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fusionandthings · 6 years

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Revisiting old experiments.

My last blog post focused on new hardware for magnetic reconnection experiments. Since then, I've published two new papers (available here and here) using this hardware, as well as an improved version which allows us to study reconnection whilst varying the plasma density and magnetic field strength. Wake Vortex Study at Wallops Island. Langley Research Centre, NASA: Public Domain

Although there's plenty to do with reconnection, I'm also getting increasingly interested in magnetised turbulence in plasmas. Turbulence in fluids is one of the most challenging areas of research across engineering and physics, with billions of dollars spent understanding how it effects things such as aeroplanes, wind turbines and F1 cars.

If you chuck in magnetic fields, compressibility and fast moving charged particles the problem of turbulence becomes significantly harder, but we need these extra ingredients to extend theories of turbulence to astrophysical objects like accretion disks around black holes, the chemistry of the interstellar medium (in which stars like our sun are formed), and other fascinating and complex objects we observe throughout the universe. It's actually pretty hard to make a plasma which isn't turbulent!

To this end, I've started designing some new experiments to try and create a turbulent plasma which is easy to diagnose. This is a key requirement - there's no point making a turbulent plasma if we can't measure it.

In the first year of my PhD I carried out some initial experiments using carbon wires (pencil leads!) in an imploding wire array. The resulting column of plasma was fascinating - highly unstable, with features on all resolvable length scales. We didn't fully understand what was going on this picture, but as it won a prize in the annual EPSRC science photo competition, and I wrote a blog post about it that seemed like enough at the time - I moved on to other research ideas, eventually settling on reconnection.

All good ideas have been done before, and in October we met up with our collaborator Nuno Loureiro, from MIT, and he suggested a turbulence experiment. We dusted off this image and started chatting about how we'd actually measure turbulence - what is it we want to know, can we measure it and would anyone care?

Well, I have no idea whether anyone will care, but we can make a start on the other two points. I won't talk about our new diagnostic technique in this blog post - not only is it unpublished, but we also not quite sure how to analyse the results yet! Still, the old experiment clearly needed some improvements to allow us to make better measurements, and to this end I designed some entirely new hardware.

I have a reputation in my research group for being obsessed with the laser cutter, and for good reason - it's an incredible way to make things. You draw a shape, and the laser cuts it out of 1.5 mm thick stainless steel. And it does so quickly and cheaply. As opposed to waiting weeks for components to be meticulously machined, we can get the parts back the same day, or even over a lunch break. The laser doesn't care what shape you draw, so you can go wild with beautiful curves and precise alignments which would be very difficult to do with standard machining techniques. At least part of my obsession with the laser cutter is the incredible aesthetics it makes possible, and so my latest design looks like an exploding flower or the maw of some horrific sea creature:

Well, that’s how it looks as a render. In reality, MAGPIE is a bit more grimy:

Still, not bad! At heart, there are eight vertical carbon rods, arranged in a circle. Current passes up the sets of brass posts around the outside of the array, passes along the long bendy horizontal metal struts, down the carbon rods and then the inner set of brass rods to the solid lump of metal in the centre of the image.

The beauty of laser cutting is that components become disposable. I’d expected this to be completely destroyed after the shot, but actually it’s only a little burnt:

I managed to get seven imaging diagnostics onto this shot, which was a lot of work, but the results look very nice:

You can see eight converging streams of plasma, about to collide at the centre of the image. The stripy pattern is due to interference fringes - this diagnostic is a Mach Zehnder imaging interferometer, and the fringes are bent in regions where there is plasma.

The data from today’s experiment reproduces our previous experiments, which suggests that this new platform should allow us to make a turbulent plasma column. The next step is to repeat the experiment to look at later times (when the streams have arrived at the centre of the image) and determine when turbulence sets in. Then we need to get even more diagnostics and see what we can learn!

#plasma #Laser cutting #...with LASERS!#turbulence #carbon #pencil leads #pulsed power

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jackleveledup · 7 years

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Game of the Year 2016: My Top Three

It's been a long road for Game of the Year and 2016 in general, but we finally made it to the top three! In case you missed it, there were a ton of other games I loved this year that I wrote about in a post I called "Very Good Games".

And one last thing before we close this out: thanks for reading!

#3. Hyper Light Drifter

This year, no single moment compared to the rush I got from my first chain-dash in Hyper Light Drifter. There's a primal satisfaction to the accelerating timing it demands, as each flash of pink and teal raises the pressure of the impending button press. Eventually I learned that it's not that good in combat and it's only one of many means of survival, yet it was at that precise moment that the game won me over.

