14Apr / 2020

Simulation of droplets while social distancing

Using 3-D simulation data from the Kyoto Institute of Technology, The New York Times shows how droplets from a sneeze or a cough can spread in a space. In a nutshell, six feet is the recommendation while in public areas, but the farther you away you can stay away the better. Go to the end, and there’s also an augmented reality segment that puts a six-foot range around you.

I may never set foot in a crowded place again.

See also: how different cough coverings can change the spread of droplets.

Tags: coronavirus, droplets, New York Times, simulation, social distancing

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30Mar / 2020

Simulating an epidemic

3Blue1Brown goes into more of the math of SIR models — which drive many of the simulations you’ve seen so far — that assume people are susceptible, infectious, or recovered.

Tags: 3Blue1Brown, coronavirus, epidemic, simulation

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15Mar / 2020

Simulations for virus spread with social distancing

Social distancing is the game plan these days. Try to stay at home and avoid contact with others as much as you can. But why? For The Washington Post, Harry Stevens used simplified simulations of an imaginary virus to show how social distancing can flatten the curve.

Tags: coronavirus, Harry Stevens, simulation, social distancing, Washington Post

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02Mar / 2020

Super Tuesday simulator

With Super Tuesday on the way, there’s still a lot of uncertainty for what’s going to happen. FiveThirtyEight has their forecast, but even with results expressed as odds and probabilities, the outcome almost seems static and concrete. So FiveThirtyEight has a different way of poking at their forecast. Pick the winners in each state, note how the conditional probabilities change as you go, and see what might happen in the rest of the primary given your picks.

Tags: election, FiveThirtyEight, simulation, Super Tuesday, uncertainty

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10Sep / 2019

A sim to show self-driving car challenges

On the surface, driving a car might seem fairly straightforward. Follow the rules of the road, don’t crash, and watch out for others. So why not just let a computer do all of the work? The Washington Post provides an interactive simulator to put you in the passenger seat and see for yourself.

Tags: game, self-driving, simulation, Washington Post

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07Jun / 2019

Simulation of fan emotions during a basketball game

During a game, the range of emotions can vary widely across a crowd. Will Hipson, making use of some emotion dynamics, simulated how that range can change through a game:

What I’m striving to simulate are the laws of emotion dynamics (Kuppens & Verduyn, 2017). Emotions change from moment to moment, but there’s also some stability from one moment to the next. Apart from when a basket is scored, most fans cluster around a particular state (this is called an attractor state). Any change is attributable to random fluctuations (e.g., one fan spills some of their beer, maybe another fan sees an amusing picture of a cat on their phone). When a basket is scored, this causes a temporary fluctuation away from the attractor state, after which people resort back to their attractor.

I want to simulate emotion dynamics for all the things now.

Tags: basketball, emotion, simulation

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15May / 2019

Interactive explainer for how disease and ideas spread through a network

Kevin Simler uses interactive simulations to explain how things — ideas, disease, memes — spread through a network. It always looks like concentrated chaos to begin, but then the things infect quickly. Adjust variables, press play, and watch them go.

Tags: diffusion, network, simulation

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16Oct / 2018

Optimized bubble tea consumption

When you drink bubble tea, ideally you’d like to finish with the same proportions of boba and tea that you started at. Krist Wongsuphasawat took care of the math and provides a simulator for this ever important challenge:

This article simulates an optimized sip based on amount of boba and tea in the straw before sipping (method adopted from this post). The simulation assumes that all bobas sit in the bottom of the cup and stack on top of each other nicely. If you put a straw straight down when there are n layers of bobas, you will get n bobas in the straw. The rest of the straw up to the drink’s height is tea. The drinker sips until all n bobas are in his/her mouth then stop. After each sip these n bobas and tea inside the straw are gradually reduced from the cup.

The final recommendations: use a slim cup, minimize ice, and drink strongly. Mess around with variables here.

Tags: boba, simulation

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15May / 2018

Subway delays visually explained

Adam Pearce for The New York Times describes the sad state of affairs that is the delayed subway trains in New York. One delay causes a ripple effect down the line, leaving little chance to get back on track. The more straightforward figures gear you up for the overall view at the end.

This was for New York specifically but is applicable to other transits and forms of transportation. See also the traffic gridlock simulation from a few years ago. It doesn’t take much for gridlock.

Tags: New York Times, simulation, subway

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11Dec / 2017

Simulation shows swirling of smoke, sea salt, and dust around the world

NASA. Data. Good.

Tracking the aerosols carried on the winds let scientists see the currents in our atmosphere. This visualization follows sea salt, dust, and smoke from July 31 to November 1, 2017, to reveal how these particles are transported across the map.

The first thing that is noticeable is how far the particles can travel. Smoke from fires in the Pacific Northwest gets caught in a weather pattern and pulled all the way across the US and over to Europe. Hurricanes form off the coast of Africa and travel across the Atlantic to make landfall in the United States. Dust from the Sahara is blown into the Gulf of Mexico. To understand the impacts of aerosols, scientists need to study the process as a global system.

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Tag Archives: simulation

Simulating an epidemic

Super Tuesday simulator

A sim to show self-driving car challenges

Simulation of fan emotions during a basketball game

Interactive explainer for how disease and ideas spread through a network

Optimized bubble tea consumption

Subway delays visually explained

Simulation shows swirling of smoke, sea salt, and dust around the world

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