Heavy Metal and Emergent Behavior

You may think that moshing and disordered 2D gases don't have much in common but Jesse Silverberg of Cornell University contends otherwise. He says that mosh pits act just like disordered gases and people in circle pits act in an ordered vortex-like state. From the article: "Silverberg and co gathered their data by examining videos of mosh pits on You Tube... These crowds contain anything from 100 to 100,000 people. After correcting for camera shake and distortions in perspective, they used particle image velicometry techniques to measure the collective motion of moshers. What they discovered was that the speed distribution of moshers closely matches that of molecules in a 2D gas at equilibrium."

Weird

[Neil Boekend]

My experience with smaller mosh pits (guess: up to 50 headbangers) indicates a different pattern, more like a sloshing wave. Most people move in one direction until they get near the edge and then go back.
Is this a size thing? The mosh pits analyzed in this story are bigger. Changes that the behavior?

Translation at work

[Tagged_84]

This really flows well with the book I'm reading at the moment, The God Problem by Howard Bloom. This is an example of translation causing transformation, the movement of the gas molecules is a recruitment strategy that is dominate enough to cross between different, err things? The same pattern in the gas create a social/group activity when translated to humans. One of the examples given in the book outlines how bacterial colonies in Petri dishes spread out in fractal patterns just like those found in rocks.

It's a fairly stretched out book, I originally started reading it for his theory of the shape of our universe, a bagel. In theory it replaces dark energy with gravity to explain the accelerated burst and subsequent slow down experienced by the early universe as well as the missing anti-matter. 250 pages in and it's covered the history of science while explaining how we miss what's right under our nose, such as the Egyptians making perfect right angles using the golden ratio and never discovering the concept of angles. Highly recommend it!