
Sand dunes can 'communicate' with each other - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2020-02-sand-dunes.html
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jacobush
_" but as the experiment continued, the front dune began to slow down, until
the two dunes were moving at almost the same speed"_

One of my armchair imaginary projects is creating a fleet of solar powered
robotic vehicles, which use solar sintering to fuse a grid over sand dunes, by
slowly tracing a grid pattern over an area.

The assumption being, that this will over time bind the dunes. The article
above gives me hope that not only might the dune be arrested in such a fashion
stop moving itself, but it might also deflect neighbouring dunes through the
"communication" mentioned in the article!

Perhaps the sintering can also be adapted to install tiny dew catching
features which might trap enough moisture for vegetation to take hold in the
dunes. (In an almost "3D-print" fashion.)

(I got the idea watching this:
[https://vimeo.com/25401444](https://vimeo.com/25401444) "Markus Kayser -
Solar Sinter Project")

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toast0
Robotic solar death rays sounds like a bunch of fun, but stopping the movement
of sand destroys the dune ecosystem. You can look into the history of the
Oregon Sand Dunes and how invasive European beach grass stabilized the dunes
and changed the ecology.

We don't live on Arrakis; as of now, there's no need to fight against natural
sandy habitat.

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odomojuli
Alongside cellular automata, you can also simulate a sand dune model using
reaction-diffusion systems such as a modified Belousov-Zhabotinsky model. The
'reaction' here is the aeolian process of wind being funneled against piles of
sand.

'Communicate' is perhaps a stretch, really what's happening is that in a grid
simulation, all the computation is done in parallel from a point to its
neighborhoods, with each step simulating exchange of information to alter the
state of each cell. For most simple models, this merely entails flipping the
state between active and dormant (so 0 and 1) for each cell. And most models
only consider adjacent neighborhoods (such as von Neumann or Moore).

That is to say, you can observe complex global behavior based on simple local
patterns.

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undersuit
Sand dunes are real world cellular automata, neat.

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DonHopkins
And piles of sand are real world the Abelian Sandpile Models!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_sandpile_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_sandpile_model)

And the snozberries taste like snozberries!

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flareback
This is interesting but I think the word 'communicate' is bit of a stretch.
Why do people always try to anthropomorphize things?

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jessriedel
Physicist use this term, but always with the understanding of "communication"
in the sense of Shannon information, i.e., two initially uncorrelated systems
can become correlated only if they "talk" to each other. It's never intended
to suggest planning/agency, and it's a useful intuition pump, properly used.

What's happening here is that the journalist is keying on that phrase used by
physicists and repeating it in a popular setting where the reader doesn't know
the more precise meaning. It functions as effective clickbait, but the
journalist can maintain plausible deniability by quoting the researcher.
(Sometimes, the physicists is guilty of doing this purposefully and the
journalist is duped.) This is actually a pretty big source of popular-physics
clickbait.

~~~
thdrdt
But why not use the word 'interact' instead?

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asdfman123
Shannon's original paper was "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," which
actually studied radio communication, it's since been generalized, and there's
no reason to rename jargon so outsiders can better understand it.

~~~
eric190
It was actually "The mathematical Theory of Communication," where
communication was studied over any channel not just radio.

The paper(s) revolutionized several fields!

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graphememes
TL;DR they stand in the way of wind and create turbulence which impacts the
ones behind them and cause them to get in sync.

