tsbertalan

I don't understand. What you call "crowdfunding" I'd just call "subscription", which is how all journalism was paid for until fairly recently. You're really arguing that openly corporate-funded "journalism" would be superior, and have a lesser tendency to promote a particular angle, like, say, the capitalism-cures-all-ills mantra?

Astroturfing.

If it's cheaper and better-quality (which are certainly not given), then I don't think you could really call it "unfair". At least, in the moral sense, that it would be better for society. If the overriding governmental policy goal is indeed to maximize the public good, not to maximize shareholder value.

Even better than bringing all corporate taxes down to the lowest rate; force tax havens to bring the lowest rate up to something reasonable. A global economy demands global rule of law. Then, yes, market forces can be used to direct corporate citizenship (and therefore employment+tax revenue) to where it is needed (assuming sufficiently far-sighted governance to realize the global equivalent of Ohio needing more federal assistance than California, and also robustness to regulatory capture).

Your race to the bottom would only ensure that governments eventually cede all power to multinational corporations. Then, we're back to feudalism, only global this time.

Wasn't the danger of encountering devices (somehow) programmed to act differently in a regulator's test regime than in daily use one of the points made in the article? (Actually achieving this in the gas pump situation is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Paper-crumpling is nonlinear. Maybe your complaint is rather that paper-crumpling is "only" a topology-preserving diffeomorphism?

At least in the Kuramoto model, it's a little more complicated than the OP makes it sound (but not much). Step 1 is more like "if you see a flash, bump your clock closer to midnight."

Specifically, an ODE is given for firefly $i$'s phase angle $ \theta_i$

$$\dot\theta_i = \omega_i + K / N \sum_{j=1}^N \sin(\theta_j - \theta_i)$$

This gets interesting because the flies natural frequencies $\omega_i$ are also assumed to be randomly distributed. So you don't get perfect phase-synchronization--flies with fast natural frequencies lead the pack as it loops around the phase ring, and flies with slow natural frequencies are dragged along at the back. Relative to the mean phase, your excess phase approaches a smooth increasing function of your natural frequency. But, for high enough values of $K$, you do get frequency-synchronization--everyone oscillates at the average frequency.

(For low values of $K$, or too-large natural frequencies, "rogue oscillators" emerge in a SNIPER bifurcation. They zoom around the phase ring at a different frequency, briefly slowing as they pass through the cloud of synchronized oscillators. Also applies for too-slow rogues.)

In the video and the OP's simulation, it looked the natural frequencies were all pretty similar, if not the same. However, there was a second addition that is not in the original Kuramoto model (but is in most subsequent models): rather than observing all other flies, only observe nearest neighbors. This can be added by putting a symmetric boolean adjacency matrix $A_{i,j}$ right before the $\sin$ in the previous equation.

This has the effect of making excess phase a smooth function of not only the natural frequency, but also some structural feature imposed by the network. In random networks like Erdos-Renyi, this feature is the node degree, but in the video it looks like it might be the long axis of the bush (so, like, one of the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian).

(In general, coupled oscillators, such as circadian gene clocks, show this smooth dependence of excess phase on per-unit heterogeneities, which is the topic for the first half of my PhD dissertation. The second half is figuring out what the heterogeneities are when you only have recordings of the dynamics to go by.)