My memory is flypaper for random facts and memories. I am responsible neither for what I remember, nor for what I do not.
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Raindrops
Raindrops begin with tiny, microscopic particles, to which water molecules attach themselves. These particles may be dust, salt, bacteria, pollen, or anything else from around 20 nanometers up to around 100 microns in size. As water molecules collect on these particles, they collide and jostle one another, often clumping together, sometimes because of electrical charges, sometimes because of the surface cohesion of the accumulated water molecules. At this early stage, these water laden particles are better thought of as proto-droplets, because they are still invisible to the naked eye and because they are at the mercy of the vicissitudes of air drafts and electrical charges. As these proto-droplets continue to jostle one another and collide, they continue to grow until they have attained enough mass to fall to earth. Only then should they be thought of as raindrops.
Metaphors and, more broadly, images, analogies, similes, and so on, are all useful aides to thinking. But this begs a difficult question: what is thinking? The grammatical form of the word strongly implies that thinking is an activity, something that an entity does. At our present historical moment, and in thinking through this problem, clever…
