Samuel Scoville: No 2 Alike

Friday, January 22, 2010

No 2 Alike

    All snowflakes are different - as far as we know.
    Each snowflake experiences slightly different
    variations in temperature and humidity for which
    the dendrite growth is extremely sensitive. Since
    no two snowflakes arise from identical temperature
   and humidity conditions, no two snowflakes are alike.
                    (D.C. Physics Photo of the Week)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmCpOKtN8ME

A snowflake is a snowflake is a snowflake says
Gertrude Stymied delighting in the tautology underlying
everything I say: I am that I am, foundation of my
observation, need I argue? I wish I could.

Phatic Communion: Malinowski’s word for IT.
Sure, IT may sound like IT’s about “this” or “that”
—trash or check book or the vote in Massachusetts.

But it’s about me, sayer (eironist), revelation,
my apologic. Do I got a problem with that?
Tautologician: defining world in my snowflake
terms? . How could it be otherwise?

Smoking Causes Cancer! Let that (say) stand
for why a person dies: Because and Affect.
In general lots of stuff causes. Cause is
ubiquitous. Where do I draw the line?

Some dodge the bullet. No two snowflakes
alike, actually. But assume we are.
Good practical sense statistically.
Who can say naught? All like
on the one hand. Not all like
on the other hand

Clap &Clap or just Clap?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Auto Bio

I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by a thief in the night sometime in the late 19^thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow, squeezing off a couple of rounds and sending the burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons of family notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down to Philadelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him. She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-it would have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY but INSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville

Samuel Scoville