent, but sort of in line with the original topic,
I've long wondered at those familiar lines from Blake's Auguries of
Innocence.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I asked about this last year, and got some replies:
Backwards Blake

The four lines appear to assert that in order to do A and B, just do
X and Y. But it seems to me that A and B are are switched around
with X and Y. How do you hold infinity in the palm of your hand, or
hold eternity in an hour? They both seem impossible. But I would
say that you can do them by seeing a world in a grain of sand, and
by seeing a heaven in a wildflower, both of which I think almost
anyone can do.

Blake seems to be saying, in order to accomplish this simple, easy
thing, just do this apparently impossible thing. Backwards. I don't
understand why, and I want to.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

I suspect that is how people come up with a lot of inventions; by looking at something in a different way one day to everyone else.

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Life is its own god.

Can you please ask the voices in your head to keep the noise down?

It's one of the reasons I have come to find poetry so useful. A great poet (or a great poetic setting) can make you think about ordinary things in a different way, and give insights I find unobtainable from other sources. Or just lift you up.

When I drove down to Florida (so long ago!) to watch the launch of Skylab two things happened that have stuck with me ever since. The first, bigger one was the transcendental experience of all those thousands of people standing around me. As the rocket began to rise everyone, spontaneously, began chanting "Go... go... go...", as close to a mass secular prayer as I have ever experienced (I was doing it, too).

The second, personal one was having a wire cross in my brain and dredging up a couplet I had read as a kid in the Rubaiyat, in a thin, red-covered book on my parent's shelf. As the rocket neared the clouds I heard in my mind:

Up from Earth's Centre, through the Seventh Gate,
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate.

Talk about getting the shivers.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

I do that sometimes. Especially when I am traveling in a bus or train.

(* yep, I know I am crazy )

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Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says "You're all idiots", and pours two beers

Yep; that's the spirit. I never thought about that one either.

How does that differ than the times I've imagined the room spinning 360 degrees?

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

A very small, thin, red leather-covered book? Easy fit in a shirt pocket?
Published by the Little Leather Library Corporation of New York?

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

My Rubayiat:

It was cloth-bound, maybe six by nine inches. I remember classic Persian illustrations on pages facing the text. The Fitzgerald translation, of course. It was on the shelf next to the Childcraft books, the Encyclopedia Britannica (1948 ed), and the Grimm's and Anderson's Fairy Tales. My parents didn't read much beyond the newspapers, but somehow (instinctively?) they made sure I was well-stocked.

We're talking approximately 50 years ago, understand.

I learned to read very early (My mother would sit on the couch with me and taught me to read using the Sunday color comics). This would have been when I was seven or eight. Most of it went right over my head, but I also remember (and was made uncomfortable by):

And lo, the phantom caravan has reached
The Nothing it set out from. Oh, make haste!

I don't know why. It's like the cold water on the spine every time I read Kubla Khan and get to:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Another poem I ran across as a kid. The indistinct mental image of a sunless sea has haunted me ever since.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Upper leaves shield the sunlight effect, preventing underneath melting.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

Hee hee hee! I learned to read when I was a third that age!

Actually, my mother hardly ever read aloud to me. At least not that I remember. By the time I was three, I was reading to myself, and by the time I was six, my mother didn't have time anymore.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Into this Universe, and why not knowing,
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.

Much more Fitzgerald than Omar Khayyam. Though this verse is pretty close to the original.

Good old Fitzgerald and Coleridge (and throw in Swineburne for good measure), and all the other, depressive, drugged up, alcoholic geniuses.

I phrased it poorly, Gillian. I read the poem when I was seven or eight. I don't remember excatly when I started reading, but I was a good reader by kindergarten, so I must've been four.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

I'll admit that I was a little surprised at the thought that "seven or eight" was early to be reading, since they do teach it in kindergarten. (I had my own reading class that year, though, because I was already reading at about a third-grade level, so "Dick and Jane" were not exactly scintillating to me.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"