These geese totally hate me.
May. 16th, 2010 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anarresI'm doing the exam study thing, which is frustrating - my courses are interesting but exam study makes you forget this and just focus on getting marks. I'm really excited about the statistics project, but I have to wait for exams to be done before I'll be able to spend a serious amount of time on it.
On my way into uni I take a slight detour so that I can walk along Castlefield canal basin instead of along a motorway. Not many people come by this way. I usually pass by this family of geese, two big ones and five little ones.
The big ones are really very big and actually quite intimidating - they've got big, scary, bitey beaks and they hiss at me to let me know they're pissed off that I've entered their space. The small ones are fuzzy and yellow and very cute, and totally oblivious to me. I sometimes stop for a few minutes to watch them (from a respectful distance) and as far as I can tell they have three activities: pecking the ground for food, grooming themselves, and grooming each-other. They have a funny way of walking around, going a few steps in one direction, pecking the ground, then switching to a different, random direction. Brownian motion - not a good strategy for traveling from A to B, but a very good searching strategy. Their path has a fractal dimension somewhere between one and two and in theory if they walked for an infinitely long time their path would completely fill a two-dimentional area.
My procrastinate-o-meter is pinging, better get back to work.
On my way into uni I take a slight detour so that I can walk along Castlefield canal basin instead of along a motorway. Not many people come by this way. I usually pass by this family of geese, two big ones and five little ones.
The big ones are really very big and actually quite intimidating - they've got big, scary, bitey beaks and they hiss at me to let me know they're pissed off that I've entered their space. The small ones are fuzzy and yellow and very cute, and totally oblivious to me. I sometimes stop for a few minutes to watch them (from a respectful distance) and as far as I can tell they have three activities: pecking the ground for food, grooming themselves, and grooming each-other. They have a funny way of walking around, going a few steps in one direction, pecking the ground, then switching to a different, random direction. Brownian motion - not a good strategy for traveling from A to B, but a very good searching strategy. Their path has a fractal dimension somewhere between one and two and in theory if they walked for an infinitely long time their path would completely fill a two-dimentional area.
My procrastinate-o-meter is pinging, better get back to work.