Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
It looks to me the article addresses this. When windmills are in a conventional face to the wind position, they do need to be well spread out in order to catch as much wind as possible. But if you rotate the position 90 of the fans degrees so that they are spinning sideways, they spin with greater efficiency when lined up behind each other in zones of lower air resistance. The article appears to refer to this fan position as a vertical rotation. The photo shows vertically rotating tube like structures, which are much like long fans turned on their sides. Aligning them in fish school formation evidently is the most efficient in terms of space and maximal wattage generation. That's how it all appears to me in any event. Hugh Trenchard - Original Message - From: Nicholas Thompson To: Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:45 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Sorry, everybody. What I meant to write was, Wait a blithering moment!!!, suggesting, at least, that the metaphor between bunching up cyclists and bunching up windturbines was backwards. Don't you WANT your turbines to feel the headwind? Of course I am wrong about this, but I sure would like to understand why. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Carl Tollander To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/24/2009 10:13:22 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills What they lack is mobility - lacking some sort of mobile platform maybe they could get together and decide where the next best placement would be and tell the manufacturing and installation people. Some sort of distributed instantiation - Group orders another member, turbine shows up in the mail, speaks up, says, I am a wind turbine, the group has determined that it will be most efficient if you place me over there. And the humans would go do that, since the turbine family was usually right about such things. So maybe the turbines want some particular configuration, the friction is just one criteria. If they were a phased array antenna (in addition to being a group of wind turbines) then they would have additional criteria. C Nicholas Thompson wrote: Now what a blithering moment. Cyclists flock to reduce friction. Ditto fish, I suppose. So, turbines want less friction with the wind? Something screwy here. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Roger Critchlow To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/24/2009 7:36:30 PM Subject: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Same power production as existing wind farms in 100th the land area. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1124/1 -- rec -- -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 11/24/2009 09:10 PM: I am not at all sure what it means to have my rhetoric rejected. My facts, yes; my logic, sure. But my RHETORIC? Rhetoric is the language we build up around and/or to explain facts. Logic is merely a formal type of rhetoric. The implicit persuasive attempts in what you said earlier about a confusion of trust, is rhetoric, not fact (or logic). I reject rhetoric when i can imagine other, different rhetoric built up around the same facts. I think it would be trivially easy to build up a different structure of language around the facts you (and MacLuhan(?)) are building yours around. My rhetoric is that we need not extend, ham-handedly, the coarse trust relationships wielded by our ancestors. Trust relationships can become articulated and more fine grained (and can also become thicker and more coarse grained) if the need arises. So, my rhetoric is that we haven't been _forced_ into more associations. We've actually _grown_ more associative power in the form of an extended physiology. Prior to technologies like sophisticated language, the telegraph, air travel, cell phones, and facebook, our dunbar number may well have been limited to the size of our neocortex. Nowadays, though, we've outsourced part of our neocortex to the tools around us and, hence, have a much larger dunbar number. After society collapses again, trust will coarsen. But for now, it's very fine-grained and includes a bushy extension into Facebook [un]friending. Those of us who know how to use the technology have more associative power than those of us who don't. Celebrity is NOT, then a confusion between village trust and world trust. It's a mechanism for categorizing the larger population of people with which we associate. E.g. Do you like Country Western music? No? You don't LUUUV Garth Brooks!?!? OK then, that helps me determine where you lie in my (complex) trust matrix. Of course, by saying it this way, I make it very clear that you are equally capable and justified in rejecting my rhetoric, because there are no facts in the rhetoric itself. The rhetoric is built up around the facts. And you don't have to reject the facts in order to reject the rhetoric. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Glen, I think there is confusion over the thing to be explained. The question of celebrity in this case is not why should you trust someone who loves Garth Brooks? but why should you trust Garth Brooks? Why do we treat these people as if they are part of our extended family? What do you really know about Garth Brooks that makes you think you should buy a car he recommends? Why would you care who he is married to? Surely this type of interest and trust used to be limited to village members. Surely then, that type of interest and trust is being extended to a group other than the one it evolved to extend to. I'm not really sure how the argument goes from there, but that part seemed relatively straightforward. Eric On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 08:52 AM, glen e. p. ropella g...@agent-based-modeling.com wrote: Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 11/24/2009 09:10 PM: I am not at all sure what it means to have my rhetoric rejected. My facts, yes; my logic, sure. But my RHETORIC? Rhetoric is the language we build up around and/or to explain facts. Logic is merely a formal type of rhetoric. The implicit persuasive attempts in what you said earlier about a confusion of trust, is rhetoric, not fact (or logic). I reject rhetoric when i can imagine other, different rhetoric built up around the same facts. I think it would be trivially easy to build up a different structure of language around the facts you (and MacLuhan(?) are building yours around. My rhetoric is that we need not extend, ham-handedly, the coarse trust relationships wielded by our ancestors. Trust relationships can become articulated and more fine grained (and can also become thicker and more coarse grained) if the need arises. So, my rhetoric is that we haven't been _forced_ into more associations. We've actually _grown_ more associative power in the form of an extended physiology. Prior to technologies like sophisticated language, the telegraph, air travel, cell phones, and facebook, our dunbar number may well have been limited to the size of our neocortex. Nowadays, though, we've outsourced part of our neocortex to the tools around us and, hence, have a much larger dunbar number. After society collapses again, trust will coarsen. But for now, it's very fine-grained and includes a bushy extension into Facebook [un]friending. Those of us who know how to use the technology have more associative power than those of us who don't. Celebrity is NOT, then a confusion between village trust and world trust. It's a mechanism for categorizing the larger population of people with which we associate. E.g. Do you like Country Western music? No? You don't LUUUV Garth Brooks!?!? OK then, that helps me determine where you lie in my (complex) trust matrix. Of course, by saying it this way, I make it very clear that you are equally capable and justified in rejecting my rhetoric, because there are no facts in the rhetoric itself. The rhetoric is built up around the facts. And you don't have to reject the facts in order to reject the rhetoric. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
...that should read rotate the position of the fans 90 degrees (it was late and I should have been in bed). - Original Message - From: Hugh Trenchard To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net ; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group ; Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 12:05 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills It looks to me the article addresses this. When windmills are in a conventional face to the wind position, they do need to be well spread out in order to catch as much wind as possible. But if you rotate the position 90 of the fans degrees so that they are spinning sideways, they spin with greater efficiency when lined up behind each other in zones of lower air resistance. The article appears to refer to this fan position as a vertical rotation. The photo shows vertically rotating tube like structures, which are much like long fans turned on their sides. Aligning them in fish school formation evidently is the most efficient in terms of space and maximal wattage generation. That's how it all appears to me in any event. Hugh Trenchard - Original Message - From: Nicholas Thompson To: Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:45 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Sorry, everybody. What I meant to write was, Wait a blithering moment!!!, suggesting, at least, that the metaphor between bunching up cyclists and bunching up windturbines was backwards. Don't you WANT your turbines to feel the headwind? Of course I am wrong about this, but I sure would like to understand why. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Carl Tollander To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/24/2009 10:13:22 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills What they lack is mobility - lacking some sort of mobile platform maybe they could get together and decide where the next best placement would be and tell the manufacturing and installation people. Some sort of distributed instantiation - Group orders another member, turbine shows up in the mail, speaks up, says, I am a wind turbine, the group has determined that it will be most efficient if you place me over there. And the humans would go do that, since the turbine family was usually right about such things. So maybe the turbines want some particular configuration, the friction is just one criteria. If they were a phased array antenna (in addition to being a group of wind turbines) then they would have additional criteria. C Nicholas Thompson wrote: Now what a blithering moment. Cyclists flock to reduce friction. Ditto fish, I suppose. So, turbines want less friction with the wind? Something screwy here. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Roger Critchlow To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/24/2009 7:36:30 PM Subject: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Same power production as existing wind farms in 100th the land area. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1124/1 -- rec -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Thus spake ERIC P. CHARLES circa 11/25/2009 06:14 AM: I think there is confusion over the thing to be explained. The question of celebrity in this case is not why should you trust someone who loves Garth Brooks? but why should you trust Garth Brooks? That's not what celebrity is about, though. Celebrity has nothing to do with trusting the celebrity. It has to do with trusting the people around you, some of whom know things about the celebrity and some who don't. It's easier if you think about things like sports stats. Just because you argue that one team should win the next game or that so-and-so is a better quarter back than some other guy doesn't mean you trust that guy. It means you have some leverage for a trust relationship between various friends. Why do we treat these people as if they are part of our extended family? We don't. Just because I talk a lot about who Brad Pitt is married to doesn't mean I treat Brad Pitt as if he's part of my family. It _does_ mean that I have things to talk about with my friends who also talk a lot about who Brad Pitt is married to. What do you really know about Garth Brooks that makes you think you should buy a car he recommends? If Garth Brooks recommends we buy a car, we buy that car because it gives us leverage with our social clique (presumably orbiting details about Garth Brooks). Why would you care who he is married to? Because knowing that gives me leverage with my social clique. Surely this type of interest and trust used to be limited to village members. Surely then, that type of interest and trust is being extended to a group other than the one it evolved to extend to. The trust is built up within and around the social clique, not with Garth Brooks. The celebrity is merely the fulcrum, the _category_ that makes trust a fine-grained thing. I'm not really sure how the argument goes from there, but that part seemed relatively straightforward. [grin] Yeah, people tell me that I've totally missed the point ALL THE TIME. So, it doesn't bother me to be way off base, here, too. I claim that it's not that straightforward at all. We are _not_ confusing village trust with world trust, as Nick argued. We are exercising a part of our extended physiology, namely the TV/Magazine media, in order to exercise/maintain a complex trust matrix. That's my story (aka rhetoric) and I'm sticking to it. ;-) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
