To those who are not aware of the fact: The main authors of this randform blog (Tim and Nad) are math Ph.D.’s. Since now quite a while we are very concerned about the fact that (pure) math research is increasingly put under high retrenchment pressure. So for example under the name of “shaping for excellence”, the University of Leicester will decrease its fundamental research capacity. For “pure” math this means: the University VC (=vice chancellor) proposes to cease research in pure mathematics and wants again to fire all researchers. It is claimed that this is necessary because: “…to ensure a future research identity in AI, computational modelling, digitalisation and data science requires ceasing research in Pure Mathematics in order to invest and extend activities in these areas.”
For those who know about the mathematics behind AI, computational modelling and digitalization this sounds not only absurd but rather like to cut one’s nose to spite one’s face. But it seems things are even worse that is this “triage” seems to be a pretense as they give no concrete plan “to invest or extend activities” but just to cut in fundamental mathematics research.
As a matter of fact this plan affects a high amount of female researchers. In fact by comparing with the list of academic staff (I count 39 academic staff members) and/or the list of group members in “applied math” and/or the list of women in mathematics on the equal opportunites web page it seems all women but 3 of Leicester’s math department are going to be fired.
For those who are interested in what keeps us busy – here is one thing: Local politics and in particular Berlin traffic planning.
If you are able to endure german subscripts you might watch our attempt to convince people that their ideas of traffic load removal may have the opposite effect of what they think.
If not -Tim had only very few hours to work on the music but you might just enjoy his lofty kind of ambient electronica.
Remark: The code as posted at the randform post ShutterSploshScatterPlots needs to include the new Content Security Policy.
That is you have to embed the following lines (at least thats how it worked here for the moment) into your html head:
In case you feel a bit overcharged by all that – as a courtesy for you I quickly filmed the program output with my mobile and turned it into a gifanimation, which you can watch after the ” Read the rest of this entry”.
This month no new randform post.
The previous post is hard enough to digest.
On a personal note:
The previous post is actually a main result of a phase between mid/end 2012 – spring 2015. In this phase I was investigating in which way I could apply my math/physics and visualization skills to climate science. In 2015 I more or less ended the investigation, since I found that -amongst others- my programming skills were not good enough for a continuation on a more professional level and started to work in a company in which I have been working since then.
Last year (Jan 2017) there was a long essay in the german newspaper “Die Zeit” (“The time”) about how important a natural scientific evaluation could be for historical research. The essay: “Darum hatte Hitler keine Atombombe” (“That’s why Hitler had no nuclear bomb”) was written by physicist Manfred Popp. A very brief summary of his argumentation is that a lot of historical research about german nuclear research during Nazi times was more or less flawed due to missing knowledge or misinterpretations of physical facts.
You might remember the post “Before and After” which was part of a series of posts, which were documenting the demolishment of a pub/restaurant/dancehall in the Berlin neighbourhood of Biesdorf, which belongs to the Berlin district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf.
The above image shows the train station S-Biesdorf. The former restaurant was located right behind the back of the fotographer. If you look at the post you should be able to assemble the space situation.
In 2006 Tim played around with swarm simulations in processing and ended up with funny flush like settings. We tweaked the parameters in such a way that it ended up looking like and sounding like a galaxy being flushed down the drain and made it into the art work “dipper galaxy flush” where dipper refers to the wellknown patterns in the constellation Ursa Major. Our comment wasn’t though referring to a particular galaxy there but to galaxies in general – which could include our own.
If you look at the processing code you see that Tim’s simulation doesn’t use e.g. Newtonian gravity, although Tim used a force which is similarily “centralizing” as dark matter.
Inspired by discussions about dark matter and dark energy and general relativity at John Baez’ social media I wanted to get a feeling of how important the feature of dark matter is in order to allow for galaxy formation.
The above is a realtime javascript simulation using purely newtonian gravity with no dark matter but two giant masses (indicated by blue circles, which size is not proportional to the smaller circles) and something that could be called an “inelastic binding”. That is if the distance between masses is smaller than some number then those “close-by” masses behave as if they stuck together as in an inelastic collision, or in other words: the velocity of a mass is set to be the weighted average velocity of the close-by masses (details in the code, how much inelastic collision you want is set by the parameter “mix”).
It was acutally not so easy to find a configuration which somewhat mimicks galaxies, but the above looks a bit as if, I find. If I find the time I may add a 3D viewer. Try yourself – the source code is open.
Here how a scientifically advanced galaxy simulation, which includes dark matter looks on a super computer: World’s first realistic simulation of the formation of the Milky Way and here an interview with the author Lucio Mayer. Just like us many other users think it looks like a filmed flush – if you read the comments.
Here another simulation by Fabio Governato on his youtube channel: The Formation of a Milky Way like Galaxy. He has a whole variety of galaxy formation videos.
update 1.12.2017: There was a mistake in the addition of the z-speed, which is now corrected in the above version. Luckily the correction did affect the overall appearance only slightly.
In an earlier randform post I mentioned the connection of methane emissions and geological features. In particular in an area called Vestnesa which is about northwest of Svalbard (look at image 3) high methane emissions were due to plate tectonics. In that post I asked wether this fault couldn’t be eventually part of a plate which arises from a break of the Eurasian plate, i.e. in particular whether there are similar plate tectonical ongoings along the (northern part of) Ural. I was in part drawn to that question because of the above image. In the above image you see a plume (CH4 air masses) starting at the Kara sea and then going down south in the west of a line, which seems to indicate the Ob river. I.e. this plume seems to be going down at least along the northern part of the Ural mountains. The image is on a world scale so this is a bit speculative, but still, it looks as if. But since the resolution is so crude it should also be mentioned that east of the Ob there are major gas fields, like at Novy Urengoy.
This program was used by artist Scriptique to program a kind of “paint-by-number recreational occupation for your browser” (as the artist called it). It should display something like “a paint drop dropping”.
The program has a MIT licence and you can see how well your browser paints by numbers by pasting the program into a file and then opening the file in your browser (tested with firefox).
After a brief history of the radio technology museum Königs-Wusterhausen on the “Funkerberg” (“broadcast hill”) and an overview on the impressive Dieselgenerator here now part 3 of the series. Part 3 deals a bit with the radio broadcasting itself and in particular with the role it played within my family. (more…)
