Spanish 'running of the bulls' festival reveals crowd movements can be predicted
phys.org
phys.org
The parent comment sounds funny but is not directly relevant to the content of the article.
Also note that not all crowds are the same. I went to some metal concerts where the moves would exhibits very different moves, including less packed and steal, split in in very highly packed borders before an abrupt run and merge, as well as creating protection circle around someone who falls on the ground. I actually didn't witnessed any major crowd incident in such a concert, so I would be interested to have statistics about outcomes of a crowd panic in a metal concert vs in a cinema for example.
Essentially if you want a max density in area A, you enforce some other max densities in the area several times larger than A.
One interesting thing about Hajj is that not only is travel to a specific place mandated but also travel in a specific path and direction; you need to walk around the Kaaba seven times and walking between the hills of Safa and Marwah seven times.
Given the Kaaba is only 12m x 10.5m its a very small place to concentrate people in.
This is not new in any way, btw. This paper seems to specifically address the running of the bulls.
Would this to some extent be how actual fluid (e.g. water) move as well? I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there from one side of the liquid to the other side.
> I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there
That is how gasses are. Although in that case there are lots of high speed elastic collisions happening.
This allows him to predict planetary + galactic scale events, including a surprising and imminent regression of humanity into a new Dark Age.
There’s a smarter treatment of the idea in the John C. Wright’s “Count to the Eschaton” series.
Do you not the know the Second Foundation?
In fact, that mathematics turns out to be much more widely applicable than mere Psychohistory, since it applies to all systems of all types and purposes, not just human societies. A small system like a web server is simple enough that you or I can confidently predict its eventual failure; the hardware simply doesn’t last forever so eventually a disk will fail or a capacitor will pop or whatever. But the company running the web server is a much more complex system that is much harder to predict. Does the company fail if it pivots to a different market and turns off the web server? Or if the cleaning lady unplugs it once a week to vacuum? If you want that particular web server, or the pages it serves, to last forever then you really have to design that corporation well. You don't want it to divert from the plans you gave it when the market changes and there is more profit to be made elsewhere. In fact to keep that web server running over the long term you really might have to design the society around it so that the situation _doesn’t_ change too much. Society will keep changing as fads come and go and people are born and die, but you want it to always orbit a chaotic attractor of your choosing in the phase space of possible societies.
The series takes this idea to its logical extreme, giving the main characters access to and control over larger and larger systems until they are controlling vast galactic superclusters. The degree to which the many myriad intelligences, human and otherwise, in those vast systems can carry out the main character’s purposes over deep time depends on how well the rules they have devised work and how well those intelligences understand and implement them.
To be fair, the Foundation series it takes literally centuries for events to play out.
A lot of self-interested motives would not be well served by that timeframe.
The premise was that even being aware of the impending collapse was not enough to stop it.
Ant farm is the kind where dirt/sand is poured in between two glass panes and you watch them build tunnels and watch the ants interact with various things you drop inside it).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987646
(6 days ago, 92 points, 41 comments)
It also seems to specify the density with which these properties emerge
I was wondering if Crypto whales use this insight to create FOMO and make them buy shitcoins in their pump and dump schemes.
If we represent:
- the "price is rising or falling" as "a bull is approaching"
- a combination of percentage stake + your buy price as "how close you are to the bull" (as in, how much you'd be impacted)
- a sell action as "running in a particular direction"
and so on, then that could perhaps be a decent model?
> The sculpture was created by Italian artist Arturo Di Modica in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. Late in the evening of Thursday, December 14, 1989, Di Modica arrived on Wall Street with Charging Bull on the back of a truck and illegally dropped the sculpture outside of the New York Stock Exchange Building.
See: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Wa...
Totally willing to believe I’m just naive about this; I don’t see what “bull market vs. bear market” has to do with the running of the bulls festival.
> The terms come from London's Exchange Alley in the early 18th century, where traders who engaged in naked short selling were called "bear-skin jobbers" because they sold a bear's skin (the shares) before catching the bear. This was simplified to "bears," while traders who bought shares on credit were called "bulls." The latter term might have originated by analogy to bear-baiting and bull-baiting, two animal fighting sports of the time.
I feel dumber having just written that out. Don't they teach reading comprehension at school any more?