DETERMINISTIC CHAOS.

Could a Tilt-a-Whirl provide insights into the behavior of galaxies spinning around a black hole?

The Tilt-A-Whirl, for example, spins its passengers in one direction, then another, sometimes hesitating between forays and sometimes swinging abruptly from one motion to another. A rider never knows exactly what to expect next.

Yet these complicated, surprising movements arise from a remarkably simple geometry. A passenger rides in one of seven cars, each mounted near the edge of its own circular platform but free to pivot about the center. The platforms, in turn, move at a constant speed along an undulating circular track that consists of three identical hills separated by valleys, which tilt the platforms.  The platform movements are perfectly regular, but the cars whirl around independently in an irregular manner. Moreover, there is essentially just one adjustable parameter–the rate at which the platforms move around the track.

When the platforms travel at very low speeds, the cars complete one backward revolution as their platforms go over each hill. In contrast, at high speeds a car gets slammed to its platform’s outer edge and stays locked in that position. In both cases, the motion is predictable.

What happens at intermediate speeds?

To model dynamical systems like the Tilt-A-Whirl, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers use equations that describe how the positions and velocities of a system and its components change over time in response to certain forces.

It’s convenient to characterize a system’s dynamics by plotting how its position and velocity evolve over time. Each plotted point represents the system’s state of motion at a particular instant, and successive points generate a winding line through an imaginary mathematical space (known as phase space) representing all possible motions. Different starting points generally initiate different curves.

A simple, repeating motion, like the to-and-fro oscillations of a swinging pendulum, appears as a circle or some other closed curve. Such a plot shows that the system cycles through precisely the same state of motion again and again at regular intervals.

More complicated sequences of movements produce tangled paths that wander through phase space, sometimes never forming a closed loop.

That's without the clutch operator selectively reducing or increasing the speed of rotation the better to get a car into an extreme spin cycle.  You get sufficient deterministic chaos without the clutch operator.

To describe the Tilt-A-Whirl’s dynamics, physicists Bret M. Huggard of Northern Arizona University and Richard L. Kautz of the National Institute of Standards and Technology found a mathematical equation that approximates the motion of an idealized Tilt-A-Whirl. In essence, the movements of an individual car resemble those of a friction-impaired pendulum hanging from a support that is both rotating and being rocked back and forth while the pendulum swings. Solving the equation determines how a Tilt-A-Whirl car would behave under various conditions.

That's right, there was a publishable article on the physics of the Tilt-a-Whirl.

The resulting jumbled mixture of car rotations never repeats itself exactly, which gives the Tilt-A-Whirl its lively and unpredictable character. Indeed, no two trips are ever likely to produce exactly the same thrills and chills.

At the same time, the mathematical model used by Kautz and Huggard predicts that chaotic motion would occur at a speed close to the 6.5 revolutions per minute at which the ride is normally operated.

Interestingly, Tilt-A-Whirl fanatics know by experience that they can actually take advantage of this sensitivity. They can affect the motion of a car by throwing their weight from side to side at crucial moments, turning cycles with little or no action into thrilling whirls.

"Thus, it would seem that aficionados of the Tilt-A-Whirl have known for some time that chaotic systems can be controlled using small perturbations," Huggard and Kautz observed.

It turns out that Tilt-A-Whirl operators can also take advantage of this sensitivity. Software engineer Dave Boll described his experience one summer running a Tilt-A-Whirl, "which is easily the most entertaining carnival ride to operate."

Why? The operator can actually orchestrate the movement of individual cars. A single lever controls the ride's speed, so an operator can slightly retard or accelerate the ring of platforms at any moment. By applying just the right amount of velocity change at exactly the right time, it's possible to spin a particular car. For example, if a car is currently not spinning, is about to go uphill, and is positioned toward the inside, accelerating the platform will send the car into a very fast spin.

That orchestration might shake some change loose from a rider's pockets, or it might require that spinning car to be hosed out afterwards.  But I digress.