I say this without exaggeration: Hyper Light Drifter is a visual masterpiece. Fans and Kickstarter backers have been drooling over screens for years now, and the reality seems to have even exceeded expectations. Environments overflow with lightly muted colors and all kinds of mystery, like enormous Evangelion-inspired beasts, esoteric symbols, and ruins of a civilization long since past. Animation is beautifully handled frame-by-frame, highlighting the tension in each action and closing off with a shimmer of vibrant neon.

It's not an easy game by any means, but success becomes its own reward. Every battle is a fury of bullets and blades with far more dead bodies than dead air. I found myself often getting lost in the chaos, only realizing a room was clear when my darting eyes couldn't find anything new to shoot at. What's unusual, though, is that I didn't find the boss fights to deliver the same sense of exhilaration as the average encounter along the way, but as a capstone to a difficult journey, they work well enough. Maybe I should just be grateful I was never tempted to chuck a controller.

Hyper Light Drifter is enthralling, both in its hectic gameplay and its unwordly atmosphere. I know without a doubt that I'll be back for another shot at deciphering what the hell happened to this world.

#2. Kirby: Planet Robobot

If you've ever daydreamed about what you'd do with your own giant super robot, Kirby: Planet Robobot is a game you need to play. I mean this in the best way possible: it seems like the game was designed by a 6 year old with complete creative authority.

"Give it a giant drill! No, saw blades! Give it flamethrowers! Make it transform into a car! AND a jet!"

Yep, those are all things you can do, and it owns!

The heart of Kirby games has always lied in their diverse power-ups: fire, ice, spark, hammer, bomb, and dozens of others. This time, the sizable set of abilities is doubled by applying not just to Kirby, but his huge, face-shaped armor suit. If Kirby gets a sword, his mech gets two massive beam-sabers. If Kirby gets a jetpack, his mech transforms into a jet! Discovering all of the ways these forms could be used was a joy that lasted me the entire length of the game.

With so many power-ups there's a staggering number of game mechanics at play, which HAL Laboratories take full advantage of in the level design. Whether its a puzzle requiring a certain power-up, a rare boss or ability, or simple visual flair, each stage has some kind of "gimmick" to separate it from the last. Ideas reappear only seldomly, and not without being somehow altered and built upon. Sometimes the game even pretends to be something else entirely, like the shmup style stages that utilize the "Jet" version of the robot armor, or the auto-scrolling stages in the "Wheel" armor. All of this leads to a collection of stages that feel memorable and worth revisiting.

Between its game design and its vast possibility-space, Planet Robobot executes on its concept almost as perfectly as I can imagine. I know Kirby isn't the top Nintendo franchise for most people, but given the run the series is having right now, I'm starting to seriously question how long my little pink creampuff will go underappreciated!

#1. VA-11 HALL-A

VA-11 HALL-A is a visual novel that sounds extremely good in theory - just read its tagline: "cyberpunk bartender action." You play as Jill, who works at a bar called Valhalla in a futuristic city of perpetual darkness, poor people, robots, androids, and most of all, strife. It operates pretty differently as a video game, though. It's often assumed that gameplay exists for the sole purpose of fun, but even for a visual novel, VA-11 HALL-A's simple mechanics took me more than a few drinks to warm up to. Kinda' like in real life, the process of mixing "Brandtinis" and "Bleeding Janes" isn't especially exciting after the first few times, and almost everyone visiting the bar seems to have way more going on in life than you. I just wasn't seeing how it came together. It took some time and careful thought, but by the end of the game it had shaped into something incredible.

It's all thanks to the bar's atmosphere that I stuck around at all, and man, did they nail it. First and foremost, this soundtrack is phenomenal. What woud otherwise be your average cyberpunk setting becomes a wondrous dystopia thanks to Garoad's deft, moody composition. Its implementation is sharp, too. Instead of having music set to match each scene, you're handed complete control over the playlist while on duty. There's a palpable realism to incidentally having serious talks over loud, upbeat music, or joking during an ominous buildup. It helps to give Jill some believable agency as a bartender, too. You can always decide what drink to serve, how strong to mix it, or what music you want to play, but not who comes in that night or what to talk about. Details matter, and the developers at Sukeban Games were paying careful attention.

While Jill herself doesn't seem to bring much nuance to the story (...at first), the rest of the cast handily pick up the slack. The pixel-based character portraits are surprisingly expressive and go a long way in realizing the game's zany, reference-loaded dialog. Dorothy is a definitive fan favorite - she's an android that was specifically engineered to have weaker emotional responses to things that humans often find traumatizing. This trait colors every one of her conversations with typical humans, especially once you figure out that she's a sex-worker. Her career is almost completely inconsequential to her and she LOVES to tease people about it, so the scenes that ensue whenever she meets someone new at Valhalla are pretty entertaining, to say the least. In general, though, Sukeban Games have a firm grasp on how to both play into tropes and subvert them, which allows them to hit their punchlines without compromising any drama during more serious scenes.

