Feel-Good Friday

Due to my utter failure in the lab today (not to worry, failure is just another step on the road to success), I was in a bad mood. The hangover didn't help. Nor did the canceled dinner plans, the interminable rain, the series of increasingly obnoxious emails, and the fact that I still can't ride my f'ing bicycles.

Then I saw a post on Mike Cody's blog. He wrote vaguely enough that I really have no clue what he's hinting at, but he did put up a link to a photographer's album, entitled Excessive Consumption. Don't worry, it's not a bunch of fat people.

Now, I don't feel like debating, or even considering, the implications of a title like "Excessive Consumption". I just like the pretty pictures.

One in particular stuck out. It's the mound of sand and gravel in New Orleans. Observe:
photo by Chris Jordan
Even by itself, it's pretty. Somebody dumped sand somewhere and made a pretty thing. Fine. That such aesthetically pleasing structures are naturally occurring phenomena is cognitively pleasing in and of itself... and that, to me, is the bigger picture.

Here's where it gets really cool: This sort of behavior exists across scales, at least in the gross sense. One of my professors, Shinbrot) investigated them and put the writeup on his website. They're called "rounded hillocks", or so the paper claims.

In a controlled experiment, dripping sand onto a rotating disk, you can produce the same rounded hillocks. Shinbrot controlled the conditions to produce hillocks of a particular depth, but the similarity is evident.
Shinbrot's Figure 5d
These hillocks are millimeters wide, but without the scale, they're all but indistinguishable from the hillocks in the sand pile from Chris Jordan's photo.

But wait! There's more!

Shinbrot's Figure 5c
Hillocks on Mars, hundreds and hundreds of meters wide. It boggles the mind, this similarity across scale, and the fact that we find it so aesthetically pleasing (an admittedly subjective statement) across all of these scales.

For the explanation, and also for more pretty pictures, you can check out the paper. There's lots of math, though. Don't say I didn't warn you.

One more neat-o picture, this one of a car lot in Tacoma.
photo by Chris Jordan
It brings to mind a James Kunstler quote, talking about how suburban design makes humans miserable: "If you stand on the apron of the Walmart over here and try to look at the Target over [there], you can't see it because of the curvature of the Earth. That's nature's way of telling you that you're doing a poor job of defining space."