The scholarly article is "Chaos at the amusement park: Dynamics of the Tilt‐A‐Whirl" in American Journal of Physics, and the Computer Science club of the University of Waterloo have archived the reprint.  The laws of physics imply that at low rotational speeds of the platform, a car completes one backward circle from bottom to next bottom, while at high rotational speeds, centrifugal force wins and the car remains at the outer edge of its track.  What happens at intermediate speeds requires 39 equations to characterize.

According to Trentonian contributor Jeff Edelstein, the Tilt-a-Whirl is life.  "Dizzying. Chaotic. Uncertain. Filled with laughter and fear and a one-time ticket to ride."

The astronomy or cosmology?  I'll leave that to others.

GREAT MOMENTS IN LEFTIST LUNACY.

Crystal Davis rings all the changes.

As a Black woman who works at the intersection of parks and water, I am watching the ongoing push to restore protections at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante closely. We know that access to the outdoors is already racialized in this country, much like access to clean air or safe drinking water.

Is that intersection north or south of wells and water?  Somehow an ongoing spat between ranchers and conservationists in Utah, with Barack Obama expanding the boundaries of western monuments it's probably wise to have an air-conditioned four-wheel drive car to get to, only for Donald Trump to shrink them for Joe Biden ... you know how this is going to play out.

In her weird anthropology, the industrialization that made the Great Migration North possible somehow provides a new unity in oppression, or something.

Today, many Black neighborhoods are cut off from the waterways that sustained earlier generations. Despite their cultural and ecological importance, many lakes and streams across the Midwest and the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over. This has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.

What earthly connection "this" has to do with the latest round of cowboys and Indians in Utah I don't know, but at Common Dreams, emoting trumps logic.

Fortunately, parks and clean water are two areas where people across the political spectrum agree: The public good must be put above corporate profit, keeping public lands in public hands, and preventing pollution at the source to ensure safe and affordable water in every home in America. And we’re seeing people rise up.

Nowhere in her lament over those western monuments do we see any acknowledgement of how badly those public lands have been mismanaged by those public hands.  Sad!

TRAINS ARE MADE FOR RUNNING.

Facebook keep offering me unsolicited Advice For Elderly Persons including "13 Things Model Train Dealers Quietly Notice About Collections Owned by Someone Over 70 in the First 5 Minutes."

The article is about people who treat trains as investments, and they behave like speculators in matchbooks and sports cards.  The first item on the list seems sensible.  "Whether the Original Boxes Are Still There."  Not because those boxes are useful for protecting the rolling stock in the event of a move and when the owner crosses the final summit.

The very first thing a dealer scans for isn’t the trains themselves. It’s the cardboard sitting next to them.

Original packaging protects against dust, moisture, and warping, and its presence signals a collector who understood what they had. A box in solid shape quietly raises the offer before a single piece even changes hands.

There's even a category called "new in box" referring to rolling stock that has not been taken out of the box.

I suppose we could have figured the article was going to be crazy based on one of the images of the appraiser at work.

Gemini image retrieved from Climate Cosmos.

If you know, you know.

Let the record show that if it's property of Cold Spring Shops, it's going to run.

THROWING MONEY AROUND.

You can take the proposal seriously, as National Review editors do.

Reflexive apologists for Trump’s proposal have tended to focus on the sins of the other party — pointing, for instance, to the unnecessary and inflationary stimulus checks that the Democrats issued in 2021, and to President Joe Biden’s illegal attempt to forgive student loans. But this isn’t a defense, so much as a confession. Those policies were bad, and the Republican Party opposed them. That they were attempted was a disgrace; it was not a catch-all excuse for further reckless behavior. Whatever problems may exist in the American economy in 2026, there is no need for a round of debt-financed $5,000 checks. The central problem of our political era is the persistence of inflation and the associated increases in the cost of everyday goods. Trump’s suggestion would worsen, rather than improve, that issue.

The role of the federal government within the U.S. economy ought to be to provide a stable framework within which free people may thrive. When it taxes, it ought to tax predictably and consistently, with the purpose of covering its spending. When it spends, it ought to spend on those functions that only the national government can fulfill. President Trump’s proposal cannot be squared with the federal government’s proper role — nor, for that matter, can it be justly described as “policy.”

