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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (10010)	9/22/2001 12:22:34 AM
From: Stock Farmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Now that was a nice post!

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (10010)	9/22/2001 11:06:46 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Thanks for the information. If you've never experienced the traffic phenomenon I am talking about, and are ever in the Washington metro region, I'd be happy to take you for a drive on I-66 in search of it. There's a section of highway going through Falls Church where you can almost always find it. I am not metaphysically certain but have often speculated that the city fathers of Falls Church use giant electromagnets to slow down highway traffic, because there's nothing about the road that can explain the slowdown.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (10010)	9/22/2001 2:41:30 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Respond to of 74559

the Reynold's number has some interesting applications. in a recent issue of Scientific American, researchers described their method for large-scale modeling of the wing movement of a flying insect--the movement is too fast to produce mechanically at the same speed, but using the Reynold's number, they calculated the viscosity for a liquid in which the large (2-3 ft) mechanical wing was placed. the wing was then operated at very low speed, but with a Reynold's number equivalent to that of the insect's, to model the wing path. what happens when a humming economy, running fast in laminar flow but near its Reynolds number hits a bump in the road. while i found your description of traffic flow very interesting, i am not too convinced of analogizing, however conceptually, to a "laminar flow" model of economy. in addition, modeling of turbulence as a local event feeding only backwards down the flow on only one road is not accurate. the economy to me seems more like a vastly complex clock, or rather groups of clocks, intermeshing with each other on numerous dimensions, including physical, financial and psychological. this model has both feedback and feedforward mechanisms affecting its behavior. it is as if the traffic cop, seeing the behavior of the slowing traffic on the other side of the road, alters the behavior of other traffic cops on different roads throughout the world. not to mention that the cars seeing the cop pulled over affect the behavior of all other car travelers on different roads, as well as car sales and financing of car makers and car buyers and car travelers and feeders of car travelers and educators of the children of feeders of car travelers, throughout the world (including those cars farther up the very road being traveled). and then those reactions feed back into the system in ways that quickly become too complex for a computer less than God to model. just like the weather. this means we cannot begin to postulate some Reynold's number for a complex system like the economy.