Hugh, Thanks for explaining this to me. I figured it was something like that. But the logic IS backwards with respect to the bike racer model. The Bike racer pod is trying to protect the lead racer from wind resistance, the wind mills are trying to pass that resistance through to ever member of the pod. We could shrink-wrap the bike-pod, and it would do its job even better. Not so the windmill pod. Right? N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Hugh Trenchard To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group;nickthomp...@earthlink.net;Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: 11/25/2009 7:15:27 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills ...that should read rotate the position of the fans 90 degrees (it was late and I should have been in bed). - Original Message - From: Hugh Trenchard To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net ; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group ; Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 12:05 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills It looks to me the article addresses this. When windmills are in a conventional face to the wind position, they do need to be well spread out in order to catch as much wind as possible. But if you rotate the position 90 of the fans degrees so that they are spinning sideways, they spin with greater efficiency when lined up behind each other in zones of lower air resistance. The article appears to refer to this fan position as a vertical rotation. The photo shows vertically rotating tube like structures, which are much like long fans turned on their sides. Aligning them in fish school formation evidently is the most efficient in terms of space and maximal wattage generation. That's how it all appears to me in any event. Hugh Trenchard - Original Message - From: Nicholas Thompson To: Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:45 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Sorry, everybody. What I meant to write was, Wait a blithering moment!!!, suggesting, at least, that the metaphor between bunching up cyclists and bunching up windturbines was backwards. Don't you WANT your turbines to feel the headwind? Of course I am wrong about this, but I sure would like to understand why. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Carl Tollander To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/24/2009 10:13:22 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills What they lack is mobility - lacking some sort of mobile platform maybe they could get together and decide where the next best placement would be and tell the manufacturing and installation people. Some sort of distributed instantiation - Group orders another member, turbine shows up in the mail, speaks up, says, I am a wind turbine, the group has determined that it will be most efficient if you place me over there. And the humans would go do that, since the turbine family was usually right about such things. So maybe the turbines want some particular configuration, the friction is just one criteria. If they were a phased array antenna (in addition to being a group of wind turbines) then they would have additional criteria. C Nicholas Thompson wrote: Now what a blithering moment. Cyclists flock to reduce friction. Ditto fish, I suppose. So, turbines want less friction with the wind? Something screwy here. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Roger Critchlow To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/24/2009 7:36:30 PM Subject: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Same power production as existing wind farms in 100th the land area. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1124/1 -- rec -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Eric, Thanks for laying this out so clearly. I have not participated in social media (other than this one) yet, but, from what I hear, they involve the same sort of confusion. Nobody has a hundred friends, so the word, friend, is being extended in a creepy Orwellian way to include strangers. When I take an interest in the status of Angelina Jolie's marriage (at the Dentist's Office), I am taking a neighborly (or a carnal*) interest in a person I will NEVER, EVER MEET. It represents a deployment of effort** from which there is no feedback. The only way in which this sort of confusion could function in human evolution is in the formation of fan clubs ie, groups of people who are brought into coordination by their allegiance to mythical, unattainable figures ... you know like, god. Our shared 'friendship with Angelina Jolie makes us easier to organize for war against the fans of Brad Pitt. It's a group selection thing; group selection for individual gullilbility. Nick PS: * and **: Only an evolutionary psychologist could think of lust as a deployment of effort, but in fact it is, and in fact, we do. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: ERIC P. CHARLES To: glen e. p. ropella Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/25/2009 7:15:59 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions Glen, I think there is confusion over the thing to be explained. The question of celebrity in this case is not why should you trust someone who loves Garth Brooks? but why should you trust Garth Brooks? Why do we treat these people as if they are part of our extended family? What do you really know about Garth Brooks that makes you think you should buy a car he recommends? Why would you care who he is married to? Surely this type of interest and trust used to be limited to village members. Surely then, that type of interest and trust is being extended to a group other than the one it evolved to extend to. I'm not really sure how the argument goes from there, but that part seemed relatively straightforward. Eric On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 08:52 AM, glen e. p. ropella g...@agent-based-modeling.com wrote: Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 11/24/2009 09:10 PM: I am not at all sure what it means to have my rhetoric rejected. My facts, yes; my logic, sure. But my RHETORIC? Rhetoric is the language we build up around and/or to explain facts.Logic is merely a formal type of rhetoric. The implicit persuasiveattempts in what you said earlier about a confusion of trust, isrhetoric, not fact (or logic).I reject rhetoric when i can imagine other, different rhetoric built uparound the same facts. I think it would be trivially easy to build up adifferent structure of language around the facts you (andMacLuhan(?)are building yours around.My rhetoric is that we need not extend, ham-handedly, the coarse trustrelationships wielded by our ancestors. Trust relationships can becomearticulated and more fine grained (and can also become thicker and morecoarse grained) if the need arises. So, my rhetoric is that we haven'tbeen _forced_ into more associations. We've actually _grown_ moreassociative power in the form of an extended physiology. Prior totechnologies like sophisticated language, the telegraph, air travel,cell phones, and facebook, our dunbar number may well have beenlimited to the size of our neocortex. Nowadays, though, we'veoutsourced part of our neocortex to the tools around us and, hence, havea much larger dunbar number. After society collapses again, trustwill coarsen. But for now, it's very fine-grained and includes a bushyextension into Facebook [un]friending. Those of us who know how touse the technology have more associative power than those of us who don't.Celebrity is NOT, then a confusion between village trust andworldtrust. It's a mechanism for categorizing the larger population ofpeople with which we associate. E.g. Do you like Country Westernmusic? No? You don't LUUUV Garth Brooks!?!? OK then, that helps medetermine where you lie in my (complex) trust matrix.Of course, by saying it this way, I make it very clear that you areequally capable and justified in rejecting my rhetoric, because thereare no facts in the rhetoric itself. The rhetoric is built up aroundthe facts. And you don't have to reject the facts in order to rejectthe rhetoric.-- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.comFRIAM Applied Complexity Group listservMeets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's Collegelectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
No, the pelaton uses the lead rider to break a bow wave through the air, but the eddies from each rider's passage also curl around to give some lift to the subsequent riders in the pelaton. If you smoothed it out into one long cylinder, it wouldn't work as well. The vertical wind turbines work as a flock because they induce a sort of do-si-do of the wind through the flock, where each rank of turbines is positioned to catch the eddy from the preceding rank and throw it back to the next rank. Because the wind takes a longer than straight path through the flock, it has to move faster than the unimpeded wind. If you just set up a stonehenge in the same arrangement as the flock of turbines, you'd get the same sort of velocity effect. Having the flock adjust its geometry could be a big win. A fixed installation would be tuned to the most likely wind speed and direction. -- rec -- On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Hugh, Thanks for explaining this to me. I figured it was something like that. But the logic IS backwards with respect to the bike racer model. The Bike racer pod is trying to protect the lead racer from wind resistance, the wind mills are trying to pass that resistance through to ever member of the pod. We could shrink-wrap the bike-pod, and it would do its job even better. Not so the windmill pod. Right? N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - *From:* Hugh Trenchard htrench...@shaw.ca *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Groupfriam@redfish.com ;nickthomp...@earthlink.net;Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com *Cc: *fr...@redfish.com *Sent:* 11/25/2009 7:15:27 AM *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills ...that should read rotate the position of the fans 90 degrees (it was late and I should have been in bed). - Original Message - *From:* Hugh Trenchard htrench...@shaw.ca *To:* nickthomp...@earthlink.net ; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com ; Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com *Cc:* Friam@redfish.com *Sent:* Wednesday, November 25, 2009 12:05 AM *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills It looks to me the article addresses this. When windmills are in a conventional face to the wind position, they do need to be well spread out in order to catch as much wind as possible. But if you rotate the position 90 of the fans degrees so that they are spinning sideways, they spin with greater efficiency when lined up behind each other in zones of lower air resistance. The article appears to refer to this fan position as a vertical rotation. The photo shows vertically rotating tube like structures, which are much like long fans turned on their sides. Aligning them in fish school formation evidently is the most efficient in terms of space and maximal wattage generation. That's how it all appears to me in any event. Hugh Trenchard - Original Message - *From:* Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net *To:* Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com *Cc:* Friam@redfish.com *Sent:* Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:45 PM *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Sorry, everybody. What I meant to write was, *Wait *a blithering moment!!!, suggesting, at least, that the metaphor between bunching up cyclists and bunching up windturbines was backwards. Don't you WANT your turbines to feel the headwind? Of course I am wrong about this, but I sure would like to understand why. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - *From:* Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com *To: *nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com *Sent:* 11/24/2009 10:13:22 PM *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills What they lack is mobility - lacking some sort of mobile platform maybe they could get together and decide where the next best placement would be and tell the manufacturing and installation people. Some sort of distributed instantiation - Group orders another member, turbine shows up in the mail, speaks up, says, I am a wind turbine, the group has determined that it will be most efficient if you place me over there. And the humans would go do that, since the turbine family was usually right about such things. So maybe the turbines want some particular configuration, the friction is just one criteria. If they were a phased array antenna (in addition to being a group of wind turbines) then they would have additional criteria. C Nicholas Thompson wrote: Now what a
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
