resiliency amidst adversity

It is humbling to witness the generosity of the nations who have helped the Philippines recover from the adverse effects of typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda.  Support of any kind means a lot to the simple people of our country, and that equates to a big "Thank You".  Moreover, I thank Anderson Cooper for his inspiring and insightful words about the Filipino people:

"When everything else is taken away, broken, battered, soaked, raw, stripped, bare, you see things; you see people as they really are.  This week in Tacloban, Samar and Cebu, amidst the hunger and thirst, the chaos and confusion, we've seen the best in the Filipino people -- their strength, their courage.  I can't get it out of my mind.  Imagine the strength it takes for a mother to search alone for her missing kids, the strength to sleep on the street near the body of her child. 

We've seen people with every reason to despair, every right to be angry, instead find ways to laugh, to love, to stand up, to move forward. 

A storm breaks wood and bone, brings hurt and heartbreak.  In the end, the wind, the water, the horror it brings is not the end of the story.

With aid and assistance, compassion and care, this place, these people... they will make it through.  They already survived the worst.  They're bowed, perhaps tired and traumatized, but they are not broken.

Mabuhay Philippines!  Maraming salamat for all you've shown us.  Maraming salamat for showing us all how to live." 

from: "Typhoon Haiyan: Ruin and Rescue", Anderson Cooper 360° (AC 360), CNN, November 15, 2013

Probably, Filipinos are naturally resilient, but I think it's also about the unwavering faith in God.

“The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one.  But it will only grow in the mud.  In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud -- the obstacles of life and its suffering. ... The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. ... Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death.  If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one.”

-- Goldie Hawn

do judge a storm by its cloud cover

Image Credit: NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

The rule is don't judge the book by its cover, but in the case of storms, this rule doesn't seem to hold.  Recently, the Philippines encountered what was considered to be the strongest storm ever recorded to make a landfall.  How did they know? In the case of the United States, particularly on matters relating to strong storms in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean, aircraft reconnaissance measurements are performed to measure wind speed and atmospheric pressure.  In the case of the Western Pacific, perhaps except super typhoon Tip in 1979 (considered to be the strongest storm ever recorded in terms of 10-minute maximum sustained winds with the lowest recorded atmospheric pressure, and also the largest storm in terms of diameter), there are no aircraft reconnaissance missions to obtain on-site data about the intensity of the tropical storms especially those storms hovering over ocean waters. Speaking of super typhoon Tip, it has entered the PAR (Philippine Area of Responsibility). It was named Warling by the Philippine weather bureau PAGASA, but it did not make its landfall in the Philippines; it moved to the north direction and hit Japan instead.

Strong typhoons get a lot of attention from satellite surveys; and from the looks of the satellite images of super typhoon Haiyan (locally known as Yolanda), it is considered to be one of the strongest storms that one could ever imagine, judging from its cloud patterns.  So how did they determine the intensity of the storm so that it merits some world record?  We cannot judge a book by its cover, but meteorologists say that we can judge a tropical storm by its satellite images using the Dvorak technique.  Through the Dvorak technique, a forecaster assigns a T-number to a storm after a detailed examination of the satellite images; well, it has some subjective aspects depending on the skill of the forecaster.  However, in the case of a skilled and experienced forecaster, estimates through the Dvorak technique have been found to be reliable through comparisons with the empirical data.  It was developed by Vernon Dvorak between 1969 and 1984, and as time goes on, it has been subjected to improvements such as increasing its objectivity through the automation of the technique.  The current version is known as the Advanced Dvorak Technique and is even more reliable than the previous versions.

