Scratch Paper

This morning the weather was inclement. Now there are a few breaks in the clouds.

We saw interesting snowflakes today, formed like needles. Here’s a picture someone else took:

We quit when Tim said he could no longer stand to have snow hitting him in the face.

Ghislaine and Jean-Marc arrived with the children earlier this week. They live near Nancy, and have not done too much skiing, but the children wanted to go. So we did Col de Marcieu. Nice weather and good snow.

Jean-Baptiste got off to a rough start, falling backwards almost immediately after clicking his ski bindings shut. In the end he was the one who did not want to leave.

My intention was to drive up to Collet d’Allevard today and ski in the new snow. Except for one picture around noon, here’s what the webcam showed today.

I tried the chains on my front tires. But in the end I decided not to go.

When the first mono cellular creatures bumped into each other after flaking off from themselves, they must not have felt any particular togetherness. The togetherness comes from not being quite the same as the other ones, and therefore having to look for commonalities. The fitness for multi cellular creatures came from different/mutated stocks meeting and finding useful configurations. It must have looked very much like networking does today to the introvert.

Looking at the success of RSS and then twitter and so forth, not as a way of publish-subscribe notifications for machines that filter, but for actual human beings, I wonder if this is a throwback to that original set of conglomerations.

(What I was thinking is this: You get your conscience from running into other people and being then embarrassed by the echoes of unfamiliarity and otherness.)