On Nov 25, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: snip Nobody has a hundred friends, so the word, friend, is being extended in a creepy Orwellian way to include strangers. I disagree. I was surprised to find just how many work, family, school, church, complexity, .. friends I *do* have. I just started facebook a few days ago, and I'm finding a huge number of non-stranger, non-virtual acquaintances I have. I'm trying to keep the list quality high .. i.e. only include folks who I really do know and enjoy being in touch with. I'll easily top 200. So would anyone I think who's got diverse contexts mentioned above. No strangers. And not including everyone I do know just to keep the list tight. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Glen, Eric, This is what I get for working backwards through my email messages. We are all in agreement, here. The psychological vulnerability to fan clubs has come about in human evolution because they employ psychological structures which functioned at the individual level in village life but which now create new social structures that function at the group level in our larger societies. We have only to explain the behavior of the celebrity her- or himself: why anybody might be tempted to try to put ourselves in the celebrity position? Here, multilevel selection comes into play. While the routine function of fan clubs might be to make groups out of strangers, for the celebrity herself, it becomes an chance to exploit that weakness in human nature for her own individual gain. Any one of us who sees a chance at that opportunity would be a fool not to try and exploit it. Hence facebook and friends. NIck Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] [Original Message] From: glen e. p. ropella g...@agent-based-modeling.com To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Date: 11/25/2009 8:01:45 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions Thus spake ERIC P. CHARLES circa 11/25/2009 06:14 AM: I think there is confusion over the thing to be explained. The question of celebrity in this case is not why should you trust someone who loves Garth Brooks? but why should you trust Garth Brooks? That's not what celebrity is about, though. Celebrity has nothing to do with trusting the celebrity. It has to do with trusting the people around you, some of whom know things about the celebrity and some who don't. It's easier if you think about things like sports stats. Just because you argue that one team should win the next game or that so-and-so is a better quarter back than some other guy doesn't mean you trust that guy. It means you have some leverage for a trust relationship between various friends. Why do we treat these people as if they are part of our extended family? We don't. Just because I talk a lot about who Brad Pitt is married to doesn't mean I treat Brad Pitt as if he's part of my family. It _does_ mean that I have things to talk about with my friends who also talk a lot about who Brad Pitt is married to. What do you really know about Garth Brooks that makes you think you should buy a car he recommends? If Garth Brooks recommends we buy a car, we buy that car because it gives us leverage with our social clique (presumably orbiting details about Garth Brooks). Why would you care who he is married to? Because knowing that gives me leverage with my social clique. Surely this type of interest and trust used to be limited to village members. Surely then, that type of interest and trust is being extended to a group other than the one it evolved to extend to. The trust is built up within and around the social clique, not with Garth Brooks. The celebrity is merely the fulcrum, the _category_ that makes trust a fine-grained thing. I'm not really sure how the argument goes from there, but that part seemed relatively straightforward. [grin] Yeah, people tell me that I've totally missed the point ALL THE TIME. So, it doesn't bother me to be way off base, here, too. I claim that it's not that straightforward at all. We are _not_ confusing village trust with world trust, as Nick argued. We are exercising a part of our extended physiology, namely the TV/Magazine media, in order to exercise/maintain a complex trust matrix. That's my story (aka rhetoric) and I'm sticking to it. ;-) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Glen, I hope you dont replicate my sin of reading your messages backwards by reading mine frontwards. Yes, you are correct: Logic or the lack thereof is a part of rhetoric. But I would use a different language to describe your objection. I would say that you object to my MODEL of the evolution of human society and wish to substitute a different MODEL. My Model is based on David Sloan Wilson's Multi-Level Selection Theory, which argues that our individual behavior is the result of selection at many levels of organization. Thus behavior which is puzzling from the point of view of individual selection (which I still think Face book behavior is) is readily explained as a weakness in the ability to calculate our individual interests arising from selection at the group level. You doubtless disagree, but at least now, our views are articulated. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] [Original Message] From: glen e. p. ropella g...@agent-based-modeling.com To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Date: 11/25/2009 6:53:34 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 11/24/2009 09:10 PM: I am not at all sure what it means to have my rhetoric rejected. My facts, yes; my logic, sure. But my RHETORIC? Rhetoric is the language we build up around and/or to explain facts. Logic is merely a formal type of rhetoric. The implicit persuasive attempts in what you said earlier about a confusion of trust, is rhetoric, not fact (or logic). I reject rhetoric when i can imagine other, different rhetoric built up around the same facts. I think it would be trivially easy to build up a different structure of language around the facts you (and MacLuhan(?)) are building yours around. My rhetoric is that we need not extend, ham-handedly, the coarse trust relationships wielded by our ancestors. Trust relationships can become articulated and more fine grained (and can also become thicker and more coarse grained) if the need arises. So, my rhetoric is that we haven't been _forced_ into more associations. We've actually _grown_ more associative power in the form of an extended physiology. Prior to technologies like sophisticated language, the telegraph, air travel, cell phones, and facebook, our dunbar number may well have been limited to the size of our neocortex. Nowadays, though, we've outsourced part of our neocortex to the tools around us and, hence, have a much larger dunbar number. After society collapses again, trust will coarsen. But for now, it's very fine-grained and includes a bushy extension into Facebook [un]friending. Those of us who know how to use the technology have more associative power than those of us who don't. Celebrity is NOT, then a confusion between village trust and world trust. It's a mechanism for categorizing the larger population of people with which we associate. E.g. Do you like Country Western music? No? You don't LUUUV Garth Brooks!?!? OK then, that helps me determine where you lie in my (complex) trust matrix. Of course, by saying it this way, I make it very clear that you are equally capable and justified in rejecting my rhetoric, because there are no facts in the rhetoric itself. The rhetoric is built up around the facts. And you don't have to reject the facts in order to reject the rhetoric. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
Cyclists want lift??!! How do they maintain contact with the road? N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Roger Critchlow To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/25/2009 10:26:08 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills No, the pelaton uses the lead rider to break a bow wave through the air, but the eddies from each rider's passage also curl around to give some lift to the subsequent riders in the pelaton. If you smoothed it out into one long cylinder, it wouldn't work as well. The vertical wind turbines work as a flock because they induce a sort of do-si-do of the wind through the flock, where each rank of turbines is positioned to catch the eddy from the preceding rank and throw it back to the next rank. Because the wind takes a longer than straight path through the flock, it has to move faster than the unimpeded wind. If you just set up a stonehenge in the same arrangement as the flock of turbines, you'd get the same sort of velocity effect. Having the flock adjust its geometry could be a big win. A fixed installation would be tuned to the most likely wind speed and direction. -- rec -- On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Hugh, Thanks for explaining this to me. I figured it was something like that. But the logic IS backwards with respect to the bike racer model. The Bike racer pod is trying to protect the lead racer from wind resistance, the wind mills are trying to pass that resistance through to ever member of the pod. We could shrink-wrap the bike-pod, and it would do its job even better. Not so the windmill pod. Right? N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Hugh Trenchard To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group;nickthomp...@earthlink.net;Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: 11/25/2009 7:15:27 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills ...that should read rotate the position of the fans 90 degrees (it was late and I should have been in bed). - Original Message - From: Hugh Trenchard To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net ; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group ; Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 12:05 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills It looks to me the article addresses this. When windmills are in a conventional face to the wind position, they do need to be well spread out in order to catch as much wind as possible. But if you rotate the position 90 of the fans degrees so that they are spinning sideways, they spin with greater efficiency when lined up behind each other in zones of lower air resistance. The article appears to refer to this fan position as a vertical rotation. The photo shows vertically rotating tube like structures, which are much like long fans turned on their sides. Aligning them in fish school formation evidently is the most efficient in terms of space and maximal wattage generation. That's how it all appears to me in any event. Hugh Trenchard - Original Message - From: Nicholas Thompson To: Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:45 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Sorry, everybody. What I meant to write was, Wait a blithering moment!!!, suggesting, at least, that the metaphor between bunching up cyclists and bunching up windturbines was backwards. Don't you WANT your turbines to feel the headwind? Of course I am wrong about this, but I sure would like to understand why. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Carl Tollander To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/24/2009 10:13:22 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills What they lack is mobility - lacking some sort of mobile platform maybe they could get together and decide where the next best placement would be and tell the manufacturing and installation people. Some sort of distributed instantiation - Group orders another member, turbine shows up in the mail, speaks up, says, I am a wind turbine, the group has determined that it will be most efficient if you place me over there. And the humans would go do that, since the turbine family was usually right about such things. So maybe the
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Owen, Not convinced. I think you are describing buddies, colleagues, acquaintances, ie, people with whom you share an interests in a relatively narrow context. A friend, on my account, is a person with whom one shares committment to one another's mutual well-being, as well as many common interests, a division of labor, and means of solving interpersonal problems that arise. I certainly don't have 200 friends. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] [Original Message] From: Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Date: 11/25/2009 10:26:49 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions On Nov 25, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: snip Nobody has a hundred friends, so the word, friend, is being extended in a creepy Orwellian way to include strangers. I disagree. I was surprised to find just how many work, family, school, church, complexity, .. friends I *do* have. I just started facebook a few days ago, and I'm finding a huge number of non-stranger, non-virtual acquaintances I have. I'm trying to keep the list quality high .. i.e. only include folks who I really do know and enjoy being in touch with. I'll easily top 200. So would anyone I think who's got diverse contexts mentioned above. No strangers. And not including everyone I do know just to keep the list tight. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
A good friend will lie for you in court if you committed murder. A true friend will help you bury the body. --Doug On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Owen, Not convinced. I think you are describing buddies, colleagues, acquaintances, ie, people with whom you share an interests in a relatively narrow context. A friend, on my account, is a person with whom one shares committment to one another's mutual well-being, as well as many common interests, a division of labor, and means of solving interpersonal problems that arise. I certainly don't have 200 friends. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] [Original Message] From: Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Date: 11/25/2009 10:26:49 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions On Nov 25, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: snip Nobody has a hundred friends, so the word, friend, is being extended in a creepy Orwellian way to include strangers. I disagree. I was surprised to find just how many work, family, school, church, complexity, .. friends I *do* have. I just started facebook a few days ago, and I'm finding a huge number of non-stranger, non-virtual acquaintances I have. I'm trying to keep the list quality high .. i.e. only include folks who I really do know and enjoy being in touch with. I'll easily top 200. So would anyone I think who's got diverse contexts mentioned above. No strangers. And not including everyone I do know just to keep the list tight. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
