The posted article doesn’t talk about relationship/proximity to bulls directly. More like a large gathering of people in a plaza and is compared to another festival in Germany.
The parent comment sounds funny but is not directly relevant to the content of the article.
So, that's all very interesting. Do we also have some studies on how to avoid gathering people in such z dense level that all possibilities of that kind of dramatic outcome can occurs.
Also note that not all crowds are the same. I went to some metal concerts where the moves would exhibits very different moves, including less packed and steal, split in in very highly packed borders before an abrupt run and merge, as well as creating protection circle around someone who falls on the ground. I actually didn't witnessed any major crowd incident in such a concert, so I would be interested to have statistics about outcomes of a crowd panic in a metal concert vs in a cinema for example.
Seems to me that formal studies would have more of an effect looking at how to manage crowds that are already too dense without making things worse. If you want to avoid the density in the first place, you decide on a maximum density within a central perimeter, and also manage density appropriately along the ingress routes. That way you don't just push the unsafe densities into the outer side of the perimeter. And you set your desired densities low enough to both avoid dangerous situations inside the central perimeter, and allow the central crowd to get out if there is a fire/etc. inside it.
Essentially if you want a max density in area A, you enforce some other max densities in the area several times larger than A.
I would imagine that if anyone has done the work to study this, it’s the Saudis for the Hajj, since they are managing the largest human migration to a single point. (I believe there are larger migrations like China’s Lunar New Year, but those are more diffuse since it’s more people to hometowns.)
Crowd density is certainly the key here. Over a certain density crowds move like a liquid. Under a certain density crowds get much more difficult to model.
This is not new in any way, btw. This paper seems to specifically address the running of the bulls.
But if anything, this study at least shows that we're getting closer to understanding and managing the dangers of large, dense crowds in a way that can actually be applied
That video is really illuminating in the article. I've experienced it once at the entrance of a concert. If you have all kinds of forces acting on you, then you don't have much autonomy on how you move.
Would this to some extent be how actual fluid (e.g. water) move as well? I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there from one side of the liquid to the other side.
Like what I witnessed with ants in my childhood ant farms.
Ant farm is the kind where dirt/sand is poured in between two glass panes and you watch them build tunnels and watch the ants interact with various things you drop inside it).
It’s not clear to me either. I’ve heard for a long time - including in undergrad fluid mechanics - how large groups of humans can be modeled via fluid mech equations. But this article seems to provide more robust evidence of these occurrences IRL.
It more draws parallels between the oscillations seen in crowds in Pamplona and another large gathering in Germany. Which have similar flow properties.
It also seems to specify the density with which these properties emerge
I feel like the headline is seriously misleading. The TL;DR is basically "the authors observed pockets of several hundred people spontaneously behaving like one fluid that oscillated" over an 18 second period. That hardly seems to amount to "predicting crowd movements" in any meaningful sense.
Readit News
The parent comment sounds funny but is not directly relevant to the content of the article.
Also note that not all crowds are the same. I went to some metal concerts where the moves would exhibits very different moves, including less packed and steal, split in in very highly packed borders before an abrupt run and merge, as well as creating protection circle around someone who falls on the ground. I actually didn't witnessed any major crowd incident in such a concert, so I would be interested to have statistics about outcomes of a crowd panic in a metal concert vs in a cinema for example.
Essentially if you want a max density in area A, you enforce some other max densities in the area several times larger than A.
This is not new in any way, btw. This paper seems to specifically address the running of the bulls.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat9891
Would this to some extent be how actual fluid (e.g. water) move as well? I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there from one side of the liquid to the other side.
> I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there
That is how gasses are. Although in that case there are lots of high speed elastic collisions happening.
This allows him to predict planetary + galactic scale events, including a surprising and imminent regression of humanity into a new Dark Age.
Deleted Comment
Ant farm is the kind where dirt/sand is poured in between two glass panes and you watch them build tunnels and watch the ants interact with various things you drop inside it).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987646
(6 days ago, 92 points, 41 comments)
It also seems to specify the density with which these properties emerge