Aristotle once said,

"The search for truth is in one way hard and in another easy. For it is evident that no one can master it fully nor miss it wholly. But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature and from all the facts assembled these arises a certain grandeur."

Welcome: An Introduction

Setting: Starbucks
Katrina enters Starbucks, aproaches the front cash, orders a grande white chocolate mochachino, and waits for it to be served. Meanwhile she scans the cafe and spots Mr. Barry in a crisp new gecko blouse (custom fit) from Malaysia. As he sips on his wild sweet orange tazo tea, Katrina notices that he is reading the preface of The Science of Everyday Life. Since he is having a hard time with the technical writing style Jay Ingram posseses, Katrina decides to give him an introduction of her own...

In the novel, The Science of Everyday Life, Jay Ingram attempts to answer all of those questions that everyone ponders but no one looks into. The experiments described in this novel are very interesting and are hard evidence of the many theories explained. Since there were 26 chapters that weren't all that interesting, I chose the 10 best ideas to share with all of my viewers. Enjoy!

The Swarm

Before reading this chapter, I thought that swarms of mosquitoes stuck together to hunt for their next human victim. I thought that the mosquito exited the swarm, then bit me, and then by human reaction, I simply murdered it. It is nothing like this because the insect is not looking for me, but only its mate. Since I don’t make the cut, the female mosquito has to fly in to the nearest male and begin the mating process. It’s not the whole mating that may be fascinating to some, but the construction of the swarm. How can mosquitoes keep a perfect swarm without flying around something? Well, have you ever noticed that they always fly over something? For example, if a swarm was over a white sheet, you can cut around all of the edges and since the aim is for the centre, the swarm will stay in the same place before you started cutting. If you moved the sheet, the swarm would shift with it. You could call this organized chaos. Something I find interesting but typically doesn’t have an explanation, is that mosquitoes sometimes fly in two swarms, one on top of the other and can be seen when there is a swarm over someone’s head. The construction behind this is a pancake style swarm near the scalp and a column swarm above the pancake swarm. No one knows why, but it makes you wonder why they do that. In all, there isn’t much more to this chapter because how much research can possibly go into swarms of insects...


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