science – A Geeky Gulati

Covid-19 – why are we so vigilant when seems like nobody has it?

So, there’s this other thing going on – the protests. And restaurants are open. And it feels like there is social pressure .. don’t wear a mask, you look stupid. Maybe just me. Feels like, “If this were a real problem, more people would have it.”

Human feelings are nice, but.. they don’t scale well.

What’s the right percentage of people who should be sick in order for it to “feel” right? Lets say.. 10%.

At 4.4 Million people in KY.. wait, no, that’s assuming even spread. Lets just go with, “In the metropolitan area that I live in, 10%”.

At 600,000 people, that means 60,000 people would be exhibiting symptoms.

According to the most recent numbers (link), 6700 active cases, 500 hospitalizations, 70 in the ICU. So about 7% hospitalized, and 1% ICU. So if 60000 folks where “active”, then 5000 hospitalizations, and 700 in the ICU. We have (link) in the magnitude of 2500 hospital beds across the state of KY and 1500-ish ICU rooms.. but that’s for 4.6 MILLION people. I can’t find the exact numbers for Louisville, but basically:

If “enough” people around us seem sick, then the hospital system would be overwhelmed and we’d be seeing the 10%+ death rates that were seen in other places that got overwhelmed.

So, if we win, it looks like: Nobody around us, nobody we know, gets the virus. And still a ton of people die.

I guess i’ll continue to wear my mask and try not to be a vector, even if 99.9% of the time, i’m not near anybody with the virus, and I’m probably not carrying it either.

Its been forever.. here, lets watch some ice melt.

One of my gifts to our life was a GE Opal Nugget Ice Maker.

I was curious how stale the Ice could get. So I timelapsed it. Here it is, from about 6am to about 11pm:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G6I-FdJVZI]

My guess is that its loosing maybe 1/3 volume in about 12 hours. So maybe 36 hours for a full refresh of ice?

In other news:

I finished up a session with Code Louisville .. several unlisted videos from that. May make them public in the future.
I’ve transitioned over to covering maintenance tasks at work – and figuring out my tooling for capturing that flow:

I’m also trying out using a google group in “shared inbox” mode to capture requirements naturally from emails
I’ve got a zapier zap for converting emails into cards on the above board.
I ran more than 2 miles for the first time in 2 years or so!
We as a family tried to go without an internet connection at home, and we only lasted about 2 weeks.

I’m hoping that my schedule has cleared up a bit..

At first, I barely had time to take care of just the emergencies, I had left myself no time to breathe with all my projects / commitments
Now, the last 3 nights, I’ve had options of what to do with my time.. and I’ve mostly been catching up, decompressing, regaining my humanity
I’m promising NOTHING (that’s how I get into trouble), but just writing this blog post .. feels like I’m coming back to an equilibrium of some sort.

3D Fractals via Mandelbulber

I was scanning recommended videos on Youtube when I came across this one:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhMdL4kSnsg]

I had to see this. It was amazing. I was hooked. I had to find more.

That led me to this program: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mandelbulber/files/Mandelbulber%20v2/win64%20build/

Which I then ran, and tinkered with. Result: I rendered two/three desktop backgrounds for myself.

At 2560×1080, the first two took about 15 minutes. The third one, which looks like the second one, was actually rendered at 5120×2160, and then scaled down to 2560×1080 (simulating an anti-aliasing of 2x). However, it .. came out different:

There are more holes, in the one with higher resolution.

This is because

a) Mandelbulber dynamically scales fractal complexity as it raytraces, and

b) the model that I chose, i chose one with “negative scale”, which I think means, the fractal works by taking chunks out of space rather than by adding chunks into space.

I gave up at this point. There’s an unlimited investigation that could happen, and my curiosity had been satisfied. I could make desktop wallpapers of any resolution.. but I’d need to search for something cool to take a picture of. And there’s so many variables.

I did find another VR flythrough, albeit i have no VR goggles, so someday I want to see this in stereoscopic:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOu3_tmHxu4]

Be aware there’s a lot of material editing stuff that you can do as well – which can be a bit hard if you haven’t dealt with materials (specular, texture, etc) before. Oh, and dynamic volumetric fog – lots of computation even at 320×200. Like I said, unlimited time could be spent…

Or you can oogle these:

http://www.mandelbulber.com/gallery_page1.php

(screenshotted so you can see how beautiful before deciding to click the link).

Lava Lamp

When i was a child, I used to drool over the things you could get for points in the back of Marvel comics. One of them was a Lava lamp.

My coworker Mike offered one up as part of moving. I snatched it up. And I’ve.. been obsessing about it.

The result of my obsession: using my iPhone 6 to do a Time-Lapse, with a lamp in the background providing additional lighting. In 3 Instagram videos:

1. Lava Lamp Cooldown: https://www.instagram.com/p/BOoAqRDDPmu/?taken-by=sunnywiz

When heat is removed, it very quickly loses convection.. stuff is still liquid, but doesn’t move as much. As that cools, it seems to shrink a bit. (Although, I don’t know that the water displacement changes … i didn’t think to check that). A cat comes by to check things out later.

2. Lava Lamp Warmup Part 1: https://www.instagram.com/p/BOoMoN4jf9N/?taken-by=sunnywiz

The liquid at the bottom builds pressure and pokes holes through the solids above it, causing some geysers and debris. The video ends where you can see the whole mass melting a bit.

3. Lava Lamp Warmup Part 2: https://www.instagram.com/p/BOoMuwLjOss/?taken-by=sunnywiz

More and more of the wax melts and starts playing into convection. Once you get convection, the melting process speeds up (I think).

Looks like the heating side of things is somewhere around 127F, and the tapered area (from the bulge up) is 106F all the way up – I think that’s why its tapered like that, so that the heat loss is distributed evenly?