Standing Room

Wes Johnson’s short impromptu film of birds on power lines. 

powerlinerflyers from wes johnson on Vimeo

Music by Yann Tiersen. 

Comments

[Brian H]

That's lovely.

[Brian H]

It reminds me of this.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6484138201640748049

[Anna]

Wonderful. I love the shuffling along as more birds arrive.

[clazy]

I see things like this and inevitably wonder what patterns I'm participating in, and whether the difference between me and fundamental particles is only scale.

[clazy]

And then I see something like that Pixar short, and such ponderous thoughts are immediately ejected from my mind.

[David]

Clazy,

“I see things like this and inevitably wonder what patterns I'm participating in, and whether the difference between me and fundamental particles is only scale.”

Given that some of the forces governing particle interactions don’t “scale up” to human size, as it were, I’d guess the patterns are different. And fundamental particles don’t appear to have complex social obligations.

“And then I see something like that Pixar short, and such ponderous thoughts are immediately ejected from my mind.”

I think much the same thing applies to this site as a whole. Pondering epistemology or social construct theory is fine in moderate doses, but posting an occasional fart joke is quite important too.

[clazy]

Scale adds complexity, and the difference in patterns is a consequence of that. I suspect that as scale increases, minute irregularities also accumulate, materialistic/mechanistic explanations begin to fail, and humor squeezes through the gap. Insert fart joke.