Details, Details…

I get caught up in the details.  I am writing some sound analysis software that I keep adding little useful features to.  Each feature adds more opportunity for bugs to creep in.  Sometimes they are easy to find but other times…well, sometimes you just give up on that feature. 

Last summer I saw a presentation containing a spectrogram with an intriguing s-shaped feature.  When I realized that it was a Doppler shifted sound I started thinking about how that shape feature would be formed.  This fall I finally took the time to sit down and derive the equations.  It didn’t really take that long to do it but it took me several days to write it up and illustrate it.  And there were a lot of little details that I couldn’t overlook.

A couple of times this fall I have been caught up in other details.  Last month three of us went for an evening bicycle ride at dusk.  On the way back I stopped to put on my hat.  The others kept going.  Suddenly, I was struck by the beauty of the purple hills against the pink sky…hills that I have looked out on, wandered around on, occasionally slept out on, and thought about over the last forty or fifty years.  They faded into the background as my attention turned to a solitary piece of spider silk drifting ever so slowly to the ground ten feet in front of me.  There was no hint of breeze on this cool October evening.  I just stood there on the trail, not another person in sight, watching that silk fall to the ground.

This week we were walking on the road west of the house.  The township had put a new chip and seal on it last summer.  I knelt down to tie my shoe and noticed the sedimentation layers in one of the limestone chips.  I was mesmerized by it.  Time stopped.  All of my attention was focused on that little piece of stone.  These layers were so thin.  I wondered what geological process would cause that kind of pattern and over what length of time.  Hours? Days? Months? Years?  I postulated that the stone might have come from northwestern Ohio so it might be from the Silurian geological time.  I went home and started reading about that time…