Crowdsourcing

I came across this extremely well written article on Evolution and the Wisdom of Crowds. It analyzes three very successful instances of when crowdsourcing has worked wonders: Wikipedia, Prediction markets and Recommendation systems. The part on Prediction markets is especially good.

Global Regularity for Navier-Stokes

We've all heard of the Navier-Stokes equations: they are the fundamental equations that describe any kind of fluid flow and are, in a sense, Newton's second law written specifically for fluids. The real charm of these equations is that they describe an enormous number of physical phenomena, right from relatively simple flows in pipes to massive air currents in the atmosphere.

These equations also have another, more notorious, claim to fame : nobody has ever proven that solutions to these set of equations exist in 3 dimensions ( the real world ). Even if we assume that 3-d solutions exist, nobody has proven till now that the solution will be physically meaningful ( that they do not contain 'spikes' or 'jumps' ). Here we are, with a set of equations that we know describe a large set of physical phenomena. We know the physical phenomena exist, but we haven't yet proven in theory, that our equations make sense!

The Clay Mathematics Institute includes the proof of existence and smoothness of the Navier-Stokes equations as one of its seven Millennium problems. Terrence Tao - the Australian child prodigy who became a full professor at UCLA at the ripe age of 24 - has written an very detailed analysis of the problem from a purely mathematical point of view. Take a look:

Why global regularity for Navier-Stokes equation is hard

Flywheels Ahoy!

I found this interesting article on flywheels as energy storage devices on reddit. It talks of advances in flywheel design that might soon enable us to use them as reliable and efficient energy storage devices, especially in the context of storing solar energy:

The Mechanical Battery

And we so love Cold Opens and In Medias Res :) !

Hello and Welcome!

Hello, and Welcome to the PMM3 blog! We are students of Mechanical Engineering at IIT Madras, and we thought it'd be a nice idea to have a blog about interesting stuff in Mechanical Engineering.

We were searching around lots for a name, and finally hit on PMM3 - The Perpetual Motion Machine of the Third kind - <corny alert> The one that violates the principle of mental inertia! </corny alert>

We're planning to have all kinds of articles: theoretical, practical, historical, DIYs , all related to Mechanical Engineering, that have one common trait: they should evoke that lovely feeling you get when you understand how an intricate system works, or how suddenly a formula looks so beautiful after you understand what that extra term meant, or even the sheer joy of knowing something entirely new.For the first few weeks, we will publish the articles ourselves, so that _we_ get to know clearly what the blog should stand for, and soon we'll solicit articles from all of
our readers.

We hope one day PMM3 will be on every Engineer's fingers, as Slashdot is on every geek's ;) We'll be back with our first article soon, and until then,take care!