Project Hokusai Part II

So, the 4 consecutive typhoons have postponed my return to the island for longer than I'm willing to accept, but Project Hokusai: Fractal Waves has continued.  What began as a wave measuring project became much more of an engineering project.  I think that pictures & caption tell the story best.

As you may remember, this was my original design (real life pictured below)

It had issues with tipping upward with waves  instead of raising laterally.

Design 2 came to me when I was about to fall asleep one night.

Surprisingly, I was actually able to construct it.

But higher waters caused it to wrap around he poles.

Later that day I resorted to a solitary stick, and entering timestamps when waves hit it by hand on a tablet.

The solitary stick was actually quite successful, and yielded the cleanest yet least detailed data so far.  While this was happening an older couple approached me, and I was sure they were asking me why the heck I was staring at a stick.  I tried to talk to them a little bit…mostly using my charades skills I explained I was there to study monkeys but the waves were too big to get to the island.  I knew the Japanese word for pattern, and tried to say I was observing wave patterns.  Eventually, I realized they weren't trying to figure out what I was doing - they wanted to photograph me.  They had me sit in my chair and gaze off towards the island while they went full paparazzi.  They were traveling around for photography and came to photograph the waves and surfers.  I used the rest of the Japanese I knew - 'My name is Kelly, nice to meet you,' and they went on their way.

Design 4 - possibly the most sophisticated design.  I went with the tri-stick one, with hopes it would not flip.

This lasted for about a minute before getting knocked down.  Here are the shambles.

The Face of Failure.

Hybrid design - never actualized.

Another design (actually drawn out before the bamboo raft)

I finally acquired a proper tube floatie!

Inspecting Design 5.  It worked fairly well, but eventually the sticks fell over. Also, it would occasionally flip.

While the tube was an improvement, I decided the more complex designs were doomed to fail because the ocean is chaotic and unpredictable, so the more parts and components, the harder it was to predict how the device would behave.

Design 6 - beautiful in it's simplicity.  

Design 7, when Design 6 failed.

Save the trial!!!

This last design seems to work the best, but I was having issues keeping the stick from falling over (probably because the waves were decent sized).  I will return to this design again in the future, with hopes to collect more wave data!

Some other beach photos:

This ledge and rock pile was not there a few days before. 

When there are surfers in the bay, it is not a good sign for island access...

Fractal!

Can anyone ID this bone?

Creature (I threw it back in the water)

dead creature

Large waves behind the dock!

Fractal Waves

Tuesday, 14 July

I’ve been reading a great book suggested by Andrew called Chaos: Making a New Science.  It is about the discoveries/unification of chaos theory and complexity science (Lorenz attractors, logistic map, fractals, etc).  A lot of these pioneering scientists were studying turbulence: weather or fluid dynamics.  This book has been a nice complement to my daily walks/jogs along the beach, where I’ve been paying particular attention to all the patterns!

As Benoit Mandelbrot pointed out, Hokusai, the famous Japanese artist, shows the fractal nature of waves – waves within waves within waves (and fractal patterns in the cloud outlines too!)

Hokusai - The Great Wave

Waves around Koshima.

What scale is this pictures? Kind of hard to tell! 

These patterns are amazing.  Sand or carpet??

Eventually, I got an idea:  if I couldn’t study monkeys because of the waves, why don’t I study the waves?  They have fractal patterns too!  At first I was half joking, but the more I thought about it, I decided, why not?  Maybe it could give me some data to play with!  I’m going to study fractals, darn it!  With or without monkeys.

My original plan was to sit out and collect data on waves as they passed by – time series of the waves and possibly height, if I could plant a yardstick in the sand.  The plan began evolving as I started thinking about what materials I had.  I had rope.  There were ample abandoned buoys, bamboo sticks, and rocks on the beach.  I had a waterproof bag.  I had an iphone, which had accelerometers inside of it.  Maybe there was an App I could get that could extract this data?  There totally is!

Today I gave it a try: iphone in 2 plastic bags inside a water-proof bag which floats if filled with air, wrapped around a large stick stuck in the sand.  I attached a second rope to the bag and a rock planted further up shore, so if the stick breaks or falls I won’t lose my phone.

My first time planting the stick it had fallen over by the time I got back to my beach mat, and no data had been recorded by the app : /  I found a large rock to hammer the bamboo further into the ground, which lasted the rest of the time.  After a little over an hour I took it down to check out the data.  Success!

Supplies.

A version of the contraption.

New study site? 

Now THIS is the way to collect data!!

I have no idea what this means or how to interpret accelerometer data, but I have data! (And, something to do during the impending typhoon!) 

raw data

My hope is to collect more data, come up with a plan for refining the data to get at wave magnitude, and running fractal analysis on the sequences to see what wave magnitude scaling might be like.  Previous studies have actually used this type of analysis on off-shore ocean waves height, with hopes to better understand wave patterns to inform breakwater design (shore protection, offshore platforms, etc).  I don’t necessarily expect to produce anything that would be that useful or legitimate…right now all I have is a make-shift ocean powered pendulum…but it will be a fun fractal side project while I’m waiting!  I hope to improve on the design tomorrow, possibly using some buoys I collected on the beach.

New life philosophy: when life gives you lemons…measure them! 

Typhoon Season

7 July – 13 July

I was told it would be unlikely I would make it back to the island for at least a week.  I didn’t believe it until it happened.

It is important (and frustrating) to note that the weather itself has not been bad (yet).  The ocean waves are just too rough to make it across to the island.  Even though (and possibly because) the island is so close, the waves are especially rough between it and the mainland – waves come from both directions and meet into a choppy bay of no travel.

That is the boat dock...

My attempt to fly to Koshima.

Cecile, a French student at the Primate Research Institute/Kyoto University and her friend Clemence, a student at University of Montpellier, stayed here for 4 days.  It was so great to have the company, and to meet international primatologists!  Cecile has previously done fieldwork on Koshima, so she is familiar with the area and introduced me to some locals, which was fantastic.  Hooray for new friends!

They left back to Inuyama on Thursday, and when the weekend came, I was alone again (there are 2 people here working on weekdays though!).  However, Ichiki, the tiny hippie/surfer town the field station is located in, is not a bad place to be stuck!  I pretty much have a private beach, the area is tropical and beautiful.  Life is quite stress-free.

The Field Station.

Jog on the beach - gotta stay in shape for Koshima!

Is this from a squid? Does anyone know?

On Saturday I went to Cafe10, a café owned by the family Cecile introduced me to.  It was awesome!  They were also so kind to host me for dinner :)

But, while the weather has been nice with rough seas, this will not be the case for long. Here are some weather maps:

8 July: Oh man, three typhoons in the area!!  At least they are south of me.

11 July: But wait!  Typhooon #3 is moving north!

13 July: Holy crap!  It is coming right towards us! And there is a FORTH typhoon on the way!

Here is a map of the waves resulting from the southern typhoon (typhoon #2). I'm on the east coast of that big chunk of land near the middle.

Here is a current wave map.  Notice the legend…that is in METERS. 

The typhoon should hit sometime around Thursday.  Yesterday the post doc working at the field station gave me an emergency briefing.  Apparently there was an earthquake yesterday too, but I didn't feel it.  If there is a tsunami, an alarm will sound and I am supposed to run up a nearby hill to a high look-out.  If there is a bad typhoon or something of the sort, an announcement will be made in Japanese that will tell people to prepare, buy food, etc.  So, alarm = go to hill.  Voice over the speaker = stay in. 

Also, I have this:

 Wish me luck! :P