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Category Archives: Chaos Theory

Updates

In the wake of ScienceOnline2011, at which the two sessions I co-moderated went pleasingly well, my Blogohedron-related time and energy has largely gone to doing the LaTeXnical work for this year’s Open Laboratory anthology. I have also made a few small contributions to the Azimuth Project, including a Python implementation of a stochastic Hopf bifurcation model.

I continue to fall behind in writing the book reviews I have promised (to myself, if to nobody else). At ScienceOnline, I scored a free copy of Greg Gbur’s new textbook, Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering. Truth be told, at the book-and-author shindig where they had the books written by people attending the conference all laid out and wrapped in anonymizing brown paper, I gauged which one had the proper size and weight for a mathematical-methods textbook and snarfed that. On the logic, you see, that if anyone who was not a physics person drew that book from the pile, they’d probably be sad. (The textbook author was somewhat complicit in this plan.) I am happy to report that I’ve found it a good textbook; it should be useful for advanced undergraduates, procrastinating graduate students and those seeking a clear introduction to techniques used in optics but not commonly addressed in broad-spectrum mathematical-methods books.

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Python Exercise: The Logistic Map

Nostalgi-O-Vision, activate!

A month or so after I was born, my parents bought an Atari 400 game console. It plugged into the television set, and it had a keyboard with no moving keys, intended to be child- and spill-proof. Thanks to the box of cartridges we had beside it, Asteroids and Centipede were burnt into my brain at a fundamental level. The hours I lost blowing up all my own bases in Star Raiders — for which accomplishment the game awarded you the new rank of “garbage scow captain” — I hesitate to reckon. We also had a Basic XL cartridge and an SIO cassette deck, so you could punch in a few TV screens’ worth of code to make, say, the light-cycle game from TRON, and then save your work to an audio cassette tape.

From my vantage point in the twenty-first century, it seems so strange: you could push in a cartridge, close the little door, turn on your TV set and be able to program.


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Currently Reading

Random fun items currently floating up through the arXivotubes include the following. Exercise: find the shortest science-fiction story which can connect all these e-prints, visiting each node only once.

Robert H. Brandenberger, “String Gas Cosmology” (arXiv:0808.0746).

String gas cosmology is a string theory-based approach to early universe cosmology which is based on making use of robust features of string theory such as the existence of new states and new symmetries. A first goal of string gas cosmology is to understand how string theory can effect the earliest moments of cosmology before the effective field theory approach which underlies standard and inflationary cosmology becomes valid. String gas cosmology may also provide an alternative to the current standard paradigm of cosmology, the inflationary universe scenario. Here, the current status of string gas cosmology is reviewed.

Dimitri Skliros, Mark Hindmarsh, “Large Radius Hagedorn Regime in String Gas Cosmology” (arXiv:0712.1254, to be published in Phys. Rev. D).
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Currently Reading

Xiaojuan Sun, Matjaz Perc, Qishao Lu, and Jürgen Kurths, “Spatial coherence resonance on diffusive and small-world networks of Hodgkin-Huxley neurons” (arXiv:0803.0070, accepted for publication in Chaos).
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Spotted on Teh arXivotubes

You know, I’m beginning to like these RSS feeds for the arXiv. Two e-prints just popped up in the “quantitative biology” section which I should look over more carefully:
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ICCS: Sunday Morning

The following is my first attempt to liveblog ICCS 2007. I arrived at the Quincy Marriott shortly before 8:30 this morning, having driven south on I-93 from Boston. Unlike the first time I drove out here, I didn’t get lost in Braintree, since I took the left fork at the “Braintree split,” where I-93 undergoes mitosis. These things are important to know.

The morning’s plenary talks began with Diana Dabby (Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering), who spoke about chaotic transformations one can apply to music in order to generate musical variations, as in “Variations on a Theme of Beethoven.” Her scheme begins by breaking the musical performance into a sequence of pitches, denoted [tex]p_i[/tex], and then mapping each [tex]p_i[/tex] to a section of a dynamical trajectory on a chaotic attractor like the Lorentz owl/butterfly mask.
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Chaos, Phase Transitions and Topology

Ben has suggested the following paper as a target for our discussion. We should, he says, have the necessary background by the end of the summer.

As the abstract says, the paper is divided into two main parts:
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