Everything Is As It Should Be

Spitsbergen is a Norwegian island in the Svalbard archipelago. It has spectacular mountains, abundant glaciers and desolate tundra, where stones are littered over a flat and mostly featureless terrain. In places on this tundra, the stones are arranged in a remarkable way; they lie not in a chaotic, haphazard jumble but in an ordered array of hauntingly beautiful, nearly perfect circular piles.

Today NYTimes blogger and theoretical physicist Mark Buchanan links these stones to human social patterns in some lovely and reassuring ways:

Although we tend to think of ourselves as individuals making up our own minds, we’re obviously influenced by what others around us do. Social patterns routinely emerge that have little to do with the character of individual people.

Check out the link at:

http://buchanan.blogs.nytimes.com/?th&emc=th

and a study from UC Santa Cruz on the crazy Norwegian stones:

http://www.ucsc.edu/currents/02-03/01-20/patterns.html