snow

School is dismissed... and out.

Via Huffington Post:

Simon Beck has spent the past decade tracing beautiful patterns into snow-covered mountains and lakes using nothing but snowshoes and some basic math knowledge.

The British cartographer/artist started incorporating fractal patterns into his work after reading "Chaos: Making a New Science," a 1987 book written by former New York Times reporter James Gleick, Discovery News reported.

"When I did my first drawing, I had no idea how good it was going to look," Beck told CNN. "It's just so unusual and unique. No one else is doing anything like it."

The formation of snowflakes—essentially, the idiosyncratic way that water crystallizes when suspended in our atmosphere—is an extremely complex process that still hasn't been fully described by scientific formulas. "People think that a snowflake is just a frozen raindrop," says Caltech physics professor Kenneth Libbrecht, who's spent the past few decades studying the process of snowflake formation. "But that's sleet, just little ice cubes, and not even close to what a snowflake is."