We're not quite in agreement. Tweeting and updating your facebook page is not an attempt to become a celebrity. That's where I'm disagreeing with you. Such behavior is no more an attempt to become a celebrity than, say, telling a joke to 5 friends in a pub or, say, giving a toast at a wedding ... or organizing a local seminar on emergence. True, for _some_ people, people we might diagnose as narcissists, EVERY opportunity to take the stage might be a form of trying to become a celebrity. But normal people don't do that. And Facebook consists primarily of _normal_ people. Now, there are corporate facebook pages and corporate twitter feeds (including people who've become institutions like John Cleese or Guy Kawasaki) and those people use these media as public relations outlets or even to deliver their product. But even in those cases, they're not using the media to become celebrities or exploit a weakness. For the most part, they're merely doing what their fans/customers ask of them. As to the behavior of some celebrities and why they do what they do, there can be an infinite number of reasons. And I caution you against over simplifying those reasons in the same way I caution you against oversimplifying trust relationships. For example, we have a local bread maker named Dave. Dave was a criminal. Then he learned to make bread and that others liked his bread. Now he uses his celebrity status in an attempt to demonstrate that criminals can redirect their energy into productive behavior that benefits those around them. Is Dave a narcissist? Is he exploiting his fans? I don't know. And, frankly, I don't care. The fact is that such behavior is much more complex than you portray. Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-11-25 09:28 AM: We have only to explain the behavior of the celebrity her- or himself: why anybody might be tempted to try to put ourselves in the celebrity position? Here, multilevel selection comes into play. While the routine function of fan clubs might be to make groups out of strangers, for the celebrity herself, it becomes an chance to exploit that weakness in human nature for her own individual gain. Any one of us who sees a chance at that opportunity would be a fool not to try and exploit it. Hence facebook and friends. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] model ( was Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions)
Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-11-25 09:36 AM: I hope you dont replicate my sin of reading your messages backwards by reading mine frontwards. It's not a big deal. Real discussions don't happen on mailing lists, facebook, twitter, or even via e-mail or phone. So, feel free to read these posts and respond in any order, and with any content you wish. It's all in good fun, as far as I'm concerned. Any actual benefit the participants and lurkers receive is gravy. But I would use a different language to describe your objection. I would say that you object to my MODEL of the evolution of human society and wish to substitute a different MODEL. My Model is based on David Sloan Wilson's Multi-Level Selection Theory, which argues that our individual behavior is the result of selection at many levels of organization. Thus behavior which is puzzling from the point of view of individual selection (which I still think Face book behavior is) is readily explained as a weakness in the ability to calculate our individual interests arising from selection at the group level. Model is a much abused word. Models (and simulations) are a sub-type of rhetoric. Not all rhetoric constitutes a model. I'd call your (very brief and largely detail-free) rhetoric that celebrity is an effect of being forced to handle a large # of associations and, hence a confusion between village and world trust is NOT a model. If we include David Sloan Wilson's Multi-Level Selection Theory and inference made from that theory including the above, then I still don't call that a model. I call it one of a theory, thesis, hypothesis, conjecture, or speculation. A model, in my lexicon, must have at least 2 attributes: 1) it must be an extant thing in and of itself and 2) it must have a referent. Your rhetoric has (2) but not (1). And even so, your rhetoric is way too abstract to measure actual human evolution. (Remember that model is derived from the same root as measure... e.g. a balsa wood airplane is used to measure a real airplane.) You can't measure human evolution with your rhetoric; so, even if you claim it is extant (e.g. in the form of books, video or audio recordings of lectures, etc), it's still quite a stretch to call it a model. p.s. And YES, I know lots of people will claim that lots of people will disagree with my use of the word model, here. But I hope you realize now that it doesn't much matter to me whether lots of people disagree with my use of the word model, especially if those disagreeing people aren't professional modelers. And don't expect me to believe that pro persuaders (who make their living building rhetoric) are pro modelers. While pro modelers _are_ pro persuaders, pro persuaders are not necessarily pro modelers. ;-) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Douglas Roberts wrote: A good friend will lie for you in court if you committed murder. A true friend will help you bury the body. There's I trust your judgment which could mean (say, in an academic setting) that one is capable in some domain or even `thinks right' (capable in many domains), and also the special case of I trust your judgment in the social (a.k.a. mafia) sense which means that one understands the relevant social constraints within the clique and relative to other cliques.Friends/enemies may fail to provide good/bad outcomes when they operate outside certain constrained contexts (fail in the first sense). The idea of being `trustworthy' implies a social clique with arbitrary values and investments, but also capability. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
More in the philosophical flow: Enemies stab you in the back Friends stab you in the front Best friends poke you with bendy straws On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Marcus G. Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.comwrote: Douglas Roberts wrote: A good friend will lie for you in court if you committed murder. A true friend will help you bury the body. There's I trust your judgment which could mean (say, in an academic setting) that one is capable in some domain or even `thinks right' (capable in many domains), and also the special case of I trust your judgment in the social (a.k.a. mafia) sense which means that one understands the relevant social constraints within the clique and relative to other cliques. Friends/enemies may fail to provide good/bad outcomes when they operate outside certain constrained contexts (fail in the first sense). The idea of being `trustworthy' implies a social clique with arbitrary values and investments, but also capability. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
Sorry for the confusion. it's sailor talk, a lift is an impulse in the direction you're trying to go. -- rec -- On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Cyclists want lift??!! How do they maintain contact with the road? N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - *From:* Roger Critchlow r...@elf.org *To: *nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com *Sent:* 11/25/2009 10:26:08 AM *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills No, the pelaton uses the lead rider to break a bow wave through the air, but the eddies from each rider's passage also curl around to give some lift to the subsequent riders in the pelaton. If you smoothed it out into one long cylinder, it wouldn't work as well. The vertical wind turbines work as a flock because they induce a sort of do-si-do of the wind through the flock, where each rank of turbines is positioned to catch the eddy from the preceding rank and throw it back to the next rank. Because the wind takes a longer than straight path through the flock, it has to move faster than the unimpeded wind. If you just set up a stonehenge in the same arrangement as the flock of turbines, you'd get the same sort of velocity effect. Having the flock adjust its geometry could be a big win. A fixed installation would be tuned to the most likely wind speed and direction. -- rec -- On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Hugh, Thanks for explaining this to me. I figured it was something like that. But the logic IS backwards with respect to the bike racer model. The Bike racer pod is trying to protect the lead racer from wind resistance, the wind mills are trying to pass that resistance through to ever member of the pod. We could shrink-wrap the bike-pod, and it would do its job even better. Not so the windmill pod. Right? N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - *From:* Hugh Trenchard htrench...@shaw.ca *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Groupfriam@redfish.com ;nickthomp...@earthlink.net;Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com *Cc: *fr...@redfish.com *Sent:* 11/25/2009 7:15:27 AM *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills ...that should read rotate the position of the fans 90 degrees (it was late and I should have been in bed). - Original Message - *From:* Hugh Trenchard htrench...@shaw.ca *To:* nickthomp...@earthlink.net ; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com ; Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com *Cc:* Friam@redfish.com *Sent:* Wednesday, November 25, 2009 12:05 AM *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills It looks to me the article addresses this. When windmills are in a conventional face to the wind position, they do need to be well spread out in order to catch as much wind as possible. But if you rotate the position 90 of the fans degrees so that they are spinning sideways, they spin with greater efficiency when lined up behind each other in zones of lower air resistance. The article appears to refer to this fan position as a vertical rotation. The photo shows vertically rotating tube like structures, which are much like long fans turned on their sides. Aligning them in fish school formation evidently is the most efficient in terms of space and maximal wattage generation. That's how it all appears to me in any event. Hugh Trenchard - Original Message - *From:* Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net *To:* Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com *Cc:* Friam@redfish.com *Sent:* Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:45 PM *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Sorry, everybody. What I meant to write was, *Wait *a blithering moment!!!, suggesting, at least, that the metaphor between bunching up cyclists and bunching up windturbines was backwards. Don't you WANT your turbines to feel the headwind? Of course I am wrong about this, but I sure would like to understand why. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - *From:* Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com *To: *nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com *Sent:* 11/24/2009 10:13:22 PM *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills What they lack is mobility -
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
As others have already said, this is about Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT) rather than Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWT) like you see in eastern New Mexico and west Texas. The article is incorrect about VAWTs being a new idea - Sandia developed the idea in the '70s and you can see one of our surplused prototypes out at Clines Corner. VAWTs have three advantages - they are agnostic with respect to wind direction, the machinery is less complex as the turbine is at the bottom and there's no need for the machinery and complexity of the rotating head, and they can operate over a greater spread of windspeeds (HAWT are limited by the blade tip speed - if it exceeds the speed of sound they will break up). The reason HAWT have succeeded in the marketplace is that the blades can be lifted up into the best wind area - the Sandia egg-beater VAWTs are closer to the ground. The turbines in the article look like they beat that limitation by spinning around a tall mast. If I understand the article correctly, the concept of fish schooling formation undoes one of the benefits of VAWT - being agnostic with respect to wind direction. Ray Parks rcpa...@sandia.gov Consilient Heuristician Voice: 505-844-4024 ATA Department Mobile: 505-238-9359 http://www.sandia.gov/scada Fax: 505-844-9641 http://www.sandia.gov/idart Pager:505-951-6084 Roger Critchlow wrote: Same power production as existing wind farms in 100th the land area. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1124/1 -- rec -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
On Nov 25, 2009, at 12:26 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: On Nov 25, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: snip Nobody has a hundred friends, so the word, friend, is being extended in a creepy Orwellian way to include strangers. I disagree. I was surprised to find just how many work, family, school, church, complexity, .. friends I *do* have. [...] I'll easily top 200. So would anyone I think who's got diverse contexts mentioned above. No strangers. And not including everyone I do know just to keep the list tight. -- Owen Such a social butterfly! I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me! [Stuart Smalley] :-) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
