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Avalanches Simulated With 500,000 Ping-Pong Balls
An anonymous reader submits "Ping-pong ball avalanche experiments have been carried out for the last three years at the Miyanomori ski jump in Sapporo, Japan, to study three-dimensional granular flows. Up to 550,000 balls were released near the top of the landing slope. The balls then flowed past video cameras positioned close to the flow, which measured individual ball velocities in three dimensions, and air pressure tubes at different heights. The flows developed a complicated three-dimensional structure with a distinct head and tail, lobes and 'eyes.' See for yourself, it's quite interesting!"
Were these supposed to be the avalanche victims?
Pic
:)
If you don't get the joke, you're too young
"Hey Bill, we've got tons of ping-pong balls and a very elaborate and sophisticated means of tracking their movement - what should we do with them?"
"Uhh, use them to predict the Powerball results and retire on private carribean islands, unique ones of which we own for every day of the month?"
"No, you fool! Avalanche research is clearly the way!"
wow! forget RTFA. try RTFP:
/. reached a new low? and yet i still read it. :)
"to study three-dimensional granular flows"
has
The only tragic victim of this experiment was this man.
A bespecticled bunny rabbit and moose were seen running from the scene.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Yeah, you figure if he's curious enough to take the time to post "why?" he'd be curious enough to CTFL! (Click the fucking link).
Anyway, clicking around the site, this prime example of what it's all about:
My current research is concerned with the dynamics of avalanches. Avalanches are sometimes treated as a special sort of granular flow. These have been studied for a long time but because they can have solids, fluid and gaseous properties satisfactory theories do not exist except in special situations. An excellent starting point is Taguchi's Powder Page. To understand these flows better a series of experiments was started last year of ping-pong ball avalanches on a ski jump in the outskirts of Sapporo. Up to 300,000 ping-pong balls were released from the top of the landing slope and their subsequent motion analyzed using video cameras. These flows are a much simpler than real avalanches but they do have similarities and any model that cannot explain these flows will certainly fail on real avalanches. I am developing a model to predict these kind of flows.
I hate ping pong avalanches.
The hardest part is digging yourself out with nothing but a ping pong paddle...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
but somehow I doubt their webserver is ready for the ensueing avalanche of slashdotters!
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
This is an interesting experiment and all, but it resembles a real avalanche about as much as computer climate models resemble real weather.
A actual avalanche is orders of magnitude more complicated. It'd probably be easier, and much more informative, to simulate it on a computer, actually.
It does make for some good eye candy, tho, and I'd bet it was a whole lot of fun. As a serious scientific tool, it's probably not very effective in this day and age, given the better tools out there.
As a teaching tool, however, it has astounding potential, especially in primary education.
Just as an aside, I've witnessed a few large avalanches. I was fascinated (and horrified) at the time; the fascination came from observing the complex flows introduced by various things such as the underlying terrain, trees, assorted rocks, etc. I remember thinking the last time that it was a good demonstration of fluid flow dynamics. The horror came from watching several skiers get caught up in the snow flow. They survived, thank Guh.
(Disclaimer: IANAMathematician).
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I went to the Open House for the mining engineering program at my university (Queen's) and one of the professors showed us how they use computer simulations to model rock interactions. The simulations modelled the behaviour and interactions of thousands of sample rock particles. Really interesting stuff. I guess this kind of test is where they get the raw data to develop these computer models.
Mining engineering is also cool because there is a required explosives and blasting course in second year.
boom boom boom
That picture totally looks like this animal. Illustrating other evolutionary principles somehow?
R
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russel
"Click on any of the pictures to get an enlargment."
me: [reading site] oh cool, ping pong balls. shitloads of em. shitloads of anything is good. clickety. oooh lotsa videos. hrm. "The files are mostly a few MB in size." cool. interesting.. uhh sure bottom camera. clickety.. save as.. program files, fine. clickety.. 33 FUCKING MEGABYTES??
these motherfuckers got balls of steel, i say, serving 102 avi's at like 25 megs a pop. i would think doing something like that willingly implies confidence in one's ability to handle large amounts of bandwidth.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Didn't Captain Kangaroo invent the Ping-Pong ball avalanche back in '55??
This would make an excellent addition to the spectacular gameshow 'Takeshi's Castle'. The opportunities for hilarity are just endless... maybe
This is pretty cool, sort of an "avalanche light" experience.
They could rescue people with chihuahuas carrying cans of diet pepsi.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Captain Kangaroo started in B&W in 1955, but went color in 1969. Check it out here
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Though it's no doubt an interesting experiment that might lead to further research, it's a long way off from modeling real avalanches.
Ice and snow crystals vaprorize, recrystalize, and form bonds in enormously complex systems, unlike ping pong balls, which just bounce off each other.
An article documenting some of the research being done on avalanche snow's state changes and shifts in stability can be found here.
Hey, you lost the ball again, Sureshot. Go find it.
Okay....wait, here it is.
And a second one!
And yet another......and another....
Oh oh, Ruuuuuuun!....
Table-ized A.I.
Badgers? We don't need no steenking badgers!
advanced 3d video and ping pong... its amazing this hasnt caught on earlier among the geek community!
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
... 4 merry maids, 1 golf ball collector, and a fortune cookie. Can I have sauce with that?
I wasn't trolling actually. I did click on the link,
saw a few pictures, no description and posted the
question. If indeed they are studying granular flow then
where are equations? That page had only pics.
I assumed this was just some pathetic exuse for
buying a bunch of ping-pong balls.
We are seeing in this picture not a badger, but a manifestation of primal forces.
In old times they called them demons. Now we call it quantum phenomena.
There is a lot to learn about the universe yet.