First Clostridium difficile and then all humans…

Dalek-like robots are being employed to clean the wards of a North Wales hospital.

Darlek
Robomen being lead by a Dalek. Image by the BBC.

One of my friends (who shall remain nameless) was worried about robots taking over the world. His nightmares will only get worse!

roboman
A member of the cleaning staff at Glan Clwyd hospital in Bodelwyddan. Image by the BBC.

Link
Robot cleaners used cut hospital infection in north Wales

This is like so random…

Below are random walks on the plane (not a lattice) for which step size gets (on average) smaller and smaller with each step. I pick the step size using the Maxwell-Boltzman distribution (with a =1) and a suitable scaling which depends on the iteration parameter. I the add a opacity depending on how many times the points are visited: bright white means a lot, while grey means not many and black never.

I may play with these further, but they make some interesting pattens. We have approximate self-similarity and so these patterns have fractal-like properties. Anyway, enjoy….

random10

random1

random2

random5

These images were created for artistic rather than scientific reasons. That said, random walks are have been applied to many fields including ecology, economics, psychology, computer science, physics, chemistry, and biology.

Probably the most famous application of a random walk is to Brownian motion, which describes the trajectory of a tiny particle diffusing in a fluid. I have no idea if there is anything scientific in these images, but I would not be surprised if for small step sizes we have approximately Brownian motion. However, I would need to think a lot more about this before making concrete statements.