Winter Wonderland

Ok, yeah, so all this snow is pretty inconvenient. Let's just get that out of the way. But beyond all the bother, there's really a lot of wonder to be found as well.

We got about eight inches of the fluffy white stuff at my house here in Redmond. More than some, not as much as others. Snow brings out the community. My family and the four neighboring houses around our little cul-de-sac, much like most suburban families, really never talk to one another. There's no animosity involved, it's just that we live our own lives, going to and from work, driving kids to school and soccer practice, then coming home to hole up inside for dinner. It's the routine.

But when the snow comes, the routine gets buried. If we can't drive, our car-culture is paralized. No work, no school, no deadlines.

Our little street is kind of steep, and I know from experience that if anybody drives on it the packed snow will turn to ice and before long nobody will be able to get out. And the city doesn't plow down here. So when the snow comes, the shovels come out. I usually head outside around nine in the morning on a snowy day, and start scooping a one-car-width lane down the street. It's work, but the physical labor is a nice change of pace from sitting at a computer all day, and the exercise keeps me warm.

But I can't manage the whole street myself, especially not when we get an 8 inch dumping. So before long, those neighbors come out with their own shovels. Between the five of us, pretty soon we've got a clear lane of pavement with branches out to everyone's driveways. We talk. Catch up on how each other's kids are doing and what's new in people's lives. I learned that one neighbor is writing a book. Another has an import/export business. One neighbor's kid, who I used to pay to help me with my yardwork, is at the UW now doing his prereq's for the college of engineering.

Yeah, the snow's inconvenient. But it brings the neighbors out for some good old-fashioned community. Together we accomplish an impromptu public works project, for the common good, that none of us could manage on our own. There's something wonderful in that.

Yesterday afternoon, back inside the house, I was looking out at our balcony at the snow on the rails and decided to take this picture. This is where the snow tapers off as the rail runs under the eaves. So big deal, right? Well, I know this is tremendously geeky of me, but it put me in mind of something that's been bugging me since High School.

See, although I'm as big an athiest heretic as you're likely to find this side of Richard Dawkins, my mom sent me to a Catholic high school. Which was weird, because on the one hand we had to study the bible and the sacrements and all that stuff, but on the other hand, being a Jesuit-run school the science curriculum was first-rate. I mean, really really excellent, which is why my mom had sent me there in the first place. So since that age, I've been aware not only of the general tension in society between science and religion, but also keenly aware that the two can get along. The Jesuits manage it just fine, which makes me wonder why other religious groups can't. Not all of them, of course, but you know the ones I mean.

So this picture put me in mind of that. Notice the way the snow tapers off. That's a sigmoid curve. Sigmoids show up all over the place. They're in statistics. In population growth dynamics. They are fundamental to the operation of the computer you're staring at right now: the behavior of every one of the billions of transisitors in it is described by a sigmoid curve, albeit one that has such sharp transitions and such a steep slope that it becomes, effectively, an on/off switch. There are many curves that are ubiquitous in mathematics and nature, but the sigmoid must surely rank as one of the more iconic symbols of science and technology.

And here it is, described with elegant beauty in the slope of a snow bank.

To me, that is utterly emblematic of how you can't revere the natural world without also becoming aware of the science behind it. Me, I love science for its own sake, because it's fascinating and helps me understand how things work. But if I were a religious man, it would seem the most natural thing in the world to love science because it illuminates the intricate masterpiece of God's work. So when I see a sigmoid curve in the snow, it simultaneously evokes a sense of wonder and confuses me all over again as to why some religious groups have such animosity toward science.