A couple of very strange natural (well, natural, with a little help from mankind sometimes...) wonders for today, that really would have been best shared on Halloween. But hey, I didn't find them on Halloween, I found them today. Save the link if you like, and wait 'til next year to view it. ;)
Do you know where the largest urban bat population in the world lives? How about the 1.5 million Mexican freetail bats that have formed a breeding colony in Austin, Texas, IN the Congress Avenue Bridge? (Here's a little more on them... the pictures are just fantastic!) The bats have been "adopted" by the city, and families picnic on the lake shore in the early summer evenings to watch the bats' emergence. There's even a statue in Austin to their honor. Neat, neh?
Second bit of natural weirdness... anyone who's seen the movie Sweet Home Alabama has seen a fulgurite (the glass structures formed when lightning strikes sand and fuses it). But have you ever seen a Lichtenberg figure? It turns out lightning (artificial or no) can leave some *very* interesting marks... in lucite, on a lawn, even on skin... Wikipedia has a very interesting article on them. What fascinates me the most about these figures are all those branching iterations in the pattern... they remind me very strongly of fractal patterns. (Well... I suppose it makes sense, since they both appear to be recursive figures of one sort or another.)
But still, it just fascinates me how... okay, forgive me as I get exceedingly corny, here, but... how magnificent and astounding the patterns of nature are. They're hidden everywhere-- identical patterns, turning up in the oddest places and showing how completely different things can, in their essences, be similar. Trees, ferns, lightning, seashells, broccoli, fractals.... Infinite simplicity and infinite complexity, all in one neat little planet. ^_^
Posted by gris at November 18, 2004 04:55 PM