So here's a vortex game for you all. There is a fleet of sail boats racing from Newport, Rhode Island across the Atlantic to the mouth of the English Channel. If you go to http://www.nyyc.org/transatlantic/ and click on [Tracker] you'll get a map of the North Atlantic with the positions and tracks of the boats marked. The red line is the great circle from south of Nantucket to the finish, the shortest path.
Up on the control bar there's a button which will turn on a wind direction/intensity overlay so you can see the low pressure SE of Greenland with an eastern arm that stretches almost to the Azores; the high pressures centered west of Brest, SW of Greenland, way south of the Great Banks; and the head wind that the fleet is beating into. There's a slider under the weather button which allows you to step the wind overlay forward in time to the predicted winds at 3hour intervals in the future. Find the fastest path given where the wind is, how well you can drive the boat, and where you expect you and the wind will be on the next watch. The wind arrows the map shows are from the freely available NOAA GRIB models, but most of those boats are getting the best weather predictions that money can buy. Human ingenuity vs fluid dynamics, the state of the art, no doubt getting very wet at the moment. -- rec -- On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Roger Critchlow <r...@elf.org> wrote: > There are several papers from Ken Dill and students that deal with these > approaches. And i don't think you missed them, they turned up after a > discussion on Maximum Entropy Production principles. > > -- rec -- > > On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote: > >> ** >> On 6/30/11 8:02 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: >> >> Thanks, Eric, for taking the question seriously. I will study your answer >> with care. >> >> Ask a simple question, and waddya get? >> Another day older and deeper in (conceptual) debt! >> >> >> Eric says: >> >> " All these >> flow problems that we talk about are not described by equilibrium ensembles; >> they are ensembles of processes. Of course, everybody says that, but >> apparently most of the time people don't act as if saying that should then >> carry meaning for what they think afterward. (Like other mantras, its >> function appears to be to suppress pre-frontal cortex activity.) " >> >> >> What a great insight! I wonder how much of our blather here on this list >> is in fact crafted or selected for it's ability to suppress pre-frontal >> cortex activity? Wow! While we *think* we are promoting pre-frontal >> activity, we may very well be supressing it! I wonder if there is a simple >> heuristic for recognizing "mantras" in clear text? >> >> Going recursive here, I wonder about the brain-state/chemistry that might >> be involved in our (my!) propensity for (near) idle speculation about things >> I know just enough about to be dangerous. There seems to be something very >> soothing about this kind of speculation... hmmm? >> >> As for the rest of your (Eric) response! What a lot to unpack... I mostly >> get process vs equilibrium ensembles, spaces of histories and and some of >> the entropy talk, but am lost entirely on the topic of competing definitions >> of "diffusion" and it's precise relevance to this conversation... I'll give >> it my best shot though... dig a little deeper. >> >> I believe This is the Dill >> paper<http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dillgroup.ucsf.edu%2Fdl_papers%2FJCP2008Stock.pdf&rct=j&q=ken%20dill%20caliber&ei=_KIMTqSdNZT2swOvkLCQDg&usg=AFQjCNF1QwcT3WourQaoLPT8EvAX1tfG4w&sig2=0YsVN6J1NJanyAIYt3rszQ&cad=rja>you >> refer to? I missed it the first time it was passed around I think. Or >> with your just-out re-attribution to RC, rather than NT And here is a >> lecture >> by Dill <http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/537/> at MIT that might be more >> accessible by some? >> >> - Steve >> >> >> >> ============================================================ >> 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
