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from the To-see-a-world-in-a-grain-of-sand-and-corn-dancing-on-a-stove dept.
Some dynamic systems can develop multi-periodicity, meaning that some parameter, such as a mechanical oscillation, can switch between different vibrational frequencies or amplitudes. For instance, a small-scale disturbance is coupled into a large-scale one.
This has been observed in muscle motion, laser stability, seismic motion, etc, and there is much to understand about these couplings in chaotic systems. Initiated by an apparent diversion from pandemic boredom, Promode Bandyopadhya noticed that when shucked cobs of corn were placed on a glasstop hotplate, the cob oscillates autonomously about three axes with varying amplitudes and frequencies that shifted randomly with time. He videoed ears of corn as well as a number of other smooth fruits on a hot surface and extracted their motion over time. His results are summarized in a tour de force of mechanical dynamics in a Nature Scientific Reports paper. He observed that corn cobs roll, pitch, and yaw, but green chilies, blueberries, tropical berries, red grapes, oblong grapes and grape tomatoes only roll and yaw.
Autonomous thrust oscillations are difficult to design in a laboratory, however we have discovered that the seven types of fruit offer a new test bench.
Details and videos of his dynamical systems kitchen laboratory observations are provided as a Google Drive Link.
Journal Reference:
Promode R. Bandyopadhyay. Multistable autonomous motion of fruit on a smooth hotplate [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-03859-8)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13 2022, @05:21PM (2 children)
I was thinking of an experiment for a Youtube video where you make a copy of a copy of a copy of a sheet of paper. I wanted to see what happens after, say, 100 copies of copies. I tried Youtube searching it and the only thing that comes up is some song. I'm surprised I can't find something like this and I'm too lazy to do it myself.
It would also be interesting to see what happens if you use the same copier over and over with each copy vs using different copiers at various times. I imagine if you use the same copier each time (assuming you gave it some rest time) you would need more copies before it becomes blurry (font size 12 times new roman) since you are repeating the same imperfections of the same copier over and over and not introducing new varying imperfections from different copiers.
If you use different copiers each copier will add different imperfections and it may take fewer copies before the text becomes difficult to read. I would like to see, more specifically, how it becomes difficult to read. Does it fade? Does it become blurry? How? Also make sure you don't use one of those copiers that tries to infer and reinsert letters/characters.
This could be interesting in an office environment where there are multiple copiers and you need several copies of something so you quickly make copies of it on the nearest copier. The next time you or someone else needs several copies of it they take one of the copies and makes copies of that on the nearest copier at the time (perhaps using a different copier). What would happen over a long period time as you keep making copies of copies on various different copiers (vs if you just used the same copier). I suppose the quality would be at least as low as the lowest quality copier you use and would probably be lower over time.
Yes, we are so bored we are rolling and laughing out yaws and pitching new low pitched dull ideas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13 2022, @05:29PM (1 child)
(Same poster: I'm not sure what those printers are called but I guess I'm going to call it an OCR reprint printer or whatever).
(Score: 3, Informative) by hubie on Thursday January 13 2022, @07:35PM
If I was asked to take a stab at guessing your age, I would put you at under-40. The reason being that the experiment you've described was common standard operating procedure in the 90s and earlier (well, not quantifying it). Actually, I'll say mainly the 90s when decent and relatively affordable copier machines were available, but before PostScript and PDFs took over. Before that, copies were made using photostats and mimeograph machines [nyu.edu]. The quality of the first copy wasn't too bad (mimeographs were worse), but when you got into making copies from copies, it could get ugly fast. Probably my favorite example of this is the original Pons and Fleishmann cold fusion experiment announcement. The "preprint" for that exploded around the world, basically via fax machine. So institutions would receive a fax, then that would get re-faxed to N other places as well as M copies of it made, so you had faxes of faxes of copies of faxes, etc. I was in graduate school at the time and even I have a copy of that preprint somewhere. I recall my copy being pretty ugly too, with skewed pages and such. I also recall how exciting the news was at the time. It is really special to be in the right environment when something like that happens. I was also lucky to be in school when room temperature superconductors were announced.