Given a couple of spare hours preceding sleep and a day off work tomorrow (as all my Fridays are), and a temporary relinquishment of the pains of a course in International Finance, for a few minutes preceding the setting down of these words I thought that I might upload a video file of a flock of Brant geese on the waters near Parksville, taken during a recent weekend getaway. But the sometimes intricate mechanics of electronic file conversion has, for now, usurped my attempts and caused me to re-direct the focus of my ramblings for the night.
However, before leaving the subject of Brant geese, a subject to which I will return, I must comment that these are remarkable birds from the perspective of collective phenomena generally. I had observed how closely clustered these birds were as they floated on the heaving cold waters near to the shoreline, and I watched how they would adjust their positions when relocating en masse by drifting in behind each other, much as cyclists do when speeds are driven to a certain output threshold at which riders self-organize into a synchronized paceline. Another example of the “drafting effect”, I thought, as I watched them. The drafting effect is of course the description I apply to any natural self-organized process whereby agents in a system save energy by following others.
So, I managed to capture a brief digital video of the flock on the water, albeit in fairly poor quality. But I will leave the vagaries of file uploads for another time, when the hour is not so near the stroke of midnight, and the lids less heavy.
That said, as the seconds wind on inexorably toward that moment when today becomes tomorrow, when evening becomes morning; that moment when I vow to cry for the night “I can no more” and send myself to bed – in the intervening time there is little left of detail to be expressed, but merely a mood, a cloud of sensations which emerge from a unique sequence of synaptic events that crystallize to a few phrases on a white, empty, digital space.
Ah there it is! I can no more.
This shall be continued soon.
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