I have a confession to make. I am a computer game junkie. I just like playing games, especially RPG or action games.
But sometimes that does pay off. Last night, I was playing “Pacific Fighters” which is a WWII game where you get to fly airplanes in mock battles, etc. Since I’ve just gotten it and aren’t very good at it yet, I used the Full Mission Builder to create some take-off and landing drills, as well as a basic attack against stationary objects, etc. so I could get a “feel” for what I was doing.
I used a map that had two separate islands and put in a route from the first island to the second island. Because the program is realistic, it doesn’t have computer generated waypoints that you can see, so you have to base your flying on visual landmarks. Thus, I stuck the waypoints in based on the various tiny islands that were sprinkled between the two big islands where the main mission was carried out.
So why is all that important? Because as I was “flying”, I kept looking at all these little islands below on the screen. Then, this morning, as I walked down the sidewalk in the snow, I realized something interesting.
You see, yesterday we had a blizzard. It was so bad, I didn’t even go to work. Today, it was still faintly snowing (although it was sunny at the same time it was snowing), and there were bits and pieces of snow on the sidewalk. But it wasn’t a covering.
Instead, what happened was that there were pockets of snow and pockets of dry sidewalk. Yesterday, the wind was blowing really hard as the snow fell. Also, the temperatures being the way they were, some of the snow had a chance to melt. That melted snow then froze and turned to ice on the sidewalk. This morning, the places that had ice had the snow sticking to them, and the places that did not have ice were mostly dry on the sidewalk.
So what’s the point, then? What does that have to do with the fact that I was playing “Pacific Fighters” last night? Only this: the pockets of snow looked identical to the way the little islands looked in the game.
Now the islands in the game were patterned off of real islands. They were “mapped” into the computer game so they were very similar looking. But even were they not, it got me thinking of islands in general. You’ve probably seen pictures of the Florida Keys, or various other island chains. The snow on the sidewalk still looked like those.
I like patterns. It’s part of my nature, which is probably why I noticed this. But here’s what’s interesting about it. The snow pattern was made due to several complex things: the way the wind fell, how the snow melted the night before, how it turned to ice, etc. The islands in the oceans, however, are primarily shaped by such things as wave action and the errosion of the banks.
How, then, did two different things created by such radically different means come to look almost identical in everything but scale? (The snow “islands” on the sidewalk obviously weren’t as large as real islands.)
If we see something that looks similar to another thing, we generally conclude that either the shape was caused by a similar process or else it had a similar design. Thus, snow dunes look like sand dunes because the wind makes both of them. But there was no errosion on the snow on the sidewalk like there was on the banks of islands. How, then, did these two things come about looking so similar?
In fact, it reminded me very much of fractals and the way that the chaos theory works. Perhaps we can say that underlying these two things is the chaos theory–that that is what is similar. But what is the chaos theory? It’s not a thing, of course. It’s a theory about the mathematical processes behind random things.
See, a fractal that approximated the shape of an island or these snow islands is based off fairly simple mathematical formulas. But mathematics are not phyiscal entities that alter things either. Thus, we have to say that nature must, in some manner, be oriented in such a way that things come out looking like fractals. Thus, nature must somehow exist in a manner that it has forces that can be simulated with mathematical formula.
No, I don’t really have time or means to probe any deeper than that at the moment. Just giving you something to think about.
