Logarithmic Spirals

Last night while looking back through some things I'd saved regarding last year's Hurricane Isabel (we had Charley to storm through here today), I ran back across this web page:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030925.html

It's purely amazing how these "logarithmic spirals" appear in things as disparate as hurricanes, galaxies, and nautilus shells! A marine animal, a huge weather phenomenon, and an incredibly huge stellar object thousands of light-years away.

Yet the evolutionist would say that these are all coincidences, that these things all happened to develop logarithmic spirals by chance, that there's no intelligent Designer behind it all.

HAH.

I had never seen the similarities between cauliflower and hurricanes before - cool! Very definitely by design

Stay out of harm's way of that big cauliflower i hear is coming up your way John-san!!

Oh, it's already come and gone, no real biggie in these parts. (Even though Charley's center passed within 5 miles of where I'm sitting.) We've been thru much worse in the not-too-distant past. Florida took it on the chin this time around, unfortunately.

Hi John: If it's not too much work, can you tell us what a logarithm is and how you construct a spiral using a logarithm.

A logarithm is the inverse of an exponent. For example, 10 x 10, or 10^2, = 100. So the base 10 log of 100 is 2. 10^3 = 1000, so the base 10 log of 1000 is 3.

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Alogarithm

There are some links at the Astronomy Picture of the Day site above that talk about the mechanics underlying logarithmic spirals (also called equiangular spirals). They're pretty technical, but here they are:

http://www.bath.ac.uk/~ma2mrm/logarithmicspiral.html

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_progression

http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/%7Ehistory/Curves/Equiangular.html

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Geometry/Mirabilis.shtml

http://xahlee.org/SpecialPlaneCurves_dir/EquiangularSpiral_dir/equiangularSpiral.html

http://www.spirasolaris.ca/rcarchibald.html

Those without formal math training will most likely be a bit put off! I don't pretend to understand everything at those sites either. But it's neat that such a complicated phenomenon would be exhibited across such a wide range of things in nature. It makes the notion of all of Creation coming about by random accident seem pretty ridiculous, doesn't it.

I live near Orlando, FL and had to go down to ground zero of Charley, in Punta Gorda, this week. All the way down we saw terrible destruction. But what impressed me is how it was patchwork. A mile or two would be like a war zone, then a mile or so as if it had never been touched. A new trailer would be wrecked and tossed upside down, while right next to it would be an old scrappy trailer that looked unaffected. Wouldn't it be interesting, when we get to heaven, if we discover that weather is actually something God and Satan can both control like a game of checkers? We think of a storm as being awesome and uncontrollable, but maybe it really can be completely orchestrated down to the last square foot of area it blows over. Satan says, "I will send a hurricane and ruin people's houses". God says, 'I will let you to wake up the people, but certain ones' you cannot touch" And God sends his angels to manage the wind, while satan sends his to do all the damage they can. So, maybe this is a bit childish...but maybe it really isn't. We are mere infants in scientific knowledge, tho we pride ourselves in assuming we know everything worth knowing. We think we know just how wind works and what you can or can't do about it, but science sometimes comes up to great surprises. Actually, when we pray for protection in a storm, we are assuming that God and the angels can keep the damaging forces off of us even though blowing all around. So, maybe he actually does do that, and patchwork destruction is no accident. What think you?

I'm sure some of that goes on. Both God and Satan can cause storms, and control them, as we know.

There's the story of Jesus rebuking the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and it calmed down. In the book of Job, Satan whipped up a storm which killed some of Job's sons and daughters. When God talked to Elijah once, He manifested Himself as "a great and strong wind." (1 Kings 19:11)

Of course we know the Lord destroyed the world by the greatest rainstorm in history during Noah's time.

"In accidents and calamities by land and by sea, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, -- in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power."
{RH 03-14-12 para. 5}

A lot of the 'small stuff' within storms probably occurs at random, just in due course of following "the laws of nature." But there's probably a lot of what you're talking about as well! More than we know.

In April 1984 we had 8 or 10 big killer tornadoes to rip through the county here one night. The story was later told about two little old church ladies (not SDA) who were huddled in the den of one lady's house, praying to God to protect them. A tornado barrelled right through the house, tore off the roof, caved in the walls, all that. When neighbors and rescue workers arrived on the scene, they found the two little old ladies in the middle of the rubble of the house, with nary a scratch on them. The house had caved in all around them, but there was a sort of a pocket around them where everything fell in such a way as to shelter them from the rest of the flying/falling debris. That was no random occurrence!