Mandelbrot Monkey: 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: