Nisiablog - Bold Already
More Posts from Nisiablog and Others
- Nichelle Nichols
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkjZQ2NuVyM)
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DorcFBk4sf8)
Most flows vary in three spatial dimensions and time. In experimental fluid dynamics, the challenge is measuring as much of this information as possible. For those who use computational fluid dynamics to study flows, their simulations provide massive amounts of data and the challenge comes in visualizing and processing that data in a useful way. Unless you can find and analyze the important aspects of the simulation results, they’re just a bunch of numbers. As computers have advanced, the size and complexity of simulation results has increased, too, making the task even more difficult. Using technologies like virtual reality projections (above) or 3D printing (below) allow researchers to interact with flow information in completely new but intuitive ways, hopefully leading to new insights into the data.
(Video credit: M. Stock; photo credit: 2013 Gallery of Fluid Motion**)
** The 3D-printed vortices are an image I took of a poster at the APS DFD Gallery of Fluid Motion in 2013, but I’m missing the researchers’ names. If you know whose poster these were from, please let me know (fyfluids [at] gmail [dot] com) so that I can update the credits accordingly. Thanks!
As dangerous as explosions are in air, they are even more destructive in water. Because air is a compressible fluid, some part of an explosion’s energy is directed into air compression. Water, on the other hand, is incompressible, which makes it an excellent conductor of shock waves. In the video above we see some simple underwater explosions using water bottles filled with dry ice or liquid nitrogen. The explosions pulsate after detonation due to the interplay between the expanding gases and the surrounding water. When the gases expand too quickly, the water pressure is able to compress the gases back down. When the water pushes too far, the gases re-expand and the cycle repeats until the explosion’s energy is expended. This pulsating change in pressure is part of what makes underwater explosions so dangerous, especially to humans. Note in the video how the balloons ripple and distort due to the changing pressure. Those same changes in pressure can cause major internal damage to people. (Video credit: The Backyard Scientist; submitted by logicalamaze)
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51_TXnerpRE)
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQhbhpU9Wrg)
Suicide, a Crime of Loneliness
Andrew Solomon on Robin Williams:
“He played an alien so well because he was an alien in his own mind, permanently auditioning to be one of us. Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.”
Above: Robin Williams, September 14, 1978. Photograph by Jim Britt/Getty
“Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time” - Sappho
Requested by anonymous.
