Lapping waves

The fascinating attraction of Numbers extends from the Pythagorean "Music of Spheres" to the Tau Manifesto, which D. mentioned to me yesterday. I have not gone through it, but I find rather pretentious titles such as "Pi is wrong". I guess the title goes further than the contents and, thus, it is misleading.

In a Western society where everyone gets crazy about democracy -everything is democracy: in Spain, a head of the gay lobby patronized the democratic orgasm (sic)-, I find more interesting to portrait the eradication of Pythagoras and his followers away from Crotona by the democracy advocates. I guess, democracy needs definition back in those old times, but the fact that Pythagoras -as Plato afterwards- was inclined to authoritarian intervention and against individual judgement, is widely ignored. Schools should teach that, I reckon.

The myth is even more interesting. The tradition acknowledges that irrational numbers constituted a chasm between the illusion of reducing Reality to the beauty of Numbers and Reality itself _the genuine termination of Pythagoras and his school. And I can imagine selected tribunals to keep the secret guarded _the secret that will jeopardize the appeal of the new religion. And imagine those selected tribunals persecuting the disaffected initiates who knew about it and wanted to make it public, and get them drown in the sea.

What a nice novel or movie about it?

**

My dear M., who always look and see more things and deeper than I do, naturally realizes how the wet sand after a lapping wave gets dried around your foot as you step on it. And she asked why, blessed word, why... And I don't know the answer but I try a guess. My guess is plausible, but incomplete and unfocused as, by mere chance, I came up today with the answer.

It was Osborne Reynolds (from Belfast) who realized that a lapping wave creates the most packed arrangement of sand granules when goes over it. As we step on a portion of sand, we disturb the arrangement, increasing the void volume, which is taken over in a rush by the surrounding water: water moves from the surface to underneath our foot and the sand around the foot gets dry.

Ain't that beautiful?

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