20120101 (J)
Journal: January 1, 2012
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Thought Process

Snowflake Vectors: Dawn of a new year, large agglomerated snowflakes falling @ 20° in a gentle west-north-west wind.

                                    Wind Vectors
                           (drawing of wind velocity vrs. Azimuth with broad peak N and a narrow on E)

Snowflake vectors down x° east measured against the N-S axis. Actually average vectors over some time or distance, at least as far as we can measure, though calculus and other pretentious curve fitting abstractions of continuity fill in the gaps just fine. Eyeballing does pretty good too, at least at fuzzier scales.

By increasing resolution in both time and space we proliferate exponentially the number of observations required to describe the object or process. To describe what IS, all of it, takes us ever deeper into personal ignorance of things we don’t know but our minds are capable of knowing.

Which leaf will fall next: Imagination comes to the rescue. We describe facsimiles, templates, abstractions, models of how a “representative” leaf grows, and predict with very high reliability the "class of behavior" that leaves will grow in the spring and fall in the autumn. But predicting the exact arrangement and momentum of each atom in a single leaf is impossible, let alone how these atomic position came to be (their “deterministic” history), i.e. how they came to be an “actual”, not hypothetical or simulated vein pattern.

Which leaf will fall next? is beyond human ken. Maybe machines will get there, but I don’t think we humans will. New Year’s day; just like any other day, which is different than any other day (mathematical sets, of course)