Exploring Nature

Yesterday was an awesome day. All told, I spent around 6 hours being somehow physically active - walking, playing Ultimate, doing self-defense drills, and learning some Kendo. Awesome.
I spent an hour and a bit walking around the botanic gardens before rain (and a grumbling stomach) sent me back to campus. It was overcast all morning, which made it possible for me to really explore the lower gardens without overheating in half a second. It's quite the area. Also thanks to the overcast, I had approximately zero sense of direction, so I was very grateful for the giant 'EXIT' arrows painted on the trail at every intersection. Without those, I'd probably still be wandering around there completely lost.
Here are a few pictures from my explorations of nature:

This was the overcast lifting - it was just barely
possible to see the mountains to the north.

I loved this single flower. Unfortunately,
it was pretty far off the path, so I couldn't
get any closer.

Cute berries! Probably poisonous, but still cute!

Okay, look closely in the middle there. See that gray
blob? That's a squirrel hanging head-down trying to get
something off a branch that couldn't support its weight.

So much nature!

I loved the look of this tree. I'm not sure if it's dying
or just waiting for the wet season before it comes back
to life.

Okay, just a couple more pictures before I go back to frantically debugging my CS homework...
On my way to the bookstore to buy some Scotch tape on Thursday, I spotted a beautiful yellow and black butterfly. It was hanging out near a layer of wet leaves from the previous night's rain. I'm guessing that it was drinking. The fun thing was that it was still there around 40 minutes later as I was coming back to campus. It was just begging to have pictures taken of it. Here are the best of them:

Beauty

In case you haven't realized this already, I'm big on seeing beauty in the things around me.  I've found very few things with no beauty in them, and my respect for those who can see it in everything is immense.  There is great beauty in nature.  That one's easy.  Anyone who has seen an immense waterfall or the green shoots of a sprouting bush, or watched a tree grow from a seed into maturity can attest to the beauty of nature.  Nature is also where many artists seek inspiration, because there's something about the great outdoors that stirs something with most everyone.  People, too, are often beautiful.  I'm not talking about handsome or attractive here; I tend not to notice things like that.  No, I'm talking about the beauty of someone stopping to help someone back to their feet, a person who's willing to take time to help others.  Even just the person who's willing to give anyone a genuine smile.  Beauty surrounds us.  And then, the trickiest form of beauty.  Beauty of ideas.  Some ideas are so utterly perfect that I can't describe them any other way.  The symmetry of exponential functions, or derivatives and integrals, can be awe-inspiring in a way few other things can.  Beauty isn't limited to numbers, though.  It is also amazing to see how numbers can describe the world.  Take the inverse square law of gravitation, for example.  It is exactly 1/(x^2).  Not x to the 2.0001, or x to the 1.995.  Exactly two.  And it's a good thing for us that it is, or we'd be in serious trouble.  I'll leave exactly what would happen to actual scientists to describe, but suffice it to say that we wouldn't exist, and neither would the universe as we know it.  It's stunning how perfectly the universe adheres to laws of numbers and equations, equations which we even now are still discovering. The bottom line is that beauty is everywhere.  We need only open our eyes to see the beauty hidden in everything around us. 
The universe is beautiful.  Take a second and look at it. 

Today, I'm grateful for the beauty of calculus, which manages to awe me on an almost daily basis.