How do landscapes in arctic climates become covered with geometric patterns made from rocks and soil? mark Kessler, then a University of California San Diego graduate student wondered, and watched and experimented with freezing and thawing mixes of landscape and came up with the answer. Natural, normal and dependent on initial conditions but completely divorced from the physics of the materials. They are emergent structures generated by thousands of years of reflexive reiterations of tiny processes that produce results at a higher scale. Seriously cool.

"There is nothing in the physics of a shovelful of stony mud that can predict the emergence of an intricate pattern of interlaced, stone- bordered polygons covering many square meters," wrote University of Alaska researcher Daniel Mann in an essay accompanying the Science paper.

But no-one is organising it. The RIAA and the rest of the music industry flaks are busy trying to sheet home blame for their 4 consecutive years of falling sales. All the blame, according to them, is illegal file trading on the Internet. But Dana Blankenhorn in an e-mail to Dave Farber's Interesting People Archive says its more interesting and much more subtle than that.

I don't know if Rosen knows this. I don't know that Rosen cares. But it's
clear that RIAA is becoming increasingly frustrated with what appears to be
an unannounced, unsponsored, unorganized, unsupervised, grassroots yet
surprisingly effective economic boycott of a huge industry, namely musical
recording.