Or, following the Babylon Bee, satire is the best response. "Trump Pledges That If Voters Defeat Socialism In November, They Will Each Get An Equal Redistribution Of Wealth From The Government."  I vaguely remember something called Ricardian equivalence, and Robert Barro asking, "Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?"  There might be a corollary involving helicopter droppings, er, printed money, although even in a hyperinflationary environment, having a windfall of helicopter droppings leaves you slightly less badly off than if they fall on your neighbor.

FACULTY REQUIRING MINDERS?

I'm not sure what to make of a Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression story out of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Student journalists with The Alestle at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville wanted to do something reporters do every day: interview university employees.

But SIUE’s communications office insisted on coming along and sitting in on multiple interviews between Alestle journalists and university staff. When a student journalist tried to arrange a solo interview, the director of communications said her presence was “non-negotiable” and that “approval of the interview is ultimately [her] decision.”

A branch campus of a directional state university with a history of corruption might be so placed on the academic food chain that one might wonder whether the minders are to protect the faculty from being exposed as career minor leaguers or to protect the students from doing the sort of thing Normal's rejects might do.

THIRSTDAY BITTERS.

Now fall semester commenceth, and sorority rush season is upon us.  A year ago, Jared Gould took a jaundiced view of the sorority recruiting videos out of the Southeastern Conference, at a time when nobody envisioned exiling Louisiana State, which caught on with the Wrong Sort of People.

Greek life is, in practice, a class marker. Those who can pay in gain access to mentorship, alumni networks, internships, and lifelong professional connections. Those who can’t are left outside the gates.

Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the recent “RushTok” phenomenon, which turned the University of Alabama’s sorority recruitment into a national spectacle.

Videos of young women in coordinated outfits dancing in front of columned mansions went viral. A friend of mine pointed out that many on the right embraced these clips as a sign of a cultural vibe shift. “In Trump’s America,” the videos implied that, “women are once again unapologetically hot, sociable, and patriotic.”

What the right misses, however, is that these clubs are for the wealthy, by the wealthy, and sustained by wealth. The New York Post reports that some recruits spent thousands on handbags to impress sororities, while parents hired consultants to polish résumés and wardrobes to improve their child’s chances of getting into top houses. Reports also suggest that some sororities weigh a recruit’s zip code—and body count!—as heavily as her GPA, effectively filtering out students from less affluent backgrounds.

The Greek-letter organizations have long been for students to engage in positional arms races.  The passage above follows Mr Gould's meditations on the same sort of thing in the Ivies, where there are eating clubs and there is nothing so crass as a kegger to be seen, and the positional arms race began in day care.  Yeah, right.  That's nothing Mad didn't notice way back in January 1962.  "The layout juxtaposed the idealistic promises of the fraternity recruitment pitches against the cynical, harsh reality of what membership actually looked like."

LET THE REPOSITIONING FOLLIES CONTINUE!

I've long been on record doubting using college football to attract enrollment.

The thought process of some university administrators must run something like this:  Flagship universities are visible in football.  There are lots of people in the stadium six or seven Saturdays in the fall.  So let's get some football visibility and play in a big stadium.

It hasn't worked so well for the University of Massachusetts.

Or Rutgers.

There was some controversy about turning back time in Ann Arbor, but I'm not going to get into that.  Rather, it's the follies that get administrators in New Brunswick thinking about playing in the Big Ten and administrators in Amherst seeking a return to the Mid-American.  "UMass turned a second-quarter takeaway into the decisive scoring surge and defeated Rutgers 37-21 for a Fly the Flag victory to open the 2026 season on Sept. 3."  Plus Pop-Tarts.

Those two programs are perennial poster boys for making relegation a thing in college football.

Yes, years ago Julius Erving played for the Minutemen, and their men's hockey team recently won a national championship, perhaps begging forgiveness from the wokies for that Minutemen. That "storied athletic tradition" also included the Minutemen serving as crash test dummies for the Northern Illinois football team, at least until the football-only affiliation with the Mid-American ended.

