Philip Greenspun

The real challenge of being a flight attendant is getting people out. The training requires that they demonstrate they can evacuate an aircraft within 90 seconds, but of course, a lot of stuff that is easy to do in training turns out to be tough in practice.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.