Homer's Scream

Driving up Glenhove road this morning (the busy section just ofter you cross the M1) and heading up to Rosebank, I'm listening to 94.7 and it's about a guy who has suffered massive trauma in a car accident. Even Jerry Mansfield is moved to tears. While he was in a coma his wife died, and his poor children, the eldest just 12, had to deal with their mother's death on their own, going to her funeral whilst their father fought for his life. The dad survived, and while listening to this a white bakkie tried to overtake me. Yup, on Glenhove road in peak hour traffic, and I'm going uphill at 70km/h.

At the Oxford road intersection the bakkie pulls up on my left, so I lower my window. I ask the fella if he's listening to the 94.7 and amazingly he says 'Yes,' and smiles. Seems like a nice friendly oke. I tell him that he's just tried to overtake me on a helluva busy road whilst listening to a guy who punctured his lung and God knows what, lost his wife in a car accident that has permanently devastated his whole family - is it worth it? Is it worth the risk? Because - I tell him - even if you did overtake me, you would still have ended up waiting at this traffic light. Then the traffic light went green and off we went again.

Meanwhile, this morning my corpse rose from the dead at 4:30am for a cycle. I had a dream recently that I was in a car accident, and it's been in the back of my mind, I guess, to be extra vigilant. This morning was misty, and we missed the bunch, so rode hard to try to catch up to them. At one point we reached an intersection, the light just went green for traffic crossing as we approached, and Alex seemed to get the message from the car hovering there that he could go through. I was behind Alex, so I was alert to the fact that it was a bit more iffy for me. So I followed him through, and as I did, another car came around the side of the waiting car at the last moment. I swung out wide but JEEPERS I felt like I'd been drawn into a computer game sting...and a million vaults went through my body.

Today's stats:
Time - 1:38:54
HR: 148/172
Distance: 46km
Average speed: 27.9 (coming down the dip in the last 250m of the ride, going at high speed, a car approached it's driveway...another near miss)
Maximum speed: 77km/h
Temp: 15 min/24 max
Ascent: 525
Kcal: 1570

Ja, I've been playing an awesome computer game which must be good for survival skills and reflexes, but going to bed at 2am and last night after midnight and then getting up at 4:30am...
I feel myself falling asleep - I can hear Homer's yelpy scream every time I do ;-)

From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm (NYT)

Christian Ziegler/Agentur Focus
If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.

By CARL ZIMMER

Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.

Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.

“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”

The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.

By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.

Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.
“No matter how much you look at an individual army ant,” Dr. Couzin said, “you will never get a sense that when you put 1.5 million of them together, they form these bridges and columns. You just cannot know that.”

To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Couzin builds computer models of virtual swarms. Each model contains thousands of individual agents, which he can program to follow a few simple rules. To decide what those rules ought to be, he and his colleagues head out to jungles, deserts or oceans to observe animals in action.

Daniel Grunbaum, a mathematical biologist at the University of Washington, said his field was suddenly making leaps forward, as math and observation of nature were joined in the work of Dr. Couzin and others. “In the next 10 years there’s going to be a lot of progress.”
He said Dr. Couzin has been important in fusing the different kinds of science required to understand animal group behavior. “He’s been a real leader in bringing a lot of ideas together,” Dr. Grunbaum said. “He has a larger vision. If it works, that’ll be a big advance.”

In the case of army ants, Dr. Couzin was intrigued by their highways. Army ants returning to their nest with food travel in a dense column. This incoming lane is flanked by two lanes of outgoing traffic. A three-lane highway of army ants can stretch for as far as 150 yards from the ant nest, comprising hundreds of thousands of insects.

What Dr. Couzin wanted to know was why army ants do not move to and from their colony in a mad, disorganized scramble. To find out, he built a computer model based on some basic ant biology. Each simulated ant laid down a chemical marker that attracted other ants while the marker was still fresh. Each ant could also sweep the air with its antennas; if it made contact with another ant, it turned away and slowed down to avoid a collision.

Dr. Couzin analyzed how the ants behaved when he tweaked their behavior. If the ants turned away too quickly from oncoming insects, they lost the scent of their trail. If they did not turn fast enough, they ground to a halt and forced ants behind them to slow down. Dr. Couzin found that a narrow range of behavior allowed ants to move as a group as quickly as possible.

It turned out that these optimal ants also spontaneously formed highways. If the ants going in one direction happened to become dense, their chemical trails attracted more ants headed the same way. This feedback caused the ants to form a single packed column. The ants going the other direction turned away from the oncoming traffic and formed flanking lanes.

For more, go here.

Also read my article:

Why Insects Can't Fly Straight at Night

NVDL: It would be good to take heed, since traffic congestion appears to be an awesome example of human shortsightedness and stupidity. It's called rush hour, and everyone is stuck, burning fuel, getting nowhere quickly.