I've always wondered how sophisticated the algorithms for arranging windmills might be. A 0th-order one would seem to be to estimate the region where one windmill disturbs the airflow and avoid placing another in it. Another involves deferring to the topography (Tohachapi pass for example) and maximizing the ground-effects of air flowing over ridges, etc. It would seem that the problem should bend fairly well to computer simulation. My mother-in-law just signed over her 640 acre chunk of Northern Iowa, currently under cultivation for Soy, to be used for wind-farming (as well). There is not a place I know more flat than this land... I assume a large grid of windmills will sweep over the landscape with her 640 acres a tiny spot within the larger grid. Each windmill would seem to create a rough "cone" of disturbance leeward. That "cone" would probably consist of multiple scales of compression waves... it would seem that the natural period of the larger waves would be primarily a function of wind-speed while the structure of the turbine blades (blade pitch, width, length, cross-section) and the amount of resistance the blades(drag, bearing resistance, generator back-force, etc.) would inform the other structures. A simple euclidean grid would seem to be less than optimal, with a hexagonal grid (intuitively) seeming closest to optimal. One might imagine that freeing some assumed constraints might offer more opportunities for "tuning" such an array. Deliberately canting (in yaw) some of the mills relative to the wind might reduce their own effeciency to the gain of others "downwind" as might deliberately detuning the "pitch" (dynamically or statically.. at time of install/manufacture). Similarly, the height and pitch of the mill heads might be varied slightly over the array. One would expect some low order "standing waves" behind a single mill. Interesting (but distracting) question... How to tune a flock of windmills (statically, dynamically, ???). For many reasons, I expect wind "mills" to be replaced by something more like giant Cilia someday... maybe just for this very reason... that it should be easier to "tune" an array of such things than a bunch of "fans". Cilia-like energy extracting elements would seem suitable for hydro-power as well. You can tell I still love the "idea of" macro-engineering projects... but I'm pretty sure they are intrinsically bad for the health of the planet/humanity. - Steve It looks to me the article addresses this. When windmills are in a conventional "face to the wind" position, they do need to be well spread out in order to catch as much wind as possible. But if you rotate the position 90 of the fansdegrees so that they are spinning "sideways", they spin with greater efficiency when lined up behind each otherinzones of lower air resistance. The article appears to refer to this fan position as a "vertical" rotation. The photo shows "vertically" rotating tube like structures, which are much like long fans turned on their sides. Aligning them in fish school formation evidently is the most efficient in terms of space and maximal wattage generation. That's how it all appears to me in any event. Hugh Trenchard - Original Message - From: Nicholas Thompson To: Carl Tollander Cc: Friam@redfish.com Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:45 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Sorry, everybody. What I meant to write was, "Wait a blithering moment!!!", suggesting, at least, that the metaphor between bunching up cyclists and bunching up windturbines was backwards. Don't you WANT your turbines to "feel" the "headwind"? Of course I am wrong about this, but I sure would like to understand why. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Carl Tollander To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/24/2009 10:13:22 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills What they lack is mobility - lacking some sort of mobile platform maybe they could get together and decide where the next best placement would be and tell the manufacturing and installation people. Some sort of distributed instantiation - Group orders another member, turbine shows up in the mail, speaks up, says, "I am a wind turbine, the group has determined that it will be most efficient if you place me over there." And the humans would go do that, since the turbine family was usually right about such things. So maybe the turbines "want" some particular configuration, the friction is just one criteria. If they were a
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
I agree with Nick's distinction between "friend" and "buddies/colleagues/acquaintances". To the extent that I engage in FaceBook Friending and LinkedIn Linking, those social networks are for the latter category (much) more than the former. It is the *next* boundary that I resist crossing... granting "friend" status to people who are only *passing* acquaintances. I might well discover/grow/create new friends through the extra dimensions of engagement that the digitally mediated social networking systems might engender, but I do reserve "friend" to only a handful of people to whom the implied level of commitment is informed, practical and motivated. Unless artificially constrained (by living in a confined group, isolated from others... e.g. rural village or nomadic tribe), I would not expect to be able to know intimately and give that level of trust to more than a handful of people what with the complicating factors of living in a matrix of social/political/economic forces and a milieu of individuals of varying level of acquaintance bouncing off of me every day. Perhaps what I call "friend" others would call "close friend" and what I call "colleague/acquaintance/buddy" is what others would call "friend"... Owen, Not convinced. I think you are describing "buddies," "colleagues", "acquaintances", ie, people with whom you share an interests in a relatively narrow context. A friend, on my account, is a person with whom one shares committment to one another's mutual well-being, as well as many common interests, a division of labor, and means of solving interpersonal problems that arise. I certainly don't have 200 friends. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] [Original Message] From: Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Date: 11/25/2009 10:26:49 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions On Nov 25, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: snip Nobody has a hundred friends, so the word, friend, is being extended in a creepy Orwellian way to include strangers. I disagree. I was surprised to find just how many work, family, school, church, complexity, .. friends I *do* have. I just started facebook a few days ago, and I'm finding a huge number of non-stranger, non-virtual acquaintances I have. I'm trying to keep the list "quality" high .. i.e. only include folks who I really do know and enjoy being in touch with. I'll easily top 200. So would anyone I think who's got diverse contexts mentioned above. No strangers. And not including everyone I do know just to keep the list tight. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
* * On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: I've always wondered how sophisticated the algorithms for arranging windmills might be. Here's a micro-engineering variation to keep you out of macro-trouble. Now -- back into macro-trouble again -- if you had a flock of egg-beater generators on a piece of Iowa farmland, could you run them as mixers and give a tornado a leg up over the next town down wind? -- rec -- Synchronization and Collective Dynamics in a Carpet of Microfluidic Rotors. (arXiv:0911.4253v1 [cond-mat.soft]) http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.4253 from cond-mat.stat-mech updates on arXiv.org/reader/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Frss%2Fcond-mat.stat-mech by a href=http://arxiv.org/find/cond-mat/1/au:+Uchida_N/0/1/0/all/0/1;Nariya Uchida/a, a href= http://arxiv.org/find/cond-mat/1/au:+Golestanian_R/0/1/0/all/0/1;Ramin Golestanian/a We study synchronization of an *array* of rotors on a substrate that are coupled by hydrodynamic interaction. The rotors that are modeled by an effective rigid body, are driven by an internal torque and exerts an active force on the surrounding fluid. The long-ranged nature of the hydrodynamic interaction between the rotors causes a rich pattern of dynamical behaviors including phase ordering and turbulent spiral waves. The model provides a novel example of coupled oscillators with long-range interaction. Our results suggest strategies for designing controllable microfluidic mixers using the emergent behavior of hydrodynamically coupled active components. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] model ( was Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions)
glen e. p. ropella wrote: Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-11-25 09:36 AM: I hope you dont replicate my sin of reading your messages backwards by reading mine frontwards. It's not a big deal. Real discussions don't happen on mailing lists, facebook, twitter, or even via e-mail or phone. So, feel free to read these posts and respond in any order, and with any content you wish. It's all in good fun, as far as I'm concerned. Any actual benefit the participants and lurkers receive is gravy. This bit of rhetoric suggests a pretty interesting "model" of your (our) engagement here. In any case, I think I'll take another helping of gravy. But I would use a different language to describe your objection. I would say that you object to my MODEL of the evolution of human society and wish to substitute a different MODEL. My Model is based on David Sloan Wilson's Multi-Level Selection Theory, which argues that our individual behavior is the result of selection at many levels of organization. Thus behavior which is puzzling from the point of view of individual selection (which I still think Face book behavior is) is readily explained as a weakness in the ability to calculate our individual interests arising from selection at the group level. "Model" is a much abused word. Models (and simulations) are a sub-type of rhetoric. I would counter that models are often *expressed* in rhetoric, not sub-types of rhetoric. Just as models are sometimes *implemented* in simulations rather than simulations being types of models. Can you give us more justification for subsuming modeling into rhetoric? I think it is time for Doug to get out his random-philosophy-generator to demonstrate once more that one can simulate rhetoric which has no model. But then I would be forced to ask what model of rhetoric the random-philosophy-generator is based on. Can one write a simulation without a model? Not all rhetoric constitutes a model. And that some rhetoric does not *express* any specific consistent model. I'd call your (very brief and largely detail-free) rhetoric that celebrity is an effect of being forced to handle a large # of associations and, hence a confusion between "village" and "world" trust is NOT a model. If we include David Sloan Wilson's Multi-Level Selection Theory and inference made from that theory including the above, then I still don't call that a model. I call it one of a theory, thesis, hypothesis, conjecture, or speculation. A model, in my lexicon, must have at least 2 attributes: 1) it must be an extant thing in and of itself and 2) it must have a referent. Your rhetoric has (2) but not (1). And even so, your rhetoric is way too abstract to measure actual human evolution. (Remember that "model" is derived from the same root as "measure"... e.g. a balsa wood airplane is used to measure a real airplane.) You can't measure human evolution with your rhetoric; so, even if you claim it is extant (e.g. in the form of books, video or audio recordings of lectures, etc), it's still quite a stretch to call it a model. In my lexicon, a model is presumed to have a referent but there are many, many, many unvalidated models in the world (perhaps you call these theories, hypotheses, etc.) whose referent's qualities and perhaps even existence is still in question. I do not know what a theory or even hypothesis is, if not a model. Perhaps without "proof" or "validation" it is a proto-model? p.s. And YES, I know lots of people will claim that lots of people will disagree with my use of the word "model", here. But I hope you realize now that it doesn't much matter to me whether lots of people disagree with my use of the word model, especially if those disagreeing people aren't professional modelers. And don't expect me to believe that pro persuaders (who make their living building rhetoric) are pro modelers. While pro modelers _are_ pro persuaders, pro persuaders are not necessarily pro modelers. ;-) Well said... Some of us (entreprenuers) live by the motto: Model to Persuade; Persuade to Model For the most part, those who fund modeling (and simulation) are seeking to justify their own rhetoric, not inform it. And those of us who seek such funding are relegated to using our own rhetoric to obtain those funded modeling projects. My own rhetoric (used mostly in the privacy of my own head) is that I knowingly model in support of other's rhetoric to obtain the funds to allow me to do my own model development in the pursuit of a higher truth. My model of "a higher truth" includes objective reality and does not admit to supernatural beings or forces. It has been proven to my satisfaction that I cannot validate this model. e.g. I cannot prove that there is an objective reality. Therefore *all* of my models are ultimately grounded in a model which I cannot prove a valid referent. That only slows me down when I'm in a particularly philosophical