Massachusetts scheduled a home-and-home with Northern Illinois in 2024 and 2025 and they learned a lot.  Now Northern Illinois play football in the Mountain West, and their latest attempt to be the next Boise State ran into reality at Iowa City.

Over the years, our meditations on attracting students by offering that game day (note, not game night) experience have raised the possibility that offering beer-'n-circus doesn't attract the studious sort of student.

GIVE THE KIDS SPACE TO PLAY.

The women's professional basketball season in the United States is taking a two week pause for the international World Cup competition in Berlin.  The team and player descriptions suggest there are, in fact, ways of ranking players' capabilities, and some of the ladies who grade out well might not be making the trip.

Perhaps, when the professional season resumes, the playoffs begin, and the speculation about contract renewals and the like goes on, we might be able to have a reasoned conversation about the cagermetrics.  There might even be a simple summary statistic out there, something along the lines of "wins above replacement."  Rather that than a resumption of the culture wars.

EXCESSIVE SPORTS HYPE?

In the course of a lament over gridiron parents taking the joy out of youth football, Pajamas Media's Tim O'Brien notes, "Little League baseball players should not have 'walk-up music' any more than youth league football players should have 'recruiting videos,' but they do."  I might still have some of my nephew's Greendale Youth Football trading cards (no, they did not come in Topp's bubble gum packs) but I digress.

Rather, dear reader, I want to consider a recent high school football game in which St. Joseph took an early thirty point lead over Mount Carmel, only for Mount Carmel to rally back and win the game.

It made for compelling television.  Television?  Television.  "Mount Carmel football stuns by overcoming 30-point deficit to win on national TV."  Specifically,  on ESPN.

There might not be another game as thrilling as Mount Carmel played on Friday night.

In a nationally televised game, New Jersey visiting St. Joseph Regional High School went up 30-0 on the Caravan just one play into the second quarter. It was the definition of a rout.

Until, the Caravan staged a comeback for the ages. They stunned the high school football world, as Jordan Lynch's Mount Carmel squad overcame that 30-point deficit to shock St. Joseph and win its first game of the season.

That's right, a nationally televised, if on sports cable, game, involving a New Jersey team visiting the Chicago area.

YOUR SCOLDING IS NO LONGER EFFECTIVE.

I'd really rather the culture warriors types leave Sophie Cunningham be, to sink those trilighters and protect her teammates. But the po-faced common scolds, such as supposed sports pundit Jason Page, have to contextualize her celebrating a milestone birthday at a country bar in downtown Indianapolis and energetically delivering that boot, courtesy of the Red White and Blue.

And again… tell me exactly what you are about without telling me exactly what you are about.

Just own who you are and stop talking about “loving everybody”. https://t.co/bSAUDTD3Mk

— Jason Page (@TheBackPage) August 15, 2026

He ran out of ripostes faster than Iran ran out of missiles, and well down the thread somebody posted, "They're bodying you in the comments and you deserve it."  Maybe the ratio came in a boot.

Any day we discover the Anointed losing their power to scold is a good day.

JESSICA CORBETT HAS NO STANDARDS AT ALL.

Her Monday column, "‘Deeply Alarming’: Ex-Congresswoman Fuels Fears of Trump Using Nuclear Weapons on Iran," neglects to mention in the headline that the ex-representative is none other than Marjorie Taylor "Madge" Green, who has long been a figure of fun among establishmentarian conservatives.  Common Dreams types get a bit of that fun deep in the column.

“Trump promised no more foreign wars, but may actually be the one who delivers a nuclear holocaust that would likely drag the entire world into major conflict, economic depression, and mass human suffering we’ve never seen in our lifetimes and maybe throughout history,” added Greene, who promoted various conspiracy theories while in office. “People need to speak out and boldly stop this insanity. America is not untouchable. If and when that happens, everyone, and I do mean everyone, will hold ALL of those in leadership right now fully responsible for the rest of human history. Do not use nuclear weapons and stop this war NOW.

Self-styled progressives having no standards at all?  Business as usual.

