La-Dee-Dah Day

So its now half a year here down under, pursuing the illusion of sound.

Sound - transcient, nascent sense of vibrations, which our minds make out to be pleasant or unpleasant, encoding within the nuances of speech, intellect, accent, culture, emotions, alarm and peace. Mere vibration, periodic oscillations, or aperiodic chaos; harmonic signals, inharmonic characteristics and aharmonic beatings; enharmonic chromaticisms, resonances, turbulent transcients, evanescent perturbations of regularity. Mere vibrations. But it means so much. And so much within to be understood, peeled apart, stripped and boiled down. Deconvoluted?

Sound is one thing, silence another. Degrees of silence? How about implied sound. Impedance spectra that tell me how a system would behave, as if the instrument were an elegant variable source-filter. But what do they mean? do they mean anything? and how do i know if they mean anything? Can i measure meaning?

So stumped, I am - issues of understanding, interpretation and meaning. Epistemological and Ontological cross-roads - existential post-modernism? Absolute truth? Forsooth, physics is a philosophical quest for truth - an absolute in a sea of relatives - self-existing, consistent, and repeatable; above all, Discoverable.

So here, I study truth concerning fluttering air particules and how they behave in a column. Absolutes on the fluffie fluffles. And stumped, I am.

How! Said the Indian chief.

Walk on water, and the full package comes with a-drippin' when you see the wind and the waves. Notice Peter did not walk on water, but rather, walked on the command Jesus gave him to come. Make sense?

Lesson today from the wedding at Cana - the water turned to wine, ONLY when the servants obeyed the instruction to fill the jars with water, and then bring the water to the master of the feast. Presumably, it becomes wine only at the end of the servant's journey. If the servant didn't make it to the end of the table, the water would never have changed, and the promise unfulfilled, wedding ruined, eggs addled. We can only walk on toward the end, where water turns to wine, and the sea becomes sweet; the promise only is that as we wait on Him, we get to soar as eagles, run and not weary, walk and not faint.

Laa-dee-dah. Walk on. =)

Where sky and water meet,
Where the waves grow sweet,
Doubt not, Reepicheep,
To find all you seek,
There is the utter east.
(Reepicheep's Promise, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis, 1952)

Stop Press - Weather Report!

This report here writes about a sighting of a Nacreous cloud over the Antarctic. Apparently its considered a "rare cloud", rare enough to warrant a news article, considering the 'extreme' conditions for its formation - water-ice crystals "blown along a strong jet of stratospheric air" more than 10 kilometers above the ground, and formed at an extreme temperature (minus 87 degrees). Apparently nacreous clouds are formed under harsh conditions.
(pic accompanying the report)

What's befuddling though, is that I spotted nacreous clouds while I was in Nongkhai and Laos during the the hot and rainy season in August 2005. They were spotted over Udon Thani and Vientienne municipality on separate days. More here (scroll down towards the bottom). So how rare are they, and how are they really created? By all scientific sources, nacreous accounts are rare events forming only under severe conditions (extreme cold, extreme dry, supercooling, nitric and/or sulphuric acid content!), but I've been told by two separate local accounts in Nongkhai and Vientienne that its regularly spotted over the Mekong during late afternoons that part of the year. Perhaps there is more to this phenomenon that atmospheric scientists haven't bothered with much yet? For all we know, the mekong's probably polluted and giving out noxious fumes right now!

Anyhows, enjoy!
Udon Thani, 5:19, 23/08/05
Undisclosed location, Laos, 4:50pm, 29/08/05
Undisclosed location, Laos, 4:45pm, 29th August 2005
Undisclosed location, Laos, 4:49pm, 29/08/05