MinxterBLOOM

In news of the exuberant and exultant, a surfer-dude of a free-lance physicist may have scribbled the equations linking classical and quantum physics. In other words, Garrett Lisi may know the math for the theory of everything.  This set of equations relies on patterns of eight.  See the UK Telegraph article for details of Garrett Lisi and what physicists say. Look at the image posted in several articles; rather spirographic, isn't it?

A.B., Achenblog friend from near Boston, commented today that the pattern looks like the backside of a blossom of Queen Anne's Lace, Daucus carota. The backside of the flower
E8 pattern from McMullen and Stembridge!  I love that she cares about the underneath of flowers.  See this series of photos and text about Queen Anne's Lace from the Microscopy website (UK).

A.B. also notes that Katherine Hepburn once said that you could not but believe in God when you saw a  Queen Anne's Lace flower.  I recall this poem:

Queen Anne's Lace

Queen Anne, Queen Anne, has washed her lace
(She chose a summer's day)
And hung it in a grassy place To whiten, if it may.

Queen Anne, Queen Anne, has left it there,
And slept the dewy night;
                                   Then waked, to find the sunshine fair, And all the meadows white.

                                   Queen Anne, Queen Anne, is dead and gone
(She died a summer's day),
                                    But left her lace to whiten in each weed-entangled way!

--- And this from William Carlos Williams.

QUEEN ANNE'S LACE 

Her body is not so white as anemone
petals nor so smooth-- so remote a thing.
It is a field of wild carrot* taking the
field by force; the grass does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be,
with a purple mole at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand's span of her whiteness.
Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish.
Each part is a blossom under his touch to which the
fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the
whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster,
flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over-- or nothing.

Fibonacci, anyone?  God's fingerprints are very likely such number patterns.

The umbel image of Queen Anne's Lace  taken by D. Eagan for WI Dept. of Naural Resources 

while I post this astonishing news about a WORKING SCREW OF ARCHIMEDES in my very own extended neighborhood. Here is the Washington Post link

Let this clip whet your appetite: Flood Control Goes Greek Fed Up With Frequent Deluges, a Prince George's Town Turns to a Mathematician From 3rd Century B.C. for Help By Rosalind S. Helderman Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, November 24, 2007; Page B01 A working-class community in Prince George's County that has flooded four times in the past four years has put a technology more than 2,000 years old to work in a new $6 million pumping station that residents hope will keep their little town dry. The design, known as an Archimedes screw for the 3rd century B.C. Greek mathematician credited with conceiving it, employs a massive, slowly turning screw to lift a huge quantity of water up a short distance. The new station in Edmonston uses three of the screws to raise water the 20 feet necessary to get it up and out of the town and into a levee system that runs along the Anacostia River. --- Some of my readers are science-nuts, so I must place this here. This also links to an earlier post about the amazing Brugmansia tree growing madly, happily in Zone 9, just two houses down from the Archimedian Screw.  The location is earnest Edmonston, a tiny hamlet bordering the Anacostia River, hemmed in tight by Hyattsville and Riverdale Park.

(with gratitude to a certain frostbitten gardening friend) 

The Just

Jorge Luis Borges

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.

He who is grateful for the existence of music.

He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.

Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess.

The potter, contemplating a color and a form.

The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.

A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.

He who strokes a sleeping animal.

He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.

He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.

He who prefers others to be right.

These people, unaware, are saving the world.

Translation: Alastair Reid

----

Bad gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content. -  Ken Wilbur, Grace and Grit, 1991, p. 109.

Pictures taken last March, on a day that began as dusted and later melted. Daffies do not mind fickle weather. 

On this warm November day, I planted a number of daffodiles: 

• Thalia in bundles of five and seven, to freshen up the day lily berm. They will agree with the existing and faithful  Ice Follies from the generosity of Colleen C., who has gardened in Bhutan, of all places.
• Van Sion, a very old barely-double written about by Henry Mitchell. Need I say more?
• Professor Einstein, because one must include a theory of the universe in the fabric of flower beds and
• Dainty little Baby Moon, because six were free.