New York Times – [I] learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.” Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse … Sometimes roundness is purely a matter of physics. “The shape of any object represents the balance of two opposing forces,” explained Larry S. Liebovitch of the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University. “You get things that are round when those forces are isotropic, that is, felt equally in all directions” …

In precipitating clouds, water droplets are exceptionally sticky, as the lightly positive end of one water molecule seeks the lightly negative end of another. But, again, mutually hostile electrons put a limit on molecular intimacy, and the compromise conformation is shaped like a ball. “A sphere is the most compact way for an object to form itself,” said Denis Dutton, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

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More …

• Toronto Star: “Alberta sun temple has 5,000-year-old calendar” (Jan. 29, 2009).
• WWF: “the Circle” (magazine of the WWF’s International Arctic Programme).
• First Nations Pedagogy On-line: “Talking Circles” (Overview).
• YouTube: drawing the perfect circle.
• The Canadian Encyclopedia: “Arctic Circle” and “geographical coverage” map of the arctic (from Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, AMAP).
• The Boston Globe: “The longest solar eclipse of the century” (July 22, 2009).
  
• Wiki: List of Circle Topics.