[To Hell With Poverty]

In meteorology, it led to the conclusion that it may be fundamentally impossible to predict weather beyond two or three weeks with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Someone at MIT's gonna get it for that....

[Strategerist]

Wow, had one of those “THAT guy was still alive?” moments.

[jerod]

Ah... But Al Gore can predict what the weather will be like in fifty years. LOL

[SatinDoll]

It’s not just about the weather.

The behavior of liquids or saturated steam, rushing through pipes at high velocity, is chaotic. Interior erosion of piping, such as those in power plants, occasionally rupture without warning because of the difficulty in predicting where such erosion will occurr. People die becuase of these accidents, mostly due to the very high temperatures of the water or saturated steam.

[Jeff Chandler]

OPERATION CHAOS THEORY

[grey_whiskers]

Like, *PING*, folks.

Sad news here.

[EveningStar]

sad ping here

[TheWasteLand]

Bump for a great man.

[fieldmarshaldj]

RIP.

[Enchante]

Quite a man, may he R.I.P.

One thing I have wondered (without possessing the mathematical or technical knowledge to answer this):

If a change of something like 0.0001 can produce dramatic effects somewhere down the line (some of idea of the “butterfly effect” I hope) then there would seem to be enormous indeterminacies in trying to assess anything as vast and complex as the earth’s climate.

i.e., can any of the current “climate change models” come ever remotely close to representing all of the complexities of earth’s actual climate?

[Dumpster Baby]

I used to play around with Chaos programs on the computer years ago to help me learn programming. The math involved dictates that many human ideas and inventions cannot be made to work, no matter how "obvious" the process seems.

Positive feedback oscillators are used in every nearly every radio and every computer in existence, but they work in tightly controlled circuits. When tight control is lost the circuit function goes nuts.

Everyone has heard squealing and crackling in public address systems from too much feedback. That is chaotic math at work on the feedback loop. Some feedback gives squeals, just a little more feedback gives crackling, and just a little more feedback give popping and banging noises as the amplifier saturates at its limits. This phenomenon is not caused by electrical laws but by mathematical laws acting on signal levels and the feedback loop parameters.

Seeing a moving graph output of a running positive feedback system is a revelation - aha! this is how nuclear chain reactions work, massive amounts of positive feedback causing massive spikes in output.

Chaotic math also seems to work on the human ego - too much positive feedback results in chaotic behavior.

:o)

[TBP]

Bump for morning reading.

[SuziQ]

Chaos Ping!