[S]elf-styled progressives are almost as eager to embrace people who offer concurrence with them than they are to excommunicate people who violate a purity test.  Years ago, there was Ariana Huffington, whose pronouncements as some sort of conservative were on occasion cringe-worthy, and who instantly became a hero to many of the people who eagerly slagged on her as an "idiot" once she switched allegiance and put her money into what became the Huffington Post.

The Militant Normals?  Crazy is as crazy does.  "Marjorie Taylor Greene is back at it, spinning another unhinged conspiracy yarn about the Trump administration secretly plotting nuclear Armageddon against Iran in some shadowy strategy meetings."  The things some people do for relevance.

The best argument for not expanding the size of the House of Representatives according to a cube-root rule or any other formula?  The behavior of the current members.

More districts might make election of a legislative body that more closely approximates the multicultural makeup of the population, even with more sensibly drawn simplest closed regions for the districts. On the other hand, the likes of Ilhan Omar or Marjorie Taylor Greene might become more common in more politically homogeneous districts. That's a case for limiting the scope of government, something that might happen organically as those True Believers gridlock themselves.

Put the right bunch of attention hogs on the same committee, and you're watching C-Span and Jerry Springer comes on.  It figures, doesn't it, that if the House Oversight Committee includes Lauren Boebert, Sandy Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, sooner or later you'd get all the decorum of the Mean Girls' Table at Johnson Middle School."

THAT SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT.

"Karoline Leavitt Prepared For Motherhood After Spending Last Two Years Answering Millions Of Stupid Questions."

It's Babylon Bee stuff, and yet, it's spot on.  "At publishing time, Leavitt experienced déjà vu after listening both of her kids screaming whilst throwing simultaneous tantrums."

THE OBSCURE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL SIDESHOW.

Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham has a history of standing up for herself and her teammates.  That's generally something for the court, but somehow the culture wars crop up.

Now, she's teasing a book.  It's probably not about recognizing junk defenses and providing subtle cues to get a teammate a better shot.

We, unfortunately, have precious few details at this point about what might be included in her "tell-all," but two likely topics are treatment of certain athletes by the WNBA and the delusional backlash at her wanting to protect girl athletes.

All those blue-haired weirdos who are showing up at games trying silence Sophie may want to be careful what they wish for, because if Cunningham really decides to open Pandora’s box, they might not like what comes spilling out.

It's been there all along, only the national media generally doesn't notice. Visualize a bench-clearing, fan-involved brawl at DePaul's old Alumni Hall.

CONSPICUOUSNESS TRUMPS COMPETENCE.

In The Daily Economy, Surse Pierpoint asks, "If the economic argument was already lost by 1917, and the Soviet revolution supplied prestige rather than proof, what explains the durability of Marxist categories in Western universities, long after the calculation debate was settled and the planned economies it inspired had produced the most devastating body counts of the twentieth century?"

I've reduced his argument to a clickbaity headline.  Take a long march through the institutions, dear reader, and it might make sense.

What is not in dispute is the strategy itself and its adoption across the postwar academic left: if the economic argument could not be won, the institutions that credential, publish, and platform could be occupied instead.

This is where a discipline should ask an empirical question rather than an ideological one. Occupying an institution is not the same as running it well, and a strategy built around capturing credentialing bodies produces a specific, predictable personnel problem. Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic theory, developed across Ages of Discord and subsequent work, describes what happens when a society produces far more credentialed aspirants to elite status than there are elite positions to hold them: law graduates, doctorate holders, activist-class professionals, all competing for a fixed and often shrinking number of visible slots.

I'm not sure "better to be outrageous and wrong than extraordinarily good" works as a get-hired strategy, but there it is.  "Extremity is a cheap, reliable signal in a market where everyone already has the degree."

The author's focus is on the popularity of potted Marxism in domestic politics these days.  A variant of it might be at work in academic hiring, although perhaps it helps to be conspicuously controversial and to belong to one or another of the personnel office's set of preferred hires.

SPONSORED RESEARCH IS RISK-AVERSE AND UNIMAGINATIVE.

