a tendency towards spontaneous order
a. all individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors
b. have a tendency to align in the same direction
c. all attracted to each other, but try to keep some distance.
fish 1 body length apart, birds 3 or 4 body lengths apart.
when a predator's coming, get out of the way. then try to get back together.
advantages: your odds of being the one eaten is reduced. waves of panic can propagate. information is sent about half a kilometer in birds in a very short time.
find Steven Strogatz whole talk about nature and sync here.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
John Maeda makes stuff
in this video hosted at ted.com, John Maeda talks about his life and work. he shows lots of experiments where he makes students function as parts of a computer. he also made a drawing program that has the feature where you can make a piece move about entirely randomly.
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