Meander

Meandering is a word I like to think of as synonymous with procrastination. When I meander from subject to subject in an attempt to avoid actual work (as I am doing this very morning) I typically come up with ideas for blog posts. This idea however came up while listening to an awesome podcast by the two greatest podcasters of all time, Life of Alexander. If you're not familiar with these guys go listen to Life of Caesar (recently moved to Life of Augustus) to get a sense of their amazing work.

Now back to Meandering. The word meander gets its meaning from the Meander river in Turkey which is well known for its winding, random path. Back in Alexander's day, the Meander connected the city Priene to the Mediterranean Sea, but after much silting over a couple thousand years it has diverted elsewhere. Priene is important to Alexander because, as often stated in the Life of Alexander podcast, it was well known for its temple of Athena which burnt down the night of Alexander's birth. Feeling very bad for having distracted the Gods with his birth (Alexander thought of himself as a demigod and as being descended from Zeus and (actually) Achilles), Alexander offered to repair the temple, but the locals refused (kind of them considering how broke Alexander's campaign was).

What some people don't know about meander, is that the term also refers to a formation in a river called... you guessed it, a meander. There's a shocking amount of complicated mathematics, geology involving sine waves and angular momentum, but the easiest way to understand just what a meander is, is to look at the picture below.

The wikipedia also has a picture of what they call meander scars, along the Rio Negro river in Argentina.

Pretty random, pretty cool stuff.