Aside: Polders Don't Communicate

There are many places in Holland where water levels are unequal in bodies of water mere meters apart.

Seeing water that doesn’t level out delivers a tiny, momentary shock to your brain, which, for a split second, wants to tell you that you are looking at an impossibility before realizing that this is the point of a polder—keeping the water level artificially low in one “vessel” by reducing communication with another one.

The experience is a perpetual delight, a peek at the engineered nature of nature and a peek at the automatic processing of the brain and its ability to adjust, almost instantaneously but apparently not permanently.

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