notes.husk.org/likes images.

(“Trenches have a distinctive zig zag pattern to minimize the damage a single bullet or explosion could cause. This photo also shows the scale of devastation that bombing left on the landscape.” via Aerial Photography From WWI Shows the Massive Scale of Devastation | Science | WIRED)

Inspired in part by Chris Woebken’s work, last semester was spent puzzling over animal perception by the ways that animals build, move, and act. it was really an exercise in armchair phenomenology, in starting to consider human perception with the same distance.

When you look — with that distance — at the evidence of our brief tenure on the planet, you come across these epic collaborative structures built by thousands, or millions of people in short periods of time. This one, from a hundred years ago, is a pretty solid argument for the two unique aspects of our species tangled up so deeply with one another. They are the quality of being seduced and motivated by wildly irrational ideas, and the ability to see things through with rational ant-like precision.

If I have to bet on which impulse determines the fate of the species, I still bet on that first one, the irrational drive. Whether that’s hopeful or hopeless, it’s still a good bet.