Night 49: Arts & Crafts Room
[from here]
Teleportation, check. Mild Inner-ear disturbance, also check. This was the first room S.T. could definitively ID, and it wasn't anywhere near where they'd been.
A random walk. A concept normally applied to things that moved without conscious volition. At each fractional timestep, nothing could be said relating the previous step to the next. Hence, random walk. If there was only one axis of freedom, plotted against time, it looked like this:
Drunkards were the classical example, although their movement was actually more complex -- the point as which one couldn't at least keep from turning 180 degrees on a single step tended to be the step that changed axes and fell off the bridge through a full rotation. That meant adding a nonrandom term to the walk. In two dimensions, that led to something like this:
Which was familiar to anyone who'd ever had to take or administer a sobriety test. Or looked out their second-story window on a Saturday night anywhere within a few miles of a college campus.
Excited gases were a much simpler example, if less familiar to an audience of laymen. Laypersons. Whatever. Molecules were mindless. They got hot and ping-ponged around in all directions, creating an even distribution of pressure from a process that was anything but steady. Same with crowds. Get them to the boiling point and anyone (and no one) would push them over the brink.
Maybe that was the problem? Had last night's tease had a kernel of truth, and now Landel was cranking up the heat in order to avoid a more intelligent attack? Naah. Fucker just wanted to was them stumble around, trying to piece together a theory of particle physics as applied to large objects by empiricism alone. Einstein had been a genius, but he'd been wrong about the dice. None of which applied here, where S.T. knew which asshole was doing the rolling.
He shrugged. "We knew he had the tech. For the therapy rooms." The level of sarcasm in S.T.'s voice on the word therapy was excessive by even his lax standards, but it made his meaning clear.
Teleportation, check. Mild Inner-ear disturbance, also check. This was the first room S.T. could definitively ID, and it wasn't anywhere near where they'd been.
A random walk. A concept normally applied to things that moved without conscious volition. At each fractional timestep, nothing could be said relating the previous step to the next. Hence, random walk. If there was only one axis of freedom, plotted against time, it looked like this:
Drunkards were the classical example, although their movement was actually more complex -- the point as which one couldn't at least keep from turning 180 degrees on a single step tended to be the step that changed axes and fell off the bridge through a full rotation. That meant adding a nonrandom term to the walk. In two dimensions, that led to something like this:
Which was familiar to anyone who'd ever had to take or administer a sobriety test. Or looked out their second-story window on a Saturday night anywhere within a few miles of a college campus.
Excited gases were a much simpler example, if less familiar to an audience of laymen. Laypersons. Whatever. Molecules were mindless. They got hot and ping-ponged around in all directions, creating an even distribution of pressure from a process that was anything but steady. Same with crowds. Get them to the boiling point and anyone (and no one) would push them over the brink.
Maybe that was the problem? Had last night's tease had a kernel of truth, and now Landel was cranking up the heat in order to avoid a more intelligent attack? Naah. Fucker just wanted to was them stumble around, trying to piece together a theory of particle physics as applied to large objects by empiricism alone. Einstein had been a genius, but he'd been wrong about the dice. None of which applied here, where S.T. knew which asshole was doing the rolling.
He shrugged. "We knew he had the tech. For the therapy rooms." The level of sarcasm in S.T.'s voice on the word therapy was excessive by even his lax standards, but it made his meaning clear.