Whilst stopped at some traffic lights on my way to work this morning I noticed that there was a spider on my drivers side mirror. By this time I had already driven several miles of motorway so I was quite surprised it had survived. Looking a little closer I spotted that it was moving with purpose towards something caught on the web. So somehow amazingly at about the time I stopped an insect flew into the web and was now being stalked. When I say web there was actually not much more than a single strand - making the likelihood of this occurrence less than a really quite rare thing!

At about the time i realised this the lights turned green and the line of traffic started to pull away. Feeling a little guilty, but having little choice, I moved with them - after all i didn’t want to hurt this small arachnid. As I drove along I could see that the spider was being buffeted and bounced every which way as the wind from my driving whipped over the bodywork and onto the web. A short while later we slowed down for another set of lights and I saw that amazingly the spider was still with me but surely now had a massive headache after all that bouncing! I needn’t have worried, as the speed came down some of what I thought was bouncing was in fact the spider trussing up the little insect that had landed at the previous lights, he then quickly climbed back up the web carrying his prize behind him and disappeared behind my drivers mirror.

So what made me recant this tale on a blog such as this? When I first sat down to write this entry I thought that maybe I should write about the spider itself, perhaps talk about some equations describing the forces on it during the travel and calculate the tensile strength of the web. Surely that’s what, as a geek, I should be writing about. But as I sat down top write that just didn’t seem to feel appropriate after all that wouldn’t have captured what I was really thinking at the time. It was a simple moment of pleasure and understanding gifted to me by a creature 1000th my size with whom I have no hope of communicating. It was a small moment of wonder that involved no technology but allowed me a small opportunity to sit back and marvel at the nature around me - something I do far too little. It was something that brought a smile to my face on an otherwise mind numbing journey that I make each and every morning.

As engineers, technologists, geeks, and bloggers we have a tendency for over analysis and as a result we can miss the really important nugget or concept when we are writing or talking about something. Sometimes these tiny innocuous things are worth considering and giving higher credence to.

I wonder if I shall see him again tomorrow…