Open or Closed Systems

The tall building in the center of the background is on Date. It just happens to be close to the path of wind from Palolo Valley to Liliuokalani Ave. When Palolo winds are active, they most often appear to pass by to the right and close to this Date Street building (Harmonic Constraint) and head down Liliuokalani (our building is also tall and also acts as a Harmonic Constraint). We can feel the strength of this wind when we are walking on Liliuokalani.

Date Avenue Building

Note the fact that you can see a house or building (including the large building on Date) in this picture means that house has a good view of Waikiki.

Waikiki Map with Path to and from the Food Pantry

Walina is an important street - along with Liliuokalani - because we walked down Liliuokalani to get to Kuhio and then walked over to the Food Pantry to get groceries. Then we went back up Walina to the Ala Wai Canal to walk home.

Most days the Palolo winds were blowing down Liliuokalani but many days there would be no wind on Liliuokalani but, often instead, a strong wind would be blowing down Walina. There is about four blocks between the two streets and the wind does not seem to choose any intermediate routes - just Liliuokalani or Walina. There are two constraint factors that effect this: the large (and tall) building on Date St. that could make the Palolo wind choose sides of that building based on trade winds at that moment; the area along the Ala Wai between our building and the building just past Walina has a lot of (mostly) short buildings (many are only 2 and 3 stories). I call it an Inter-nodal Region, since it appears, because there are no strong constraints (large, particularly tall, buildings), the wind “waves” form short periods of amplification with lots of nodes. I can see this in the fact that there is little wave patterns on the Ala Wai which shows up on the Canal surface, which shows large areas of mirror-like reflections (the surface is flat). These mirror areas of no waves on the Canal is why I call this inter-nodal. Sometimes the non wave area is more or less in the center of the Canal. This is because the sides (as constraints) of the canal produce enough of a wind effect to have some wave action near the edges of the Canal but these are not strong enough to affect the whole width of the Canal.

Note: with open systems (like in this wind example) the constraints seem to create a (one) unique path for the harmonic process. The actual path could change (a Harmonic Leap) with other contexts, like Trade Winds. With closed systems the constraints develop a set of solutions that could be called harmonics, theme and variations, or eigenfunctions, like an organ pipe. The waves on the water are harmonic in nature as the waves show quite complex patterns consistent with “harmonic” overtones.. From normal observation, these waves could never be considered simple “sin” waves. The local production of the waves is a closed system. This seems to be due to the internal cyclic behavior of the wave form itself.

Jerome Heath