"When traffic over their backs is above a certain level, they hold in place, but when it dips below some threshold — perhaps because too many other ants are now occupied in bridge-building themselves — the ant unfreezes and rejoins the march."(filed under: antsemergencearchitecture)
"Rosie Henderson adopted the Norman ritual in an attempt to stop road works at Les Echelons. [...] It is described as a cry for justice and involves an aggrieved party, known as the ‘criant’, the alleged ‘wrongdoer’ and two witnesses."(filed under: lawhistorylanguagenomic)
"[E]ach Archon is represented by a deck, and each KeyForge deck ever sold [will] be a unique combination of cards not available to any other person who ever plays the game. [...] What's more, each Archon is named and depicted through some kind of random name and image generator."(filed under: cardsgameswordsrandom)
"All this research seems to point in one direction: that the urban blackbird is evolving into a separate species, a case of true speciation."(filed under: birdsevolutioncities)
"Originally developed by the now-defunct Kobe Railroad Administration Bureau in the late Meiji Period (the early 20th century), pointing-and-calling is known to reduce workplace errors by up to 85 percent, according to one 1996 study."(filed under: japanpsychologyhands)
"In Australia, although pre-1891 land titles went “to the centre of the Earth”, those issued after 1891 extend down just 15 metres (49 feet)."(filed under: citiesundergroundfuturearchitecture)
"As the drought has persisted across Wales, scores of long-buried archaeological sites have been revealed once again as ‘cropmarks’, or patterns of growth in ripening crops and parched grasslands."(filed under: historyplantsweatherwales)
"He was clearly fascinated with buildings and signs. [...] His travels took him to the Grand Canyon, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountains, and across the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, but he did not take a single image of any of those wonders."(filed under: photographysignshistoryamerica)
"Preservation is driven by pirates, who are driven by ego but constrained by the technical limitations of their era. In the 1980s, this meant storage space and network speed."(filed under: softwarepiracyhistoryhacking) (via: lmg)
"Commissioned by Channel 4 for Somerset House, renowned artist John Gerrard created a virtual simulation of a flag formed of endlessly emitting trails of thick black smoke."(filed under: flagspollutionart)
"Think of each die face as the face on a clock. At 12 o’clock, you should see a Pentagon, which is the shape of a 12 sided die. The number inside the pentagon is what you got when you rolled a 12 sided die."(filed under: dicemaths)
