Another photo (of flamingos, by JM Labat/Ardea.com) which I wanted to put on my blog for no reason other than I just like it
Which set me wondering, why am I drawn so to photos of birds?
The miracle of flight, the colours, the song, are obvious attractions of birds in real life. But why photographs particularly?
I started to think it must be something to do with symmetry – the pleasing curves, the fascination of feathers
And something about the way they organise themselves in flocks
Which jogged my memory about an article in the June issue of Significance which I had put aside to read later. I am so pleased that it was not just one of those things which slipped down the pile of forgetfulness because it is just so interesting & nicely, even lyrically, written by Andrea Cavagna & Irene Giardina
It is The Seventh Starling & reports results from a European Commission funded project call STARFLAG (surely even UKIP could not carp at that)
For 3 years researchers photographed flocks of starlings form the roof of The Museum of Roman Art. They then applied some clever maths & stats to analyse in 3D the behaviour of the flocks
This kind of collective behaviour is self-organised – there is no leader or special form of intelligence at work. It generally stems from simple rules such as stay close to your neighbours & match your speed to theirs
The STARFLAG project came up with a surprise. Instead of interacting with all neighbours within a fixed distance, starlings react with a fixed number of neighbours, regardless of how far away they are
They use a topological measure of distance (rather like the London Tube map) rather than a tapemeasure. unlike physics, whose laws (so far) all depend upon metric measurement
In the starlings case the number of neighbours is 7
The authors end with some speculation about how often the number 7 pops up in biology & social science
Which left me thinking about 6 degrees of separation. I have never played the game, but I wonder: does it refer to the connections between 6 people, or to the 6 connections which link 7 people?
This self-organising principle has implications for politics, & helps show how attempts to organise us all from the centre, to make us conform (even when it is Good For Us) are doomed to failure
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