The gypsy woman left her warm hut.  The snow, rimed by a day of freezing rain, chimed with a crystalline skitter as she scooted her booted feet.  She intersects with deer who are not there, only prints left by their deep hoven feet; and with bounding squirrel shapes of shadows going on in some other time.  She sees outlines of round little bellies in the middle of four jumping feet, that tell with their sinuous tail of the same creatures stirring in her house on christmas eve.

Because Maeve loves her trees, she tangles with some choking vines, wondering if they can still inject with a poison this time of year.  She thinks they're the ones you call cats-claw, protecting her like briar rose.

Down the pseudo-shine valley of the trees where the sun doesn't reach, she walks into a wind tunnel that stops her very breath, buffeting body and mind, and goes still further to see the offing of the beach.  Looking back, she doesn't know how far five minutes was, but as she turns around to face the open waters, Maeve has an idea of how far decades are.

Laughing waves tumbled up a few flat stones, laughing in return she skips them back, and for the ones that skim and hop so fine, Maeve applauds and doesn't notice time.  She breathes through her many coloured scarves wound 'round her neck until her eye sockets go numb with frozen tears in the misted sun.  And then she leaves like a graceful tree melded with star shine.  Christmas was just another day passing by in her quiet life ever falling like snow, or howling like the gypsy wind.

GYPSY WIND painting by jstickmann (a gift 10-29-09)

words by Adrian Bejan

For a finite-size system to persist in time — that is, to live — it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.

This statement recognizes the natural tendency of imposed currents to construct paths of optimal access (such as shapes and structures) through constrained open systems.  It also accounts for the evolution (improvement) of these paths, which occurs in an identifiable direction that can be aligned with time.

Everything flows one way, from high to low.  Water flows through a pipe from high pressure to low pressure.  Heat flows from high temperature to low temperature.  This principle is known today as the second law of thermodynamics, irreversibility, dissipation, inefficiency, one way, water under the bridge, etc.

One individual sustains the crowd, and vice versa.  The big river sustains the many tiny streams of the river basin.

The reverse is equally true:  The numerous sustain the singular.  The river basin, like the tree of the lung, connects an entire area or volume to one point — flow resistances allocated to areas and volumes, all over the world, so the whole world flows best.  This principle is the "constructal law".

Both principles — the second law and the constructal law — are in action. Their footprints persist, like the river beds and the beaten tracks. The river and the caravan that do not follow their beds and beaten tracks do not get far.

The golden-ratio phenomenon and its constructal-law prediction illuminate the oneness of the integrative design of the movement of biological mass on earth. Shapes that resemble the golden ratio facilitate the scanning of images and their transmission through vision organs to the brain. The speeding up of this flow goes hand-in-hand with the dendritic architectures of the nervous system in the eye and the brain.  Dendrites maximize the rate of point-volume flow of information inside finite volumes, and the rate at which new point-volume connections can occur naturally in the brain.

The name of this constructal evolution of brain architecture, every minute and every moment, is cognition – the phenomenon of thinking, knowing and thinking again, better. ‘Getting smarter’ is the constructal law in action.

We see pattern and diversity together in every grand design of nature, from the distribution of tree numbers and sizes in the forest to the distribution of cities on a continent. Although much of the observed diversity is due
to randomness, much of it is like a fog that is dissipated by the pattern of evolutionary design predicted with the constructal law (e.g. the Zipf distribution of trees and cities on land, and the speed-mass distribution of animals with locomotion – fliers, runners and swimmers).

    

http://www.constructal.org/

view from the road taken Aug. 14
I think that the top of the dune blow-out is the highest point in the state park
 

today, opposite view from the top    Lake Michigan to the west

Muskegon Lake cove to the east

yesterday through the bog on the way to lost lake found these ice crystals in the path
never saw anything like it