Hurricane Sandy's Fibonacci golden spiral

Jim Leftwich says:

I'd seen one of these that had been done for Hurricane Irene going around, that a lot of people probably thought was Hurricane Sandy. I created this one from a NASA satellite image (distributed by NOAA) from Sunday, October 28, 2012 at 1745zulu (6:45pm EDST).

I posted it to my Tumblr, and it's a bit downscaled from my original (3000 x 2400). The satellite photo is public domain and I've given my poster of it a CC license.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Ryan_T_H

This is just plain neat
GawainLavers

Conclusive proof that it’s all part of God’s plan to derail Mitt Romney. Right? Right?
http://twitter.com/Elipsis08 Elipsis

Cool picture, but it doesn’t fit. It’s a spiral, just not a fibonacci spiral. The right side misses inside, the left side misses outside, and the center could be anything.
- http://severinghaus.org/id/sns HorsePunchKid
  
  That’s pretty much what I thought when I saw this. How far off from a golden spiral could you make the spiral and still have it look like it “fits”? I played with it briefly in Inkscape and found I could make all kinds of unrelated spirals that looked more or less like they fit, though I don’t know how its parameters correspond to the golden ratio.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop
  
  And yet it still manages to be more of a Fibonacci spiral than most supposed examples. People like to claim all sorts of things adhere to the golden ratio, but they almost never actually do. Usually they’re not even remotely close.
- Oskar
  
  Exactly. Everybody needs to read this article, and stop finding Fibonacci numbers everywhere: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm
http://www.facebook.com/alhill10 Alex Hill

Isn’t reality beautiful?
- awjt
  
  The best, man. My 8th grade social studies teacher, Mr. Takhar, would say, “I’m on a natural high. Best kind of high there is.”
  - http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers
    
    THC?
    - awjt
      
      Fresh AIR.
- http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers
  
  I believe there’s a mawkish Bette Midler song that would be an appropriate corollary to this statement.
Anon_Mahna

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYi07EhENJI
- politeruin
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3FvtMSUeLk
Boundegar

It is the Elder Sign! Ia! Ia!
Tim Westbrook

skeptoid did a “not everything is the golden ratio” including the famous nautilus shell example I always think of.
- http://twitter.com/chriscoreline chris coreline
  
  The Fibonacci Everywhere fallacy, along with Santa Claus and Common Human Decency are all ‘scientifically dis-proven myths i still believe in because their awesome’
  - remainzz
    
    amen
  - Ipo
    
    Ooh! There’s another one.
GuyInMilwaukee

days of pain in 30 seconds.
http://youtu.be/fEvQCp5AjGc
Brent Kirkham

OK, In this particular case, regardless of photos from space, or GPS, the whole Sandy thing will conform to the “Golden Ratio”. It’s not really an idea or belief, it’s reality. If you watch stuff happen for long enough, you see patterns. Unfortunately, as a species, we are selected as pattern seeking mammals. Not great, but OK.

The problem here is : are we pattern spotting or is it a spiral?
It’s a spiral. They have properties. One of the properties of spirals is that they conform to the Golden Ratio. It’s just basic physics.