Another boundary layer experience last week: On my way from work I stopped to take pictures of flags that were outside my university’s main building and that very nicely visualised the wind field (as flags tend to do).

If you just look at the flags, they look weird — they wind field was clearly not changing over time, yet the flags were at a weird angle to each other.

And in the next picture you see why: Because the air had to flow around an obstacle, so stream lines were bunching up.

The next morning, I went past there again and stopped to take more pictures, when a colleague of mine stopped next to me, looking a little puzzled that I was taking pictures of our not especially nice main building.

I explained what I was doing, and we got talking about how you see the world with completely new eyes once you have noticed, or have been shown, something tiny. Isn’t that exciting? :-)