{"id":3104,"date":"2011-03-25T11:41:29","date_gmt":"2011-03-25T19:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=3104"},"modified":"2011-03-25T12:35:29","modified_gmt":"2011-03-25T20:35:29","slug":"overflow-or-three-regimes-of-fluid-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/25\/overflow-or-three-regimes-of-fluid-flow\/","title":{"rendered":"Overflow, or, Three Regimes of Fluid Flow"},"content":{"rendered":"

I live near the Lexington Reservoir, which is next to Highway 17 near Los Gatos, CA. It\u2019s very rare for the Lex to overflow\u2014the last time I clearly remember it happening was nearly twenty years ago, late in 1992, shortly after Bill Clinton had won his first Presidential election.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Today the Lex finally overflowed again. I\u2019d been tracking the progress via drive-bys and an online gauge page<\/a>. Sylvia and I drove over just now to check it out in person.<\/p>\n

When I see water in these dramatic states, I\u2019m sometimes a little amazed at how calmly the water does its thing. No resistance. Go with the flow. Remain restless.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Further down the flume, of course, things get hyper. Yet even here, the bits of water are computing their way along continuous trajectories.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I often think about the theory of computation when looking at fluid flow, as in the photo above (taken in a gutter near my house during yesterday\u2019s rainstorm). One reason fluids in motion are so fascinating is that make a huge amount of physical computation visible. <\/p>\n

As the early chaoticians and the later computer scientists such as Stephen Wolfram and myself have pointed out (see for instance my Lifebox <\/em><\/a>tome, readable online), computations fall into roughly three classes, which we might term the Dull<\/b>, the Gnarly<\/b>, and the Pseudorandom<\/b>\u2014you can see these three modes from the top to bottom in the photo above.<\/p>\n

Before the waterfall it\u2019s Dull, in the waterfall it\u2019s Gnarly, in the crash zone at the bottom it\u2019s Pseudorandom.<\/p>\n

Sorting it through, in the Dull<\/b>, low-end category, nothing much is happening\u2014you\u2019re getting phenomena like the smooth laminar flow of a non-turbulent stream.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the wild, high-end Pseudorandom<\/b>, messy zone, you get patterns that are very hard to decipher. Computer scientists say pseudorandom <\/em>rather than random because, if physics were in fact to be fully deterministic (as it actually may be, despite the smoke and mirrors of quantum mechanics), then nothing is \u201crandom\u201d\u009d in the sense of \u201cutterly arbitrary.\u201d\u009d Everything emerges from a prior cause\u2014only it\u2019s (even in principle) impossible for our smallish minds ever to trace the full webs of natural cause and effect.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Computationally speaking, the in-between Gnarly <\/b>zone is where the action is, as in the photo above. Living organisms or minds aren\u2019t Dull <\/b>computations, nor are they Pseudorandom<\/b>. They\u2019re Gnarly<\/b>. That is, on the one hand, they\u2019re somewhat orderly, allowing one to adapt to them. And, on the other hand, they\u2019re not fubar, that is, f*cked-up-beyond-all-recognition.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Am I a stump amid the flow? Well, no, I am <\/em>flow. Dull, gnarly, and pseudorandom, depending on my mood…<\/p>\n

By the way, if you could see the air currents, they\u2019d be equally fascinating\u2014now and then, when it\u2019s misty or foggy, you can in fact begin to appreciate the dancing vortices of the air. I wish I had some special glasses that would let me see the air.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That\u2019s about enough for today, but I\u2019ll throw in two more watery photos. First a shot I got of a \u201cWeedy Seadragon<\/a>\u201d\u009d at the Monterey Aquarium on my birthday earlier this week. Gnarly, dude.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And in closing, an awe-inspiring and slightly scary picture of the vast sea and sky off Moss Landing. Come on in. The water\u2019s fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I live near the Lexington Reservoir, which is next to Highway 17 near Los Gatos, CA. It\u2019s very rare for the Lex to overflow\u2014the last time I clearly remember it happening was nearly twenty years ago, late in 1992, shortly after Bill Clinton had won his first Presidential election. Today the Lex finally overflowed again. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3104"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3109,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3104\/revisions\/3109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}