My name is Mason Porter. I am a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at UCLA. Previously I was Professor of Nonlinear and Complex Systems in the Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford. I was also a Tutorial Fellow of Somerville College.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Birds on a Wire
On the taxi ride to the airport, I saw a set of three power lines that were parallel to each other and arrayed vertically.
The bottom one had 1 bird perched on it, the middle one has 3 perched birds, and the top one had a large number of birds on it (too many for me to count).
Any ideas what the mechanism is for this? Is there a preference for height? Does it have a bit of a DLA-like flavor in that a bird lands on the first available wire from something like a random walk or Levy flight such that it's more likely to "stick" on the top one? Does anybody know if somebody has tried to model this?
Also: Mine.
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