15 posts tagged with chaos. (View popular tags)
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The Readers of Boing Boing interview Michael Moorcock
posted by Artw
on Jun 18, 2009 -
42 comments
Carousel is one incredible, continuous two-minute tracking shot of the deadly and eternal fight between cops and clowns [high definition versions here with additional interactive features]. Directed by Adam Berg, apparently 90% of the amazing stunts were captured in-camera.
posted by blahblahblah
on Apr 18, 2009 -
22 comments
Phriday Physics Phun! What is the force Superman exerts to stop a plane from crashing into the ground, or the speed and mass of Vince Vaughn's winning Dodgeball shot? What's the force exerted by a Dominique Wilkins windmill slam dunk, or the speed of a retired Charles Barkley? What's the frequency of a cat's purr? ...the mass of a snowflake? ...the pressure inside a can of soda? ..the reaction time of the human fingertip?
The Physics Factbook, via hypertextbook.com, is "an encyclopedia of scientific essays written by high school students that can be used by anybody," containing over 800 entries and special topics. [more inside]
posted by not_on_display
on Jan 16, 2009 -
28 comments
"...the best place to hide bulls**t is in a refereed journal that’s not open-access!" The math-physics blog n-category cafe digs into the curious case of M.S. El Naschie. El Naschie is editor-in-chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, published by the well-respected scientific publisher Elsevier and sold to academic libraries for US$4,520 a year. The problem? El Naschie has published 322 of his own papers in the journal -- papers that John Baez (of "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics" and "The Crackpot Index") describes as "vague, dreamlike imagery," "undisciplined numerology larded with impressive buzzwords," and "total baloney." Is El Naschie a reverse Sokal? Or a Markov process for producing random publishable papers? One thing's for sure -- he knows how to cure cancer.
posted by escabeche
on Nov 12, 2008 -
49 comments
Dominoes Made of Dominoes Awesome and very chromatically beautiful. Watch for the hold-outs that refuse to collapse.
posted by axltea
on Sep 24, 2008 -
21 comments
Remember all that talk about the
Gulf stream turning south and England entering an new Ice Age?
Well, better take a look at this one:
(at the bottom)... Ok, this is the Jet stream, not the Gulf stream, but turbulence is
turbulence and chaotic systems have a way of quickly migrating to new
attractors, often first displaying a kind of turbulence during the
transition phase. Here's a link to a .pdf that may be helpful (or not...)
I tell you - Winnipeg (Canada's Global Warming Success Story) just keeps lookin' better and better! But, hopefully, never this good...
posted by sporb
on Jul 24, 2007 -
11 comments
The Number 23 has a movie. It's been associated with everything from conspiracy theory to historical and scientific fact, and now the obsession of thousands of Discordians and worshippers of Eris (not to mention KLF fans) is the specific subject of a movie directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Jim Carrey. It comes out in February. I don't think I need to tell you which day.
posted by deusdiabolus
on Jan 22, 2007 -
70 comments
Operation enduring chaos: ... the death squads are the result of US policy. At the beginning of last year, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out "irregular missions". ... From killing everyone named Omar (a Sunni name) who passes thru the wrong checkpoint, to simply marking businesses (and their owners) they want gone with red crosses, how various squads and militias and "armies" and "brigades" are running Iraq.
posted by amberglow
on Oct 29, 2006 -
48 comments
Order from chaos! Fill a cylindrical bucket with water and make it so the bottom can spin. At certain speeds, stable regular polygonal shapes will spontaneously form at the turbulent surface of the water. See the video. [2.6MB avi] [via last week's PRL]
posted by sergeant sandwich
on May 10, 2006 -
28 comments
Somebody made a funny.
(the funny is a series of fake christmas cards with stories)
posted by snsranch
on Feb 28, 2006 -
13 comments
The synchronization of two pendulum clocks was discovered in 1665 by Huygens. Two pendulum clocks mounted on the same wall always fell exactly out of phase with each other no matter what the starting conditions. Regardless of the initial conditions the system always ended up the same. In stark contrast, a chaotic system is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. How can these two seemingly seperate things be tied together? The synchronization of chaos. When two chaotic systems are synchronized together, information can be shared between them. It immediatly brings to mind applications for encryption, but it is still far away from everyday use.
posted by ozomatli
on Dec 14, 2005 -
49 comments
"Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan." This is a fascinating and disturbing article by Josh Marshall for next month's Washington Monthly, released early due to recent events. Of course, whether or not the war will destabalize the Mideast is open to debate.
posted by homunculus
on Mar 27, 2003 -
68 comments
Can some people intuitively find order in chaos? Scientists discover that certain people are likely to predict chaotic time series, such as the weather or the stock market.
posted by costas
on Mar 7, 2002 -
13 comments
Northeast could face energy chaos, MIT expert warns "The existing transmission grids were designed to serve regional needs. Power transfers from one grid to another were meant for emergencies only. Computer simulations performed at MIT show that heavy use of grid interconnections to tap cheaper power sources can have unintended effects. Trades between two regional grids can adversely affect operations in a third regional grid, potentially leading to frequency and voltage disturbances." But don't panic, MIT's Competitive Power Systems Group (funded "from a variety of industrial sources") has a solution. FUD or useful idea?
posted by Allen Varney
on Sep 19, 2001 -
0 comments
I-jacking!
Sippey encourages you 'to inject chaos and anarchy into the post button by hijacking the identities and namesakes of your favorite web "icons."'
Who do you want to be today?
posted by peterme
on Mar 30, 2001 -
50 comments