Category: Cool Stuff

In honor of the passing of Dr. Edward Lorenz yesterday, I heard a butterfly say the entire species will recognize the man by not flapping their wings for a one minute observation today.

Dr. Lorenz is best known for the notion of the “butterfly effect,” the idea that a small disturbance like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can induce enormous consequences.

As recounted in the book “Chaos” by James Gleick, Dr. Lorenz’s accidental discovery of chaos came in the winter of 1961. Dr. Lorenz was running simulations of weather using a simple computer model. One day, he wanted to repeat one of the simulations for a longer time, but instead of repeating the whole simulation, he started the second run in the middle, typing in numbers from the first run for the initial conditions.

The computer program was the same, so the weather patterns of the second run should have exactly followed those of the first. Instead, the two weather trajectories quickly diverged on completely separate paths.

At first, he thought the computer was malfunctioning. Then he realized that he had not entered the initial conditions exactly. The computer stored numbers to an accuracy of six decimal places, like 0.506127, while, to save space, the printout of results shortened the numbers to three decimal places, 0.506. When typing in the new conditions, Dr. Lorenz had entered the rounded-off numbers, and even this small discrepancy, of less than 0.1 percent, completely changed the end result.

When I was in college, one of my math professors taught a chaos theory class.  His term (and I’m sure this is near-universal for chaos theoreticians,  but I’ve only heard him say this) was SDOIC – Situation Dependent on Initial Conditions (we pronounced it stoyk).  In chaotic systems, the results you get are extremely sensitive to changes in initial inputs.  As seen in Dr. Lorenz’s weather simulation, only slightlchanges in the measurements later in the simulation lead to completely different outputs at the end.  Thus the tiniest change in conditions, such as changes to air currents brought about by a butterfly flapping her wings, can lead to massive differences in conditions throughout an entire system.

Clearly, I cannot explain this well enough, but it is a fascinating branch of mathematics, and well worth learning more about if you are interested.  And there is much more to it than what Jeff Goldblum discussed in Jurassic Park.

So remember if the weather is batshit crazy tomorrow, it’s due to the butterflies honoring Dr. Lorenz today.  And that, dear reader, is chaos at work.

[tags]RIP, Dr. Lorenz, Edward Lorenz, Chaos theory, the pirates don’t eat the tourists, Nobody could’ve predicted that[/tags]

Some of you may remember the falling satellite that some of our excellent members of the US military were able to shoot down recently. There is plenty of news coverage about the event, both pre-shooting and after the successful shot. There is video, such as this ABC clip from the raw footage captured during the shooting:

Beyond all that, there is a very interesting report on the event from the Stanford Group, apparently prepared by retired General David E. Baker. This has some of the best information I’ve seen on the shooting, and covers what happened and who was pleased or displeased by our doing this. I received this from a friend, so can’t speak to where he got it, but wanted to share it because it’s an interesting and brief read.

Hitting a bullet with a bullet: Last Wednesday a federal notice was released warning all ships and
planes to avoid a restricted zone just west of Hawaii for 2½ hours beginning at 7:30 Pacific time. Soon
after, USS Lake Erie’s commander, Capt. Randy Hendrickson received orders from the U.S. Secretary of
Defense to “release the weapon”. Tactical officer Lt. Cmdr. Drew Bates pushed a button and a crippled
U.S. spy satellite known, as USA 193 was history.

You can grab the full PDF version of the report from me, which I’ll keep up as long as my bandwidth allows.

[tags]Satellite, Military muscle, Satellite shootdown, Stanford Group[/tags]

A recent study shows that men are more likely to get addicted to games than women. I think this is a surprise to substantially less than 100 people in the world.

The study looked at how the brains of 22 young gamers – half of them male, half female – reacted when playing a simple video ball game. The researchers found that men’s brains had a higher activity in the mesocorticolimbic system.

. . .

Acquiring as much territory in a computer game environment is more rewarding for men than for women, the study showed. Reiss wasn’t surprised: “I think it’s fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species – they’re the males.”

Might explain the jealous boyfriend thing, too, I’m guessing.

[tags]Games, Territorial, Gaming addiction[/tags]