About snow

Performing a Google search on the word snow returns about 18 million Web page results. Trust me, it does. And a lot of them say basically the same thing about snow – it’s frozen water vapor (really!). Snow is a pretty common substance (except for you folks in warmer climes), and the forecast is calling for a bunch of that substance to fall here in the Midwest sometime today. But, with snowstorms, you never know how much you’ll get or when you’ll get it.

Dieter Sturm is a guy whose job is to ensure that when snow is called for, it’s there on time and in the quantities required. Sturm is a special effects coordinator who specializes in making snow. You’ve probably seen his work in any of dozens of motion pictures, television shows and advertisements. If you were a David Letterman fan in the mid-1990s you may remember some guy coming on the show every so often and flash-freezing food. That guy was Dieter Sturm. There’s just something satisfying about watching cheese and bratwurst explode (by the way, Sturm is based in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin). The same flash-freezing technology allows Sturm to snow up a storm on cue. Sturm’s latest venture is a chain of snow parks, allowing snow boarders and skiers to do their thing anytime, anywhere, any season. It’s a ground-floor opportunity if you’re interested in making an investment in frozen water vapor.

While we’re on the subject of snow, is it true that no two snowflakes are alike? The answer is a qualified “yes.” An atomic physicist has figured the odds of any two complex snowflakes since the formation of earth being exactly alike at a staggeringly huge number – one in ten followed by 158 zeroes. But he also asks the Zen-like question, “If two identical snowflakes fell, who would know?”

I’ll give you one guess.

Photo: Barn in winter. Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2007 James Jordan