After yesterday’s big winter storm, this morning I awoke to find the windows covered in ice. I took some photos.
Below left is a photo of one of the windows here. To its right is a close-up photo of the same window.
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The reason for this texture is that ice has lower density than water. That is why ice floats.
The colder water toward the outside of the window freezes first, and therefore expands faster. This makes the outside surface area increase, causing the surface to buckle.
The result is a random bumpy topography. Because of the underlying physics, all of the bumps, although randomly placed, are about the same size.
It is similar to the process — a gradual increase in surface area over time — which causes drying paint to develop a bumpy surface, with all of the bumps being about the same size. And this particular natural phenomenon was also my original inspiration for creating synthetic band-limited noise, all those years ago.
For the last several days I have been writing posts about noise. So it seemed like a wonderful coincidence, when I woke up this morning, to see something like this.
It was as though nature itself was sending me noise.
Or maybe it was sending me a signal.