My favorite part about VA-11 HALL-A is how much of the narrative the player is trusted to piece together. For a visual novel there's suprisingly little exposition - almost none, actually! It's basically all conversations, and not even ones explicitly about current events. Your only glimpse at what's happening outside of the bar is limited to what you happen to hear, what you choose to read in the news or on shitty forums, and most importantly, what connections you can draw between them. It's amusing to talk to some of the bar's customers, for sure, but your impression might completely change when you realize what they're up to before they stop in or finish their last drink.

The way in which VA-11 HALL-A dismantled my first impression continues to impress me. As the credits rolled it made perfect sense that the bartender would feel less interesting than the guests she serviced. Maybe it shouldn't feel "fun" to Jill when she mixes a drink for a grumpy customer. Maybe it makes sense that a struggling bartender wouldn't have the clearest picture of the "what's" and "why's" of her city's politics. None of that is crucial to finding happiness anyway. VA-11 HALL-A highlighted aspects of life that I don't usually give a second thought to, in a way that feels uncommonly literary for a video game. It's probably not going to be a game for everyone, but to those that seek it out, the narrative at work is nothing short of intoxicating.

#game of the year #goty2016 #va-11 hall-a #kriby #hyper light drifter

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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Is anti-Trump furor papering over Democrats’ working-class woes?

Detroit (CNN)Gobsmacked by their base’s ferocious rejection of Donald Trump’s presidency, the candidates to chair the Democratic Party scrambled Saturday to show how devoted they are to the cause.

Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez bragged to the Democratic National Committee’s “future forum” about racing to airport protests in Houston and then San Francisco. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, made sure everyone knew he was the only one to skip David Brock’s donor summit to participate in the Women’s March in Washington.

Put him in charge, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison pledged, and “We will be asking Democrats all over the country, ‘Bring coffee to the marches. Be in the marches yourself. Carry a sign.’ “

As for those white rural and exurban voters who so brutally rejected Democrats in November — well, bringing them back into the fold is also a priority for those vying to lead the party.

If the base allows it.

After three weeks of anti-Trump protests, Democrats are still stunned by the sudden burst of energy. The party’s organs are all racing to keep up as dozens of events pop up — often on Facebook, without any party chapter or progressive organization’s involvement at all — each weekend.

“The activism of people who are concerned about the Trump administration’s threat to the country is very energizing to us,” said US Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, the 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee and one of the swing-state senators up for re-election in 2018. “We don’t view that as threatening — we love the energy.”

The energy, though, is all rooted in ferocious opposition to Trump — the same strategy that failed Hillary Clinton in 2016.

That reality has some Democrats on Capitol Hill fretting that the rising anti-Trump fervor is putting the party at risk of papering over the same problems with voters in rural and exurban America they woke up with on November 9.

“If you can’t get them back to where they’re looking and thinking, ‘The Democratic Party still represents me,’ then you’ll always be in the minority,” said US Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.

“The anger that people feel is righteous and justified, but it can’t just be a party against Mr. Trump,” said US Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia.

“I understand the righteous anger against some of the President’s policies, but we also need to lay out a narrative that’s more than just a series of position papers — that gives us an overarching theme,” Warner said. “And that’s what I’m looking for.”

The 2018 map vs. the base’s demands

Manchin and nine other Senate Democrats are up for re-election in 2018 in states that Trump won.

Four of those Democrats — Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp and Montana’s Jon Tester — are in states where Trump crushed Clinton.

Just how much latitude those senators need — and should be given by the base on votes like Cabinet and Supreme Court confirmations — is the challenge confronting Democrats now, as the party frantically searches for ways to protect those red-state Democrats without jeopardizing the base’s energy and enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, much of the base is demanding total opposition to Trump — no matter the political costs for Democrats in red states.

And there are no sacred cows, as US Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, learned when she voted in committee to confirm Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development secretary. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, was the target of protective protesters who recently marched to his home, chanting an expletive that rhymed with his first name.

These progressives see the party’s future in energizing women, minorities and young people in cities and suburbs — particularly in Sun Belt states, including Georgia and Arizona.

“Those working-class white voters aren’t the future of the party,” said Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal blog DailyKos.com, which has already raised $400,000 for a Democratic candidate in the expected runoff for the US House seat in Georgia soon to be vacated by Tom Price, Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary.

“Most of them are stuck in fake-news land anyway, and no amount of reality will penetrate that bubble. They think 1.5 million people attended Trump’s inauguration. They think Obama only needed 50 votes to pass his Supreme Court nominees,” Moulitsas said. “They’re lost. It’s a waste of time to try and win them back when there are so many core-Democratic-base who didn’t register or vote last cycle. Almost half the country didn’t vote, and the bulk of the non-voters were liberal-leaning people many of them now marching in the streets.

