Rikku of the Al Bhed (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_merriest) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2011-01-18 03:10 pm
the_merriest) wrote in fandomhigh2011-01-18 03:10 pm
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Science is Awesome!!!, Class #3, Period 3, January 18th
Had Rikku been thinking, she would have gone down to the shop and grabbed her back-up generator. But it was cold, so she wasn't.
Class today was going to be taught by candlelight, and with a roaring fire in the middle of the room. There were also plenty of blankets and mugs of hot chocolate waiting.
"Okay," Rikku said. "This week? We were going to cover something to do with biology, but in light of recent events, I'd rather talk about the weather. And then I thought, even better than just the regular weather stuff -- pressure systems and so on? That we could take this time to talk about chaos theory. We'd need lots of nifty visual aids for the regular weather stuff, anyway, and chaos is way more trippy.
"In most places -- ones that aren't Fandom -- the weather is somewhat predictable. That is, you're not going to get a snowstorm in the desert in summer without some very odd conditions to set that up. But you can get some wild variances, day to day. We can know, in general, what the temperatures in July will look like, and about how many days will be rainy, but we don't know ahead of time what days.
"Weather ties in really closely to something called chaos theory. Someone once explained chaos theory like this: say you have an eyedropper, and you squeeze a single drop of water onto your hand. Can you predict where it's going to roll, once it lands? It might roll to the side, by your thumb. The next one might slide down between two of your fingers. The next might just sit there. What changes? Air friction. Air movement -- maybe a breeze. A slight difference in the size of the the drops. Maybe you even moved your hand a fraction of an inch -- too little to detect, with just your eyes. But it's not random. If we accounted for all of those factors, in a huge computer that could crunch all those facts simultaneously, we could predict it each time. But we'd have to be able to measure each one of those factors, in a highly, highly accurate manner, and come up with the computations for it.
"The weather is a lot like that, but bigger. It's based on a huge number of very minor details. Some people talk about the 'butterfly effect' -- the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in one area could change the starting conditions just enough to cause a tornado halfway around the world. Or it could stop one. It's a system that's called multi-variant. Do you remember the experiment we did, our first day, with the rocks? And how we had a single variable, so we could track what caused changes? Weather has lots of variables. That's part of what makes it so unpredictable.
"This world can generally forecast weather for about the next week, with a fairly good accuracy, but further out, it's shaky. Even at that, we get estimates. A 30-percent chance of rain, for Friday. And then, that morning, the air pressure might experience a subtle, routine fluctuation, one that means it's way more likely to rain than anyone anticipated.
"So our discussion today, if nobody's brain is frozen over, is this: what's the weather like, where you're from? How far out can they predict the weather? If it's more than a week or two, how did your society accomplish that? Do you have a controlled environment, or are the instruments just that sensitive?
"And we can also talk about chaos, and how it kind of rules. Because, I don't know. Sometimes the world is too orderly, and that gets dull. It's nice to know that chaos is still out there messing things up, isn't it?"
Class today was going to be taught by candlelight, and with a roaring fire in the middle of the room. There were also plenty of blankets and mugs of hot chocolate waiting.
"Okay," Rikku said. "This week? We were going to cover something to do with biology, but in light of recent events, I'd rather talk about the weather. And then I thought, even better than just the regular weather stuff -- pressure systems and so on? That we could take this time to talk about chaos theory. We'd need lots of nifty visual aids for the regular weather stuff, anyway, and chaos is way more trippy.
"In most places -- ones that aren't Fandom -- the weather is somewhat predictable. That is, you're not going to get a snowstorm in the desert in summer without some very odd conditions to set that up. But you can get some wild variances, day to day. We can know, in general, what the temperatures in July will look like, and about how many days will be rainy, but we don't know ahead of time what days.
"Weather ties in really closely to something called chaos theory. Someone once explained chaos theory like this: say you have an eyedropper, and you squeeze a single drop of water onto your hand. Can you predict where it's going to roll, once it lands? It might roll to the side, by your thumb. The next one might slide down between two of your fingers. The next might just sit there. What changes? Air friction. Air movement -- maybe a breeze. A slight difference in the size of the the drops. Maybe you even moved your hand a fraction of an inch -- too little to detect, with just your eyes. But it's not random. If we accounted for all of those factors, in a huge computer that could crunch all those facts simultaneously, we could predict it each time. But we'd have to be able to measure each one of those factors, in a highly, highly accurate manner, and come up with the computations for it.
"The weather is a lot like that, but bigger. It's based on a huge number of very minor details. Some people talk about the 'butterfly effect' -- the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in one area could change the starting conditions just enough to cause a tornado halfway around the world. Or it could stop one. It's a system that's called multi-variant. Do you remember the experiment we did, our first day, with the rocks? And how we had a single variable, so we could track what caused changes? Weather has lots of variables. That's part of what makes it so unpredictable.
"This world can generally forecast weather for about the next week, with a fairly good accuracy, but further out, it's shaky. Even at that, we get estimates. A 30-percent chance of rain, for Friday. And then, that morning, the air pressure might experience a subtle, routine fluctuation, one that means it's way more likely to rain than anyone anticipated.
"So our discussion today, if nobody's brain is frozen over, is this: what's the weather like, where you're from? How far out can they predict the weather? If it's more than a week or two, how did your society accomplish that? Do you have a controlled environment, or are the instruments just that sensitive?
"And we can also talk about chaos, and how it kind of rules. Because, I don't know. Sometimes the world is too orderly, and that gets dull. It's nice to know that chaos is still out there messing things up, isn't it?"
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