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Doug - Wow! You are more of a "best friend" to the FRIAM group than I ever realized... Never again will I poke at you with one of my bendy straws just because I caught you poking at 300+ friends/colleagues/acquaintances with your very cleverly arranged (image balloon animals) bendy straws. Poke away... it makes (some of) us giggle when you do that. - Steve More in the philosophical flow: Enemies stab you in the back Friends stab you in the front Best friends poke you with bendy straws On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Marcus G. Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote: Douglas Roberts wrote: A good friend will lie for you in court if you committed murder. A true friend will help you bury the body. There's "I trust your judgment" which could mean (say, in an academic setting) that one is capable in some domain or even `thinks right' (capable in many domains), and also the special case of "I trust your judgment" in the social (a.k.a. mafia) sense which means that one understands the relevant social constraints within the clique and relative to other cliques. Friends/enemies may fail to provide good/bad outcomes when they operate outside certain constrained contexts (fail in the first sense). The idea of being `trustworthy' implies a social clique with arbitrary values and investments, but also capability. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Glen, Thanks for all of the below. For an evolutionary psychologist, narcissism is not a term of art, so far as I know. There is a category, roughly equivalent to dionysions and apollonians of people who are differentiated by whether they act in the short term or long term interest, and narcissism might correspond to the former, but I don't really know. Remember that, in evolutionary psychology, seeking celebrity status need not be a conscious or explicit goal; it can be, just the fact that when you are doing something, and adoring strangers start gethering around, you are inclined to do more of it, rather than less. But elsewise, I can pretty much concur with what you say, here. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] [Original Message] From: glen e. p. ropella g...@agent-based-modeling.com To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Date: 11/25/2009 11:13:54 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions We're not quite in agreement. Tweeting and updating your facebook page is not an attempt to become a celebrity. That's where I'm disagreeing with you. Such behavior is no more an attempt to become a celebrity than, say, telling a joke to 5 friends in a pub or, say, giving a toast at a wedding ... or organizing a local seminar on emergence. True, for _some_ people, people we might diagnose as narcissists, EVERY opportunity to take the stage might be a form of trying to become a celebrity. But normal people don't do that. And Facebook consists primarily of _normal_ people. Now, there are corporate facebook pages and corporate twitter feeds (including people who've become institutions like John Cleese or Guy Kawasaki) and those people use these media as public relations outlets or even to deliver their product. But even in those cases, they're not using the media to become celebrities or exploit a weakness. For the most part, they're merely doing what their fans/customers ask of them. As to the behavior of some celebrities and why they do what they do, there can be an infinite number of reasons. And I caution you against over simplifying those reasons in the same way I caution you against oversimplifying trust relationships. For example, we have a local bread maker named Dave. Dave was a criminal. Then he learned to make bread and that others liked his bread. Now he uses his celebrity status in an attempt to demonstrate that criminals can redirect their energy into productive behavior that benefits those around them. Is Dave a narcissist? Is he exploiting his fans? I don't know. And, frankly, I don't care. The fact is that such behavior is much more complex than you portray. Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-11-25 09:28 AM: We have only to explain the behavior of the celebrity her- or himself: why anybody might be tempted to try to put ourselves in the celebrity position? Here, multilevel selection comes into play. While the routine function of fan clubs might be to make groups out of strangers, for the celebrity herself, it becomes an chance to exploit that weakness in human nature for her own individual gain. Any one of us who sees a chance at that opportunity would be a fool not to try and exploit it. Hence facebook and friends. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Glen, A village is not an extant thing? Let's assume it is. Then could it not serve as a model for a larger social organization? A model to me is a concrete process or object that we think we understand so well that it can stand in for a similar process or objedt that we understand less well. My favorite example of a model is natural selection which takes as its model, the creation of specific breeds of domestic stock by a breeder and applies that model to explain how different species have arisen. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] [Original Message] From: glen e. p. ropella g...@agent-based-modeling.com To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Date: 11/25/2009 11:13:54 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions We're not quite in agreement. Tweeting and updating your facebook page is not an attempt to become a celebrity. That's where I'm disagreeing with you. Such behavior is no more an attempt to become a celebrity than, say, telling a joke to 5 friends in a pub or, say, giving a toast at a wedding ... or organizing a local seminar on emergence. True, for _some_ people, people we might diagnose as narcissists, EVERY opportunity to take the stage might be a form of trying to become a celebrity. But normal people don't do that. And Facebook consists primarily of _normal_ people. Now, there are corporate facebook pages and corporate twitter feeds (including people who've become institutions like John Cleese or Guy Kawasaki) and those people use these media as public relations outlets or even to deliver their product. But even in those cases, they're not using the media to become celebrities or exploit a weakness. For the most part, they're merely doing what their fans/customers ask of them. As to the behavior of some celebrities and why they do what they do, there can be an infinite number of reasons. And I caution you against over simplifying those reasons in the same way I caution you against oversimplifying trust relationships. For example, we have a local bread maker named Dave. Dave was a criminal. Then he learned to make bread and that others liked his bread. Now he uses his celebrity status in an attempt to demonstrate that criminals can redirect their energy into productive behavior that benefits those around them. Is Dave a narcissist? Is he exploiting his fans? I don't know. And, frankly, I don't care. The fact is that such behavior is much more complex than you portray. Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-11-25 09:28 AM: We have only to explain the behavior of the celebrity her- or himself: why anybody might be tempted to try to put ourselves in the celebrity position? Here, multilevel selection comes into play. While the routine function of fan clubs might be to make groups out of strangers, for the celebrity herself, it becomes an chance to exploit that weakness in human nature for her own individual gain. Any one of us who sees a chance at that opportunity would be a fool not to try and exploit it. Hence facebook and friends. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] model ( was Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions)
Quoting Steve Smith circa 09-11-25 01:50 PM: It is even less surprising that those whose rhetoric is in opposition to that rhetoric would attempt to justify their *own* rhetoric based on this failure on the part of the individuals/institutions in question to be entirely unbiased in every way. First, I have to say that I actually laughed out loud at that one. Thanks. glen e. p. ropella wrote: Model is a much abused word. Models (and simulations) are a sub-type of rhetoric. I would counter that models are often *expressed* in rhetoric, not sub-types of rhetoric. Just as models are sometimes *implemented* in simulations rather than simulations being types of models. Can you give us more justification for subsuming modeling into rhetoric? Let's look at some examples of what a model can be. A model can be 1) a stick upon which many regular marks are made is a model of length or extent, the referent can be the real line or another object with extent, 2) a crystal or coiled spring (once wound up) that steadily ticks away is a model of time, 3) a human/manikin dressed in clothes intended to be worn by another human is a model of that other human, 4) a schematic where various relations between markings (symbols) on the vellum model those relations between corresponding objects (the symbols' referents) elsewhere, 5) a blueprint (a schematic that attempts to describe _all_ the salient relations), including textual specifications for non-spatial relations, is a model for some as yet unconstructed thing, 6) a language and a collection of axioms and theorems is a model for any process that starts with initial and ends with final conditions. Now, all these examples have an existence of their own, outside any _modeling_ context. For example, (1) is just a stick that you can poke someone's eye out with or burn for heat. You can make a paper airplane out of (5) and fly it across the room, etc. Examples of (6) are currently driving the heater for my office. ;-) When they're not being USED to model something else, they are just whatever they are. In order for them to be models, they must be _used_ to express something. Usually, they are used to make a persuasive argument for or against something. For example, I may use (1) to show you that my computer is wider than yours. Or I may use (4) to show you that some crazy idea I have about the Higgs boson isn't all that crazy. In other words, a model isn't a model until it is _used_ rhetorically. Now, you might say that these models are used non-rhetorically when, say, a furniture maker constructs a chair or somesuch. But, I would counter that the furniture maker is engaged in a never-ending dialogue with herself _while_ they're making the chair. The dialogue consists of a kind of primitive rhetoric where the brain persuades the fingers and the fingers persuade the brain, or one part of the brain persuades another, etc. Most especially, however, the chair designer persuades the chair maker via models like rulers and schematics. And that's true even if the designer and the maker are the same person separated by time. All models are always rhetorical devices. An object can be a rhetorical device without being a model (like when I use a yard stick to slap you for not paying attention to my rhetoric). Can one write a simulation without a model? Yes. Simulations can come into being in all sorts of ways, including randomly. However, a simulation isn't a simulation unless it's also a model. You can't mimic something unless ... well, unless you're mimicking something. In my lexicon, a model is presumed to have a referent but there are many, many, many unvalidated models in the world (perhaps you call these theories, hypotheses, etc.) whose referent's qualities and perhaps even existence is still in question. I do not know what a theory or even hypothesis is, if not a model. Perhaps without proof or validation it is a proto-model? Right. There is no such thing as an unvalidated model. If you can't validate, then you're just speculating (or theorizing). Now, validation can be achieved in a _huge_ number of ways, including qualitatively. So, you have to think carefully before you claim a body of rhetoric is NOT a model. The main method for determining this is asking the question: What could I measure with that rhetoric? If you can't measure anything with it, then it's not a model. A model can be a theory or a thesis because a model can contain theorems and sentences. (And the way we use the term hypothesis in science, a model can also be a hypothesis... In fact, the way both words model and hypothesis are used in science, all models are hypotheses because some parts of every model are _always_ unjustified.) But not all theories or theses are models (though the pretense is that scientific theories and theses _are_ all models... otherwise they aren't scientific). For the most part, those who fund
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-11-25 02:12 PM: Thanks for all of the below. For an evolutionary psychologist, narcissism is not a term of art, so far as I know. There is a category, roughly equivalent to dionysions and apollonians of people who are differentiated by whether they act in the short term or long term interest, and narcissism might correspond to the former, but I don't really know. Very interesting. Thanks! Now I'll have to see if I can configure that dichotomy to fit into my world view. A village is not an extant thing? Let's assume it is. Then could it not serve as a model for a larger social organization? Yes, of course it can be used that way. But just because it _can_ be used that way does NOT mean that fans of celebrities or facebook users are using it that way. It only means that _you_, as an outside observer of the process, are using it that way to support your rhetoric. And it's not the village as model that's wrong. It's the other parts of your rhetoric, namely the trust relationships built up within a village. Who's to say that Ug trusted Oog just because they lived in the same village? Perhaps Ug and Oog would easily trust a stranger over each other? I don't know because I don't have any data showing me that, in all cases, Ug and Oog trust each other more than they trust strangers. I.e. you don't have (or haven't presented here) a _model_ of trust relationships in villages. You've only slapped up a coarse piece of rhetoric using villages. Fans of celebrities, as far as I can tell, definitely do not treat their celebrities as if they're part of their immediate family or circle of friends. They _cannot_ treat them that way because they idolize the celebrity and they do not (if they're healthy) idolize their immediate family and friends. And, also as far as I can tell, most celebrities get pretty irritated when their private lives are invaded by paparazzi or overly adoring fans. True, there are some who love the attention more than normal people would love it; but I suspect that most celebrities come to hate it. Hence, celebrity is NOT a confusion between village and world trust on the part of the fans or the celebrities, as you originally argued. And, hence, the village/stranger model is NOT a good model for the trust relationships we've built up with our extended neocortices like TV, magazines, and facebook. (Sorry, is that horse dead? ;-) A model to me is a concrete process or object that we think we understand so well that it can stand in for a similar process or objedt that we understand less well. Agreed and well said. Replacement is another good way to test for modelness (modelhood?). My favorite example of a model is natural selection which takes as its model, the creation of specific breeds of domestic stock by a breeder and applies that model to explain how different species have arisen. Disagreed! [grin] I don't see how natural selection is a model. But I admit that I'm not an expert on natural selection or evolution or biology or ... well anything, really. If anything, I'd be more inclined to say that animal breeding (as a concrete method using real stuff (animals, semen, fences, long latex gloves, etc.) is the model and natural selection is the referent, the thing being measured. We individual humans can't _replace_ genetic engineering with natural selection. We don't have control over natural selection (which is why we call it natural). But we do have control over our _modeling_ device... breeding. So, we can replace natural selection with breeding, but not vice versa. Hence, the model is the breeding method and the referent is whatever nature does to change animals over generations. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] F'ing Windmills
