Happy Valoween!
February 13th, 2006 nick
A compelling new service, this fon thing. Free (or low cost) wireless worldwide, a network of users who share, backing from Google and Skype (good overview here). I signed up but don’t have a compatible router to start yet (wrong linksys model!) but maybe the technical hurdles will be less once/if it catches on.
A few questions I have about the service:
~Can verizon stop me from sharing my wireless connection? It seems like one thing if I have an unencrypted signal and I don’t know if my neighbors are poaching it, perhaps another thing entirely (or at least to verizon’s lawyers) if I’m listed as a free wireless provider on the fon website.
~Do I want to share my wireless connection with strangers (or “Aliens” as they’re called by fon)? What liability am I opening myself up to? An early fon blog entry addresses these concerns a bit…
~Is this really a sustainable model anywhere other than dense and well off urban settings?
Using The Self-Made Tapestry by Philip Ball as my resource, here are two possible answers to my question posed a few weeks back about how the arms of snowflakes manage to be symmetrical:
Hypothesis one: the symmetry exists
Implausible as it might sound, there is a way in which remote parts of [snow] crystals can communicate with one another. Every crystal has a characteristic set of vibrations that involve synchronized oscillations of all the atoms about their equilibrium positions in the lattice. You know how two people walking down a street will tend to fall in step with each other? An array of atoms can act rather like that, oscillating coherently like a whole battalion of soldiers walking in step. … a disturbance in one place may spread coherently … just as a soldier who alters his pace in a marching battalion might gradually change the pace of all the other marchers. (p 126)
Therefore, the idea is that although the arms of the snow crystal are developing in different spaces from one another, they are not developing independently. I.e. If a particular structure is developing in one arm, it is likely to be mirrored in another arm.
Hypothesis two: the symmetry is in the eye of the beholder
But Johann Nittmann and Gene Stanley propose that we should not get too caught up in trying to acount for the apparent symmetry of snowflakes. They have pointed out that in fact no two branches of a snowflake are exactly alike, and suggest that almost perfectly regular snowflakes are the exception rather than the rule. Our eyes can be fooled into thinking that snowflakes are ‘perfect’ simply because each arm has side branches diverging at the same (60 degree) angle and because the envelopes [nr: the smallest possible solid shape that covers all mini-arms of the snowflake] traced out by the tips of each arm have the same shape. (p 126-7)
This second hypothesis seems a bit more scientifically compelling, although it does banish some of the childhood magic from the wonder of snowflakes. But maybe with a little more knowledge of atom-level science, I’d become a believer of the first.
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