Traffic (the kind you drive through to get to work) is a wave, not a particle. That car that nearly takes your fender off failing to understand what "merge" means causes you to press your brakes...so the person tailgating you (because that's what everyone does to suppress jerks that can't merge) presses theirs...and so on. Driving to work, I sometimes like to imagine how long the wave I just witnessed "stands" on the same stretch of highway - whether it's there for the whole rush hour or if it will dissipate or get canceled out by someone who affords extra space for such events. Whenever I drive through some inexplicable "everyone stops, then starts going again", I try to imagine what happened - and how long ago or how far ahead on the highway it happened.
Maybe the whole day, cars will stop on that spot, and wonder why the car in front made them do it.
Human interaction is probably a great deal like vehicular interaction. Even unintentional or accidental contact sends off a ripple of reactions.
Wave machine video after the break.
I wonder how warm the water was. That's a lot of humans - bleeding BTUs (among other things...) off into the water.
Tokyo must be the friendliest place on earth - to get packed into a wave pool, rubbing up against total strangers wearing nothing but swimsuits, you'd have to have a bit of a charitable outlook on your peers.
