Turing Clouds: Some Awesome Mathematical Art

My college friend Blake Jones has written up his efforts (including some awesome videos and stills) about Turing clouds.

Here are a couple of stills from Blake's website.

The site has plenty of videos and stills, as well as some behind-the-hood blurbs with lay descriptions of some of
the math and computer science.

Gummy Bear Genetics

Stripe orientation appears to be independent of genetic inheritance in Gummy Bears.

Gummy Bear genetics pic.twitter.com/XEkHuoSAz2

— Scott Kerr (@scott_kerr) February 25, 2018

"Compass Grass" (aka "Clock Grass")

This is amazing.

Word(s) of the day: “compass grass”, “clock grass” - common names for kinds of beach grass (Ammophila), given for their habit of inscribing perfect circles in sand when their leaves are swung by the wind.
Photo by @JamesPMarsden (”8.30 on the sand-clock”) pic.twitter.com/NvBN2O4V9e

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) January 29, 2018

Stunning Drawings of Seaweed

Margaret Gatty drew some gorgeous pictures of seaweed as part of her book on the topic. These pictures are awesome!

Ferrofluids + Glowsticks = Awesome!

Those of you who like pattern formation (or even who just like colorful things) should look at this article's video about mixing Glowsticks and ferrofluids. Sweet!

New Article: "The Tongue as an Excitable Medium"

Yes, really: an article called "The Tongue as an Excitable Medium" was published a few days ago in New Journal of Physics. This title is fantastic on so many levels! The article is about a condition known as "geographic tongue", which the authors of the paper model as an excitable medium, in which they (of course) examine pattern formation. But that's not what you were thinking, is it?

I have written a blurb about the paper for the Improbable Research blog. I'll post a link to it when it's available.

(Tip of the cap to IFLS.)

Update: Here is the published version of my blurb.

Pattern-Forming Pufferfish

OK, pattern-formation-ophiles: Here is an "underwater crop circle" that was created by a single pufferfish. [What? Were you thinking about the pattern on the surface of its body or something when I brought this up? :)] An example of such a geometric structure was studied in this paper, so I hope some of the pattern-formation experts find it enticing.

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

Morphogenesis for the Win!

If you like pattern formation, then you'll love the pattern on the shell of this snail that recently visited me in my apartment.

The Faraday Wave Blues

Courtesy DSWeb (SIAM's online dynamical systems magazine), here is a bluesy YouTube video about holes in Faraday patterns. The narrator has trouble keeping a straight face at the end of the video, but in general this is extremely amusing for quite a while. As discussed in this article, this video (and other ones with different narratives and background sounds) started life as a non-winning entry in the Gallery of Fluid Motion. Maybe my nonlinear science gallery video will ultimately have a similar fate?

Faraday patterns observed in BEC experiments

This summer, one of my SURF students (Tatjana Wiese) studied Faraday patterns in Bose-Einstein condensates. These patterns had not yet been observed in BECs and while the project was a cute theoretical project, I wasn't sure how easy that stuff would actually be to observe experimentally in a BEC setting. Well, a paper just posted on the arxiv reports the first experimental observations of Faraday patterns in BECs. Now, while this is not as cool as when predictions that I published (that people didn't seem to think would be seen in experiments) were observed experimentally a year later, it's still nice to know that I can pick out phenomena for my students to work that haven't yet been seen in experiments but subsequently are. (It's also not as cool as when I predict something, convince somebody to try something in the laboratory, and it subsequently works perfectly. Of course, that has only happened a couple times. This has lead to two papers in PRL and an archival paper currently under review by an applied math journal.)

I originally got this idea while I was attending a pattern formation conference in Cambridge in December 2005. Faraday patterns were the theme of one of the days, and I had this sudden insight that Faraday patterns would be a cool thing to study theoretically in BECs. I e-mailed one of my collaborators to tell him about this, and he e-mailed me back a reference from 2002 in which that had been done. (At least my I knew my idea worked...) My student studied an extension of their results.