" It’s hard to blame Representative Petri for missing the point. The value of studying fireflies is endlessly surprising. For example, before 1994, Internet engineers were vexed by spontaneous pulsations in the traffic between computers called routers, until they realized that the machines were behaving like fireflies, exchanging periodic messages that were inadvertently synchronizing them. Once the cause was identified, it became clear how to relieve the congestion. Electrical engineers devised a decentralized architecture for clocking computer circuits more efficiently, by mimicking the fireflies’ strategy for achieving synchrony at low cost and high reliability. "

― Steven H. Strogatz , Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order