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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

The faucet isn’t exactly isolated as a chaotic component. As it is, it seems to sputter and flow in a highly chaotic way already, never mind what is under it.

I am surprised the input flow isn’t first shown to be of a highly consistent flow rate with efforts to ensure a predictable laminar flow.

All you’d need is to have the faucet fill a bathtub (a capacitor) which then drained onto the wheel through a flow laminator. You could make one of those using a hose pipe whose far end is stuffed with a tight bundle of plastic drinking straws.

If you kick a football painted bright pink at random, I wouldn’t start talking about chaotic pink footballs.

Perhaps they couldn’t find any straws?

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> The faucet isn’t exactly isolated as a chaotic component. As it is, it seems to sputter and flow in a highly chaotic way already, never mind what is under it.

If true, what is the significance of your observation? IOW, so what? Are you suggesting the water wheel motion is only chaotic because the water flow is? And further, do you mean to say the water wheel's motion is not actually chaotic because the water flow is chaotic? Your comment seems perceptive, but I am failing to grasp your point. Thanks.

No slur on the experiment, but the presentation is surprising, that’s all.

The wheel seems to be clearly erratic, but the erratic faucet is distracting. Would love to see the wheel behave crazily even with the most uniformly boring and consistent inputs.

My suspicion is fluid dynamics is fundamentally chaotic, but that even with a steady, even and predictable flow, if even possible, the motion of the wheel would still be chaotic and that there is little relation between the chaos of the fluid and the chaos of the wheel movement. That's just what I think, so, take with a grain of salt, I honestly do not know. btw, chaotic does not mean erratic nor does it mean random, but instead Chaos Theory states that within apparent randomness of a complex system there are underlying mathematical patterns driven by a perpetuating feedback and resulting in a self-similarity transcending scale, as well as self-organization (fractals), and that deterministic non-linear systems are subject to a sensitive dependence on initial conditions (aka butterfly effect).

I also think this is not really an experiment but merely a physical demonstration of Chaos Theory.

>> Perhaps they couldn’t find any straws?

guffaw! guffaw!

The physical demo might have been more true to the concept, perhaps. I noticed the same issue as you did. I just came to say that the mild shaming you applied in your comment is unkind and unnecessary. A good point need not be made with ridicule.

Thanks for saying this. It made me think twice, even though I didn’t adjust my original post. I wasn’t being anywhere near as unkind as I think you think I was being, but still: language is everything.

The guffaw! guffaw! part didn’t land objectively though. You might be doing the same thing of which you accused me. Just saying.

You are welcome.

My wording of retort may have been a little too strong.

>> I wasn’t being anywhere near as unkind as I think you think I was being,

That's not for you to say. I only said I thought the comment was mildly unkind. Neither of us knows how it might have been taken by the actual object persons though. Nor the lurkers.

My worry is the cooling effect that a large amount of indirect and minor snark could have on sensitive people. Individually ever-so-slightly, yet en masse broadly deterring them from a culture which seems permeated in it. Such as (to my mind) science.

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