I’m reading You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard.  It’s a fascinating study of how humans and other animals navigate, from simple tasks like moving across a crowded room to complex feats of worldwide and celestial navigation.

One section describes Karl von Frisch’s research with bees in the 1920s.  After finding food, bees return to the hive and perform a “waggle dance,” which von Frisch deduced was a way of communicating the food’s location to other bees.  Perhaps understandably, some skepticism met this claim.  Ellard writes:

[O]nly very recently have advances in technology enabled researchers to provide what seems like ironclad evidence for the key role of the waggle dance in bee navigation.

In 1989 a team of researchers at the University of Odense in Denmark built a dancing robotic bee.

I love my chosen profession, but I do sometimes think meetings would be more fulfilling if, when someone disagreed with my point of view, I could say something like, “You’re wrong, as I shall now demonstrate with this dancing robotic bee.”

I recently finished Stephen Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers about World War II.  It’s an interesting read throughout, but my absolute favorite story comes from the introduction.  Ambrose describes the Lieutenant Waverly Wray of Company D, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, commanded by Colonel Ben Vandervoot.

Lt. Waverly Wray

After jumping into Normandy, he began crawling through the sunken lanes to reconnoiter the German positions surrounding them.  He came upon a group of eight German officers surrounding a radio — officers who turned out to be leading the counterattack.  Wray jumped through the hedgerow and ordered them to surrender.

Seven instinctively raised their hands.  The eighth tried to pull a pistol from his holster; Wray shot him instantly, between the eyes.  Two Germans in a slit trench 100 meters to Wray’s rear fired bursts from their Schmeisser machine pistols at him.  Bullets cut through his jacket; one cut off half of his right ear.

Wray dropped to his knee and began shooting the other seven officers, one at a time as they attempted to run away.  When he had used up his clip, Wray jumped into a ditch, put another clip into his M-1, and dropped the German soldiers with the Schmeissers with one shot each.

Wray made his way back to the company area to report on what he had seen. At the command post he came in with blood down his jacket, a big chunk of his ear gone, holes in his clothing.  “Who’s got more grenades?” he demanded.

…

Vandervoot later recalled that when he saw the blood on Wray’s jacket and the missing half-ear, he had remarked, “They’ve been getting kind of close to you, haven’t they Waverly?”

With just a trace of a grin, Wray had replied, “Not as close as I’ve been getting to them, Sir.”

Ambrose’s Band of Brothers (on which the HBO series of the same name was based) is more compelling overall, but because it tells the story primarily of a single company of paratroopers it necessarily offers a limited view of the war.  Citizen Soldiers gives a more complete overview, but naturally at the cost of some finer detail.  Clearly the only reasonable plan is to read both.

The picture of Lt. Wray comes from The U.S. Airborne During WW II, which came up in a Google search for Wray’s name, and which I now must absolutely explore in greater depth.