self organised criticality

the other day john was playing with the sugar in the coffee room - trying to smooth the sugar into a critical slope against the side of the bowl. it reminded me of my condensed matter course. it was one of my favourite courses - very interesting and well taught. one of the things we looked at was self organised criticality. in the case of the pile of sugar, this describes the processes which force the slope to have some critical angle. you notice that there are little landslides that occur to make this happen. amazingly, this can all be described physically - and has applications in a variety of fields, in particularly earthquakes. here is a link to the site of my lecturer.

take a look at his other stuff as well.