{"id":57775,"date":"2018-02-14T03:17:20","date_gmt":"2018-02-14T03:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=57775"},"modified":"2018-02-14T03:20:21","modified_gmt":"2018-02-14T03:20:21","slug":"patterns-knots-in-wood-eddies-in-river-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=57775","title":{"rendered":"Patterns: knots in wood, eddies in river flow"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — Gen Mattis gives Pres Trump pause ]
\n.<\/p>\n

Reporting that Secretary Mattis<\/strong> influenced President Trump<\/strong> regarding the number of troops in Afghanistan, WaPo made a remarkable comment that caught my eye:<\/p>\n

In the end, Trump decided to nearly double the size of the force in Afghanistan to 15,000 troops. In announcing his decision, Trump said he was acting against his \u201coriginal instinct.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That last remark, with President Trump admitting that he’s acted “against” his celebrated flow of instinctural utterances, struck me as pretty much unique in my reading — and as akin to a pattern I’ve long had an interest in: that of knots in wood and eddies in flowing water<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The point about eddies that interests me is that they represent a reversal of flow within a larger flow-stream. And the point about Trump is that if he goes against a previously unbroken (or seldom broken) flow of some particular behavior, that’s something we should take special note of.<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

From here on in this post, I’m exploring matters of pattern, with no necessary relationship to Trump or natsec<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I’ve long thought of eddies as equivalent to knots in wood: now I’m not so sure — I’m learning, or at least I hope so. Eddies are commonly caused by some upstream perturbation — a rock in mid-stream, for instance, or the arrival of a flowing source in an otherwise calm body of water. It may be that the heart of a knot is some such “rock in mid-stream” in wood, in which case this “drag force” diagram may give us a better picture of the knot and eddy:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Knots in wood commonly have a vertical (oblique) dimension, as when they represent the formation of a branch or twig that’s oblique to the main trunk or branch.. <\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

In all this, we are getting close to the Karman Vortex Street<\/strong> which may be familiar from the cover of Gary Snyder<\/strong>‘s (wonderful) poetry book, Regarding Wave<\/strong> (a study of Snyder’s book covers<\/a> would be a study in a variety of natural patterns):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

or from my own favorite DoubleQuote<\/strong>, between the Karman Vortex Street<\/strong> (here represented diagrammatically) and Van Gogh’s night sky<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah, from wood and flowing water to the sky.<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Okay, as I said, this is my learning curve this am, and I am humbled to add one more DQ to this small collection, this one featuring a Vortex like Kelvin-Helmholtz<\/strong> cloud formation (upper image, below):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and a lenticular cloud formation<\/strong> (lower image, above).<\/p>\n

Clouds.<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

And (liquid) water.<\/p>\n

Hey, in his far subtler and more complex way, Leonardo <\/strong>was a keen observer of these phenomena of flow and eddy too:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — Gen Mattis gives Pres Trump pause ] . Reporting that Secretary Mattis influenced President Trump regarding the number of troops in Afghanistan, WaPo made a remarkable comment that caught my eye: In the end, Trump decided to nearly double the size of the force in Afghanistan to 15,000 troops. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[526,1314,627,1500,750,626,741,1,908],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-cameron","category-donald-trump","category-doublequotes","category-enantiodromia","category-pattern-language","category-patterns","category-poetry","category-uncategorized","category-water-water-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57775"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57797,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57775\/revisions\/57797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}