F’ing Windmills It is good to see FRIAMers enthusiastically holding forth on another area of their whimsy – the effectiveness of wind turbine arrays. Wind Energy can provide a significant contribution to our energy supply. Understanding it helps. Commenters might be interested in the first seminal paper, Energy Effectiveness of Arrays of Wind Energy Collection Systems, (1976), by a clown name of Lissaman. This paper has been referenced and improved upon many times in the last 30 years. The most recent revision, by the same author, appears in the book, Wind Turbine Technology, published by NASA, and reprinted by ASME in 2009. It’s ancient, but the principles, and our planetary boundary layer have not changed. The article in Science Magazine is an example of bad science reporting, illustrating the red neck passion to simplify subtle issues into easily understandable syllogisms (see contemporary Republican politics). The reporter discusses “new” vertical axis machines! The Darrieus Vertical Axis Wind Turbine was new in 1971, while the Savonius VAWT goes back to 1931. So much for the writer’s research! That history is in most encyclopedias. In 1976, I gave a paper at the International Wind Energy Congress in Cambridge , England , funded by US DOE, noting that VAWT were not cost effective compared with the propeller type. I think that’s still true. The FRIAM response seems a little like superficial science; thinking things that “look like” or “sound like” something are that thing. An intelligent, but untutored, opinion may be interesting in philosophy, it usually isn’t in science. FRIAM is supposed to be a place where knowledgeable folks can share it. For those interested: On complex terrain there are locations that have strong flows. This is a function of topography and wind direction. One would like to install Wind Energy Collection Systems at these locations. Usually space is limited, so some WECS units will be in wind shadows, sometimes. The array can be designed to maximize the annual energy capture. This requires annual detailed wind records, a model to compute the flow over complex terrain and a turbine model describing the turbulent wake and its dissipation -- indeed a complicated process well suited to modern computers, and dependent still on poorly known fluid physics, especially atmospheric turbulence. The economic trade enters next, where costs are reconciled with the reduced revenue of units in dense arrays. From hence cometh the most effective array – not always the max. capture case. And, because costs are time variant, different each year! The ideas are simple, the execution exceeding tiresome! In the dark ages of wind energy, with funding from SBIR and DOE, Lissaman and Quinlan developed, and AeroVironment marketed, a software model, AVENU, by which one could take a contour map of a site, define a wind speed and direction, place many turbines on it and compute the total energy capture including interference. One could then drag the turbines to putatively better locations, and observe the effect. Easy on a computer, not so in the cruel world! I always thought that the verb “drag” was especially vivid here, having actually, with a cursing crew, moved 30-ton turbines by dragging them from one piece of CA desert to another. We sold the software here and abroad for $25,000 a crack, including a free Mac II, since our European customers were PC operators. It was not a successful product financially, but has been used extensively in array design for the last 30 years. I have not read my friend John Dabiri’s Caltech report, but have put in a call to chat to him. I taught wind turbine stuff at Caltech to grad classes when John was in grade school, and expect that his will be an excellent contribution. I will report on same to FRIAM when I have studied the paper itself. My title, “f’ing”, referred to “flocking”, certainly very interesting phenomenon, as is the other possible adjective. One can achieve favorable array interference in water, air or on land. I have made technical contributions to all: wet, dry and dirty flocking. The conclusions are sometimes surprising. For example, in a Vee formation of migrating geese the leader, at the tip of the Vee, experiences the most favorable interference. It’s nothing like “breaking the trail”, the magical, anthropomorphical explanation! Since I published this in 1970, folks have asked why the strongest Alpha animal would take the easiest position. My reply is, “They ain’t Boy Scouts! If you were the strongest member of the team, wouldn’t you take the easiest job?” I would, and do, as does every FRIAMer who employs a gardener! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing
[FRIAM] F'ing Windmills!
F’ing Windmills It is good to see FRIAMers enthusiastically holding forth on another area of their whimsy – the effectiveness of wind turbine arrays. Wind Energy can provide a significant contribution to our energy supply. Understanding it helps. Commenters might be interested in the first seminal paper, Energy Effectiveness of Arrays of Wind Energy Collection Systems, (1976), by a clown, name of Lissaman. This paper has been referenced and improved upon many times in the last 30 years. The most recent revision, by the same author, appears in the book, Wind Turbine Technology, published by NASA, and reprinted by ASME in 2009. It’s ancient, but the principles, and our planetary boundary layer have not changed. The article in Science Magazine is an example of bad science reporting, illustrating the red neck passion to simplify subtle issues into easily understandable syllogisms (see contemporary Republican politics). The reporter discusses “new” vertical axis machines! The Darrieus Vertical Axis Wind Turbine was new in 1971, while the Savonius VAWT goes back to 1931. So much for the writer’s research! That history is in most encyclopedias. In 1976, I gave a paper at the International Wind Energy Congress in Cambridge , England , funded by US DOE, noting that the then new VAWTs were not cost effective compared with the propeller type. I think that’s still true. The FRIAM response seems a little like superficial science; thinking things that “look like” or “sound like” something are that thing. An intelligent, but untutored, opinion may be interesting in philosophy, it usually isn’t in science. FRIAM is supposed to be a place where knowledgeable folks can share it. For those interested: On complex terrain there are locations that have strong flows. This is a function of topography and wind direction. One would like to install Wind Energy Collection Systems at these locations. Usually space is limited, so some WECS units will be in wind shadows, sometimes. The array can be designed to maximize the annual energy capture. This requires annual detailed wind records, a model to compute the flow over complex terrain and a turbine model describing the turbulent wake and its dissipation -- indeed a complicated process well suited to modern computers, and dependent still on poorly known fluid physics, especially atmospheric turbulence. The economic trade enters next, where costs are reconciled with the reduced revenue of units in dense arrays. From hence cometh the most effective array – not always the max. capture case. And, because costs are time variant, different each year! The ideas are simple, the execution exceeding tiresome! In the dark ages of wind energy, with funding from SBIR and DOE, Lissaman and Quinlan developed, and AeroVironment marketed, a software model, AVENU, by which one could take a contour map of a site, define a wind speed and direction, place multiple turbines on it and compute the total energy capture, including interference. One could then drag the turbines to putatively better locations, and observe the effect. Easy on a computer, not so in the cruel world! I always thought that the verb “drag” was especially vivid here, having actually, with a cursing crew, moved 30-ton turbines by dragging them from one piece of California low desert to another. We sold the software here and abroad for $25,000 a crack, including a free Mac II, since our European customers were PC operators. It was not a successful product financially, but has been used extensively in array design for the last 30 years. I have not read my friend John Dabiri’s Caltech report, but have put in a call to chat to him. I taught wind turbine stuff at Caltech to grad classes when John was in grade school, and expect that his will be an excellent contribution. I will report on same to FRIAM when I have studied the paper itself. My title, “f’ing”, referred to “flocking”, certainly a very interesting phenomenon, as is the other possible adjective. One can achieve favorable array interference in water, air or on land. I have made technical contributions to all: wet, dry and dirty flocking. The conclusions are sometimes surprising. For example, in a Vee formation of migrating geese the leader, at the tip of the Vee, experiences the most favorable interference. It’s nothing like “breaking the trail”, the magical anthropomorphical explanation! Since I published this in 1970, folks have asked why the strongest Alpha animal would take the easiest position. My reply is, “They ain’t Boy Scouts! If you were the strongest member of the team, wouldn’t you take the easiest job?” I would, and do, as does every FRIAMer who employs a gardener! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
I owe the short-term long-term thing to Jim Chisholm's DEATH HOPE AND SEX.The Dionysian-Apollonian thing came from Ruth Benedict, originally from Hegel, I think, who made a distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian SOCIETIES. I dont know whether you have children or not, but in case you have young ones in the house, you shoiuld be warned that all adolescents are dionysians. They cannot think into the future worth a damn. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] [Original Message] From: glen e. p. ropella g...@agent-based-modeling.com To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Date: 11/25/2009 4:35:26 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-11-25 02:12 PM: Thanks for all of the below. For an evolutionary psychologist, narcissism is not a term of art, so far as I know. There is a category, roughly equivalent to dionysions and apollonians of people who are differentiated by whether they act in the short term or long term interest, and narcissism might correspond to the former, but I don't really know. Very interesting. Thanks! Now I'll have to see if I can configure that dichotomy to fit into my world view. A village is not an extant thing? Let's assume it is. Then could it not serve as a model for a larger social organization? Yes, of course it can be used that way. But just because it _can_ be used that way does NOT mean that fans of celebrities or facebook users are using it that way. It only means that _you_, as an outside observer of the process, are using it that way to support your rhetoric. And it's not the village as model that's wrong. It's the other parts of your rhetoric, namely the trust relationships built up within a village. Who's to say that Ug trusted Oog just because they lived in the same village? Perhaps Ug and Oog would easily trust a stranger over each other? I don't know because I don't have any data showing me that, in all cases, Ug and Oog trust each other more than they trust strangers. I.e. you don't have (or haven't presented here) a _model_ of trust relationships in villages. You've only slapped up a coarse piece of rhetoric using villages. Fans of celebrities, as far as I can tell, definitely do not treat their celebrities as if they're part of their immediate family or circle of friends. They _cannot_ treat them that way because they idolize the celebrity and they do not (if they're healthy) idolize their immediate family and friends. And, also as far as I can tell, most celebrities get pretty irritated when their private lives are invaded by paparazzi or overly adoring fans. True, there are some who love the attention more than normal people would love it; but I suspect that most celebrities come to hate it. Hence, celebrity is NOT a confusion between village and world trust on the part of the fans or the celebrities, as you originally argued. And, hence, the village/stranger model is NOT a good model for the trust relationships we've built up with our extended neocortices like TV, magazines, and facebook. (Sorry, is that horse dead? ;-) A model to me is a concrete process or object that we think we understand so well that it can stand in for a similar process or objedt that we understand less well. Agreed and well said. Replacement is another good way to test for modelness (modelhood?). My favorite example of a model is natural selection which takes as its model, the creation of specific breeds of domestic stock by a breeder and applies that model to explain how different species have arisen. Disagreed! [grin] I don't see how natural selection is a model. But I admit that I'm not an expert on natural selection or evolution or biology or ... well anything, really. If anything, I'd be more inclined to say that animal breeding (as a concrete method using real stuff (animals, semen, fences, long latex gloves, etc.) is the model and natural selection is the referent, the thing being measured. We individual humans can't _replace_ genetic engineering with natural selection. We don't have control over natural selection (which is why we call it natural). But we do have control over our _modeling_ device... breeding. So, we can replace natural selection with breeding, but not vice versa. Hence, the model is the breeding method and the referent is whatever nature does to change animals over generations. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
