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Let’s Go with the Flow
MEMO from the School of Tomorrow, Oregon Curriculum Network, Portland, Silicon Forest, Cascadia, Pacific Rim
Intuitions around water flow, fluid dynamics, prove remarkably informative across multiple fields, we have discovered.
Close readers of Synergetics will find the passages wherein an optimal default fluid state is sandwiched between its two outliers: the crystalline (a subtracted degree of freedom) and the gaseous (an added degree of freedom).
We may interpret “crystalline” to be a feature of a language, as when Wittgenstein speaks of our search for a logic.
The analogy between “a reservoir”, “a battery”, and what computer science calls “a buffer”, is pretty tight. In all cases, we have the concept of “saving for a rainy day” in the sense of an ability to delay consequences (of a lack of sunlight for example).
The electricity delivery business is especially tricky because supply and demand must meet in real time, such that extra capacity is standing by to be drawn upon, which is when extra generators become handy, or storage batteries.
Batteries up to powering a city grid are still a novelty, but we all know the power of car batteries to stroke an internal combustion engine into action even before…