An earlier post with that title opened,

I've come close to, but never explicitly said, that the use of the national institutes and national endowments to support academic research is censorship per se.  The closest I have come is to suggest that creativity that might otherwise be unbridled and more enthusiastic gets diverted into chasing whatever it is the institutes, endowments, and charitable foundations are funding.  "Whether the work so funded is better than the work professors develop on their own initiative remains to be seen."  It might be worse than that.  "Even if it's not that bad, the sponsored research imperative diverts thoughtful people from playing with whatever ideas appeal to them (yes, many of them might turn out to be bad or trivial, but that's how emergence works) in order to follow what appears to be a Hot Topic (the tragedy being that by the time those grants and working papers hit the conference and journal circuits, the discipline's stars are on to other things) or to make some money."

Put bluntly, it's money wasted.

The James G. Martin Center's Edward Archer characterizes grantsmanship as fostering "The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research."  In particular, "My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields."

That second post landed in January, 2020, shortly before the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding involved furrin cleavages.

Alas, for all Our President's efforts at swamp-draining, or swapping out one set of rent-seekers for another, it will still be business as usual, argues J. Scott Turner, in academic science.  "For 75 years, Washington has preached that science needs more government. The White House still believes it."

NO. NEXT QUESTION?

Power Line's John Hinderaker asks, "Can Democrats possibly be that stupid?"  The stupidity in question is a proposed New York mandate that grocery stores knock ten percent off the bill of any shopper who uses the self-service checkout.

Unintended Consequences have never been well understood by nanny state politicians.

If not hoping to legislate away high grocery prices, perhaps Donks use edginess might be a way of attracting attention.  "Satanist weddings, beheading chickens, fake weddings, passing bills that protect child sex predators, hanging out with terrorists, hiring pedophiles—what is going on with the Democratic Party?"

Let the hard rain fall.  Mr Hinderaker suggests, "No one should ever vote for a Democrat."

All they have to do is not be sick freaks, and that's a request too far.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE.

That's the quintessence of existential philosophy, if one excuses the oxymoron, as summarized by Jean-Paul Sartre.  There might be something to it all the same.

Now comes America's Newspaper of Record, perhaps with special knowledge of the ways of the Almighty, calling the roll of the damned.  "In Lieu Of Hell, Unbelieving Introverts Will Be Sent To A Business Networking Event That Lasts Forever."

BOREDOM IS SOPHISTICATION.

That's true of soporific public radio.

That's true of a concert of tenure music.

That's true of serious film (pronounced fillllllm).

That's true of juried art exhibitions.

Why should footie be any different?

It's “the beautiful game,” and for most of my adult life I’ve been patiently informed, usually by someone who calls it fútbol, that I simply lack the sophistication to appreciate it. But they’re wrong. Soccer isn’t beautiful. It’s boring, and it has nothing to do with sophistication.

The author documents a number of things, including outcomes often indistinguishable from a coin flip.

After a dozen footie-relevant posts in the past two months, it's time to put the dodecahedron back in the locker for a while.  That is, once stoppage time is done.

Sorry, I couldn't resist that parting shot!

Find yourself a circus and go to it.

THE PERILS OF PRESENTISM.

There is no topic so humble that an academic can't befoul it.  Consider "The Rise and Fall of the Public Sandbox."  It's a review of a book, which suggests a lot of Theorrhea is in hiding.

RADIO TEHERAN ATTENDS THE SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

"A Military Flyover Country Turns 250."  It's what we'd expect.

Every dollar spent on one of these performative fighter jet overpasses is a dollar stolen from our communities. The budget is a clear reflection of what the country values, and right now, our budget says we value genocide, destruction, and the theater of war over the substance of peace and the actual betterment of our communities, our country.

The America and Freedom 250 celebrations ask us to reflect on what our nation stands for, a nation started by genocide, carried out by slavery, fueled by exploitation, and exposing how militarism, racism, and fascism are on full display. Why do we spend trillions to destroy and destabilize the world, while spending pennies on investments to make our own communities actually safe?

The author (one of two, the proofreading is as bad as the logic) writes "as an Iranian immigrant."  If the cities of the "military flyover country" aren't actually safe, couldn't that author, oh, enjoy the safety and clean water in Teheran?  So much self-inflicted joylessness.