Nicholas Thompson wrote: I dont know whether you have children or not, but in case you have young ones in the house, you shoiuld be warned that all adolescents are dionysians. Wait a second. What's that IRA and 401k *for* after all? ;-) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Massively collaborative mathematics
The 'Polymath Project' proved that many minds can work together to solve difficult mathematical problems. Timothy Gowers and Michael Nielsen reflect on the lessons learned for open-source science. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.html --Mikhail FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills - bike race model
My understanding of drafting in the peloton is that there is a low pressure area induced behind riders, meaning there is less air resistance to the riders following, and hence less energy is expended by riders following in low pressure areas (1,2). It's not lift, like it is in the bird vee formation (as Peter Lissaman points out). There has been some suggestion that the lead rider also benefits by a nudge from the rider behind who fills the low pressure zone (3), but this is disputed (4). So energy savings in pelotons is not strictly due to eddies either. Efficiencies in bicycle racing (ie. increasing speed for least possible power output) increase as the peloton becomes denser, because greater energy savings occur the closer a cyclist behind can get to the wheel in front (1,2,4). This must be balanced against the increased risk for collision cyclists undergo as peloton density increases. The notion of a shrink-wrapped peloton well describes the correlation between optimal peloton speed and density, and seems to me a better description than the eddie model Roger C is describing. The staggering of cyclists in a peloton is due to its dynamical nature and the necessity for cyclists to avoid collision, and not because it is the theoretical absolute optimal energy savings formation. That is to say that the maximum drafting benefit is directly behind others (excluding cross-winds for the moment) (1,4), which does not practically occur in a peloton (except in what I call a stretched phase, which I won't get into here). Rather, a dynamical arrowhead, rounded, or rotational effect to the peloton occurs at a certain power output threshold (which is within a narrow range for all riders) as riders rotate through positions at the front, each seeking to save energy by drafting; optimal collective output occurs during this phase (based on personal observation and analysis). I don't profess a good understanding of the eddy principles that Roger is describing in the windmill formation, but as I gather them, the principles he describes do not seem to closely describe the peloton formation, as you've pointed out. Also, unlike the static windmill formation, the peloton is a dynamical system, and so its collective output optimization also depends on the movements of the agents within the system as they respond to each other and environmental parameters. So, in that respect, the article may be a bit loose in referring to the peloton as an analog. However, it seems to me the main idea is that there is overall energy saved by a particular collective formation. Whether it's drafting or by creating eddies or by lift, the mechanism may be different, but these principles of energy savings allow for generalized flocking phenomena to occur in natural systems, which is, in general principle, what the windmill engineers are exploiting. Refs 1. Kyle C. 1979 Reduction of wind resistance and power output of racing cyclists and runners travelling in groups Ergonomics 22: 387-397; 2. McCole et al 1990 Energy expenditure during bicycling Journal of Applied Physiology 68: 748-753 3. Cycling Performance Tips. Excercise Physiology - Energy Requirements of Bicycling http://www.cptips.com/energy.htm 4. Olds, T. 1998 The mathematics of breaking away and chasing in cycling 77. Eur J App Phiol 492-497 - Original Message - From: Nicholas Thompson To: Roger Critchlow Cc: friam@redfish.com Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 9:43 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills Cyclists want lift??!! How do they maintain contact with the road? N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] - Original Message - From: Roger Critchlow To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 11/25/2009 10:26:08 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills No, the pelaton uses the lead rider to break a bow wave through the air, but the eddies from each rider's passage also curl around to give some lift to the subsequent riders in the pelaton. If you smoothed it out into one long cylinder, it wouldn't work as well. The vertical wind turbines work as a flock because they induce a sort of do-si-do of the wind through the flock, where each rank of turbines is positioned to catch the eddy from the preceding rank and throw it back to the next rank. Because the wind takes a longer than straight path through the flock, it has to move faster than the unimpeded wind. If you just set up a stonehenge in the same arrangement as the flock of turbines, you'd get the same sort of velocity effect. Having the flock adjust its geometry could be a big win. A fixed installation would be tuned to the most likely wind speed
[FRIAM] Some Facts about Arrays!
I assume FRIAM folks want to increase their knowledge - or mebbe not. Credentials: I have supervised wind tunnel tests of vehicles in arrays at USC and made extensive theoretical calcs with grad students on this subject , have tested my own designs (the Sunraycer and GM Impact) in the Caltech tunnel and the GM tunnel, and probed the wakes. I have driven instrumented test vehicles in the wake of bluff bodies at a decommissioned airfield in CA, at our test base at El Mirage Dry Lake, CA, and the GM Proving grounds in AZ. It's pretty hairy. I hold the patents on two truck drag reduction airshields. Here's the received knowledge, that I take to be correct: There is NO SUCH THING AS A BOW WAVE in incompressible continuum flows. The field equations are elli ptic, won't permit same, and Nature agrees! Bodies in a fluid stream create a wake of low energy flow that trails behind ( but NOT as a CYLINDER!). Statements that wak e pathlines are longer than in undisturbed flow are correct. The idea that this somehow forces the flow to go faster is VOODOO fluid mechanics that I didn't know was still accepted. Wake flows are actually much slower than freestream. Said wake contains a lower energy flow, and lotsa turbulence. It extends for about 12 scale lengths astern of the body, until re-energzied by turbulent entrainment from the surrounding flow. The drag of a body immersed in this wake is significantly reduced (but not the drag coefficient). For bluff bodies like cars, bikes or peoples the velocity deficit of the wake is very pronounced. The wake is influenced by ground effect (unlike the prop turbine case), and is very turbulent, with eddies of about the same as the body scale, especially when the body does no work on the flow, as is the case with bikes etc. There are no lifting components here (at least in the correct, nonFRIAM, use of the word), but severe crosswind disturbances usually occur. These wake effects are us ed to great advantage in peletons and in drafting for formula race cars. And also by crazy people (like one of my professional drivers, since killed !) for fun behind trailers on freeways. There's no mystery about anything in this sort of array interference, except the apparently eternal riddle of turbulence. I'll be glad to answer furth er questions, if I know the answer! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Answer to Steve!
Array models are muc h more sophisticated than he could even understand. The simplest models use Fourier tranforms for the boundary layer effects on the lumpy terrai n, and, for the wake development, turbulence levels computed from interaction of atmospheric stability, ground roughness, tur bine sca le, energy ex traction and wind speed gradien ts . A nd it's still not complete, but tests on my ancient model in Swed en on a real 200 kW unit spinning in the Baltic breeze were not too bad Why not put in all the effort? There's lotsa $ involved. A nd dont' even think of relo c ating a 1/2 mill $, 500 kW unit, the transfer would eat up 10 years profits! It's a mistake to assume folks know less than you! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728 - Original Message - From: friam-requ...@redfish.com To: friam@redfish.com Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 7:33:24 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain Subject: Friam Digest, Vol 77, Issue 29 Send Friam mailing list submissions to friam@redfish.com To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to friam-requ...@redfish.com You can reach the person managing the list at friam-ow...@redfish.com When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of Friam digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: flocking windmills (Steve Smith) 2. Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions (Steve Smith) 3. Re: flocking windmills (Roger Critchlow) 4. Re: flocking windmills (Marcus G. Daniels) 5. Re: model ( was Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions) (Steve Smith) 6. Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions (Steve Smith) 7. Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions (Nicholas Thompson) 8. Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions (Nicholas Thompson) 9. Re: model ( was Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions) (glen e. p. ropella) 10. Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions (glen e. p. ropella) 11. F'ing Windmills (plissa...@comcast.net) 12. F'ing Windmills! (plissa...@comcast.net) 13. Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions (Nicholas Thompson) 14. Re: Dunbar numbers and distributions (Marcus G. Daniels) 15. Massively collaborative mathematics (Mikhail Gorelkin) 16. Re: flocking windmills - bike race model (Hugh Trenchard) ___ Friam mailing list Friam@redfish.com http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
Well, I better keep my voodoo fluid dynamics speculations to myself in the future. Here's more information about the reported effect, written by someone who'd seen a vertical axis windmill before. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/40993 The reason, they say, is that the presence of neighbouring turbines concentrates and accelerates the wind. The reports are all based off an oral presentation made Monday in Minneapolis at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics. -- rec -- On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Marcus G. Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.comwrote: Roger Critchlow wrote: if you had a flock of egg-beater generators on a piece of Iowa farmland, could you run them as mixers and give a tornado a leg up over the next town down wind? Why should Iowa have all the fun? Howzabout making waterspouts with flocking tidal turbines? :-) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Shrink Wrapped Bikes
In the 80s we did a lotta work on that, designed, built and tested them. Didn't talk, did! The shrinkwrap is actually a shape like a vertical streamlined fin, narrow and tall, on a light stringer airframe covered with Monokote, that encloses the frame and rider. Huge benefits obtain from this. In the course of our road test work at the old Ontario Race Track we achieved human powered speeds in excess of 55 mph, and, as a delightful touch, prevailed upon a CA Highway Patrol officer to come pace us officially , and give the rider a ticket for exceeding the freeway speed limit; in those energy confused days it was 55 mph! Streamlined bikes are not much use. You need a few warm bodies to drop the fairing on you and set you up. And, of course, crosswinds are the very bugger! We had some very effective ideas for the Olympics (I worked for that committee) but, predictably they were so good that they were all banned! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Shrink Wrapped Bikes
55mph! Good, yes. But mediocre compared to current landspeed record held by friend, Sam Whittingham of Quadra Island, British Columbia. Current human powered vehicle landspeed record is 82mph, on the Varna Diablo, designed by Georgi Georgiev of Gabriola Island, not far from Quadra, and Vancouver Island where I live. Cycling the bike, not walking the walk, or talking the talk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Whittingham - Original Message - From: plissa...@comcast.net To: friam@redfish.com Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 9:49 PM Subject: [FRIAM] Shrink Wrapped Bikes In the 80s we did a lotta work on that, designed, built and tested them. Didn't talk, did! The shrinkwrap is actually a shape like a vertical streamlined fin, narrow and tall, on a light stringer airframe covered with Monokote, that encloses the frame and rider. Huge benefits obtain from this. In the course of our road test work at the old Ontario Race Track we achieved human powered speeds in excess of 55 mph, and, as a delightful touch, prevailed upon a CA Highway Patrol officer to come pace us officially, and give the rider a ticket for exceeding the freeway speed limit; in those energy confused days it was 55 mph! Streamlined bikes are not much use. You need a few warm bodies to drop the fairing on you and set you up. And, of course, crosswinds are the very bugger! We had some very effective ideas for the Olympics (I worked for that committee) but, predictably they were so good that they were all banned! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728 -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