Image Credit: 

NASA/SSAI, Hal Pierce

Purple indicates the coldest and most powerful thunderstorms. Note: 273 K = -0.15 deg. Celsius.  
(Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Image Credit: NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

Super typhoon Haiyan at its peak intensity (occurring on its first landfall in the Philippines) has been assigned a final T-number of 8.0 in http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/, which means it has winds of about 196 miles per hour or 315 kph (kilometers per hour).  You might be interested on the data found here: 31W-list.txt; and if you examine the raw T-numbers, a T-number of 8.1, which exceeds the upper bound of the scale, has been assigned.  Unofficially, this makes Haiyan the strongest storm ever recorded to make a landfall; and given the recorded 235 kph for 10-minute maximum sustained winds from JMA (Japan Meteorological Agency), it is the second most intense storm ever recorded after super typhoon Tip, which registered 260 kph.  Based on satellite imagery and its characteristics as a storm system, Haiyan is a wonder storm, but unfortunately, this is a destructive natural phenomenon that made its landfall in the Philippines on November 8, 2013.



More on the advanced Dvorak technique here: "The Advanced Dvorak Technique: Continued Development of an Objective Scheme to Estimate Tropical Cyclone Intensity Using Geostationary Infrared Satellite Imagery" by T.L. Olander and C.S. Velden, 2007 [pdf]

Braving the winds of Yolanda:

Image Credit: Ingo Vogelmann

on Perelman and the fate of the Universe

You might have heard of Grigori Perelman. This brilliant mathematician solved the "Poincaré conjecture" stated by Henri Poincaré as a question in his 1904 paper. The conjecture has been open for about a century before Perelman solved it through a series of arXiv e-prints in which the first one appeared in 2002.  It is one of the Millennium Prize Problems in which you will be awarded $1,000,000 for solving one of them.  However, the prize is clearly not the main motivation behind the attempt of solving one of these problems as a mathematician, a scientist, or any researcher for that matter.  With Perelman rejecting the prize after it was awarded to him in 2010, simply shows profound appreciation of the essence and relevance of the Poincaré conjecture in my opinion.  As Perelman put it in an interview:

"Why did we have to struggle with the Poincare conjecture for so many years? To put it in a nutshell, the essence of it is the following.  If a three-dimensional surface is reminiscent of a sphere, then it can be spread into a sphere.  It is known as the Formula of the Universe because it is highly important in researching complicated physical processes in the theory of creation.  The Poincare conjecture also gives an answer to the question about the shape of the Universe.",

one can see the philosophical importance of the problem.  When asked why he declined the prize, his answer was:

"... I know how to control the Universe. Why would I run after a million, tell me?"

This seems controversial, but he is clear about how valuable his discoveries were.  As for the phrase "control the Universe", one can see that this is more on the power of abstract thinking that through the solution of the Poincaré conjecture, one can fold the universe in a reversible process like crumpling a piece of paper into the smallest sphere possible and then unfold it back again.  Speaking of crumpling a piece of paper in the area of Physics, this process has mesmerized researchers in a sense that a process considered simple can be overwhelmingly more complicated than one would have thought.  To give you an idea, it is a very intricate process that requires massive force just like detonating an atomic bomb.  Just like the research on atomic bomb, a researcher should answer the "why" question first and consider its impact to humanity.

Nature can be that fascinating; kudos to the Creator of nature for that matter.

quote and quote and square brackets

Image Credit: Pietro Bellini (via flickr)

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
-- Isaac Newton



 

 

Image Credit: Sarah Ross (via flickr)

Image Credit: Lori Rielly (via flickr)

“No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.”
-- Isaac Newton

Image Credit: Daniel Doan (via flickr)

"Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. "
-- Donald Knuth

Image Credit: Paul Savala

"If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice."

-- Donald Knuth

Image Credit: Thomas Hawk

"The major cause [of the software crisis] is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products."

-- Edsger Dijkstra

"One of the most frequently mentioned equations was Euler's equation:

Respondents called it 'the most profound mathematical statement ever written'; 'uncanny and sublime'; 'filled with cosmic beauty'; and 'mind-blowing'. Another asked: 'What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?' The equation contains nine basic concepts of mathematics — once and only once — in a single expression. These are: e (the base of natural logarithms); the exponent operation; π; plus (or minus, depending on how you write it); multiplication; imaginary numbers; equals; one; and zero."

-- Robert P. Crease on "Euler's identity"