“So instead of trying to chase people trapped by Breitbart and its cohorts in conservative media, give them a reason to get excited about rallying around Democrats,” he said.

Alternate political universes

Democrats’ short-term fate, though, rests in part on whether the party can hold onto Senate seats in Trump states.

In those areas, senators are struggling to wrap their minds around the alternate universes of the Trump presidency so far.

In one — where the women’s marches, airport protests and pro-Obamacare town hall turnout are the dominant storylines and former alt-right Breitbart news executive Steve Bannon is seen as a shadow president — Trump has walked himself into repeated controversies and revealed himself to be just what the Clinton campaign warned he was.

In another — where rural and exurban voters with little economic opportunity sought to send someone to shake up a political world they thought had lost touch with their needs — Trump has pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, jumpstarted the Keystone pipeline, taken steps toward renegotiating other trade deals, hosted top labor union leaders at the White House and is fulfilling some of his top campaign promises.

“You folks have been terrific to me,” Trump told union representatives as they joined Harley-Davidson executives in a recent meeting at the White House. “Sometimes your top people didn’t support me but the steelworkers supported me.”

Many left-leaning organizations are still trying to feel their ways around the new White House.

“It’s like ‘Game of Thrones’ right now in the Trump administration — it’s kind of hard to tell who’s going to come out on top,” said Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO’s deputy chief of staff.

US Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who represents many of those “downriver” voters, said she is focused on how to use language that makes clear that “I am inclusive of everybody, but I’m also fighting for those UAW workers who think we’ve forgotten them, or those Teamsters whose pensions are being threatened to be cut.”

Dingell added: “Those are our constituents who we have to be a voice for, too. We’ve got to find a way to talk about it so they know we are the fighters for them and that we will stand strong, and that we care about those issues.”

The populist solution

Increasingly, Democrats are moving toward a message styled after populist stalwarts such as Warren, Bernie Sanders and US Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Their case: The problem wasn’t Trump’s promises, or what his campaign represented — it’s that in office, he’s promoting his billionaire friends and failing to take care of those who carried him to the presidency.

US Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, another Democrat up for re-election in 2018, said 9,000 people turned out in January at a pro-Obamacare rally in Macomb County — a key swing region that helped tip Michigan for Trump.

“There were people that I know that attended that supported President Trump that didn’t really believe he was going to take away their health care or cut their Medicare,” she said. “People thought they were voting for change, and now are saying, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t mean that.’

“I’m still fighting for the same people in Michigan that want a shot to stay in the middle class,” Stabenow said. “I think this is really more about (communicating) that.”

Other Democrats made a similar argument — saying the activist energy is increasingly pushing them toward populist policies.

US Rep. Cheri Bustos, an Illinois Democrat who easily won in a district Trump carried, said the party’s problems can be addressed partially through simple moves such as “supermarket Saturdays,” job-shadowing blue-collar workers and sitting through lengthy appearances on rural radio stations.

“We’ve also got to make sure that we’re disciplined about what our values are. We know that our policies resonate with people — with these folks who want to try Trump,” she said.

“Our theory right now is that they’re going to have buyer’s remorse — that they tried him because they wanted something different; they were tired of the status quo; they felt left behind by this wage stagnation,” Bustos said. “We have the right policies to address that. But we haven’t always gone deep into the kind of districts where people have felt left behind.”

The Supreme Court problem

A particular cause of heartburn for red-state Democratic senators is the upcoming confirmation battle over Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch.

It was, after all, the expectation that Trump would appoint conservative justices — whose tenures would long outlast his presidency — that kept many moderate Republicans behind his candidacy.

It’s a conundrum: Do Democrats risk undercutting their own cause by waging war over Trump’s most conventional decision yet?

So Senate Democrats are slow-walking their way around Gorsuch, promising to give him due consideration — buying themselves more time to figure out whether they have 41 out of 48 Democratic votes necessary to block him, and whether it’s even the fight they want.

“Explaining anything having to do with courts or law is a challenge — not because it’s inconsequential but because it can’t be dramatized with a picture and a face and a voice,” said US Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut.

“So we need to make sure the American people understand what’s at stake,” Blumenthal said. “The gobbledygook and the legal jargon are very confusing. And just now as I’m talking to you, I’m realizing that I’m sort of going off into the ether.”

Moulitsas said red-state Democrats should forget using those votes to try to prove themselves as moderates.

The likes of Donnelly and Heitkamp “aren’t going to win re-election on the strength of Trump voters impressed by their confirmation votes,” he said.

“The best chance they have to win in their tough states will be by riding this incredible wave of energy. It may not be enough, but pissing off the base certainly isn’t the better bet. You either ride in with the people who brought you, or go down fighting honorably,” Moulitsas said. “Pretending to be a ‘Republican, but a little less bad’ has never inspired a dramatic re-election victory.”