The Nerd's Eye View

But I digress. I walked into the courtyard and followed the poorly designed reflecting pool to its source, which is a stone basin about waist height that pours broad, thin sheet of water into the pool itself. The basin is far more elegantly designed than the reflecting pool, whose roiling surface makes actual viewing of any reflections somewhat futile.

All of this is unremarkable, though. What is remarkable is the way that the water flowed in the basin. While all the water obviously flows towards the notch in the side of the basin that feeds the pool, the thing that you'll notice is that it's difficult to see if flowing in the basin, at least till it gets to the notch. The best you can hope for, without some object for reference like a leaf or twig, is to observe the surface. That's what I was doing, and to my delight I saw three thin lines in the surface, radiating outwards from the notch.

The lines were quite fine, practically invisible unless light struck the surface just so. They didn't correspond to any wave or ripple, and resembled nothing more than a line drawn on the surface of the wafer freehand. The water flowed on either side of the line, like the river and the ocean, completely distinct and separate. I was mesmerized by it. How did the line come to be? What kept the water separated like that? Chuck ran his finger across the surface of the water to distrub it, but it didn't budge or disappear, subsumed into the ripples. I wished I had a camera with me, and wondered if the same lines would be there the next time I played hooky from work.