Ants Don't Wait Around For Bureaucracy or Leaders To Fix Something!

Individual ants don't wait around for bureaucracy and leaders, if they see something not working they stop and fix it!

 

 

 

 

In experiments, with the raiding ant Eciton Burchelli (central and south america), we find that when ants are crawling across a sloping passage, if an ant slips, she climbs back up and holds on and joins hands with a fellow ant.  as this keeps happening they build a scaffold, to help other ants get accross without slipping. 

No need to wait for months till a planning committee draws up plans, approve plans, hire engineers...

Funny, that humans can't do this.  Does it matter that they are all sisters?  Perhaps in human socieities that are more homogenous more communal work gets done without bureaucracy?  that'd be something interesting to test.

These are rather large families tho, 100s of thousands of sisters.  they all have one mother but i think up to 10 or 20 different fathers, i must look up to see how much mixing!  do half sisters regularly work together or is there conflict?  such interesting critters

twitter thread here:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1385904691284951040

research paper here:

"Individual error correction drives responsive self-assembly of army ant scaffolds"

Matthew J. Lutz, Chris R. Reid, Christopher J. Lustri, Albert B. Kao,  Simon Garnier, and View  Iain D. Couzin
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/17/e2013741118

wiki about Eciton burchelli here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eciton_burchellii

100 Billion Generations Strong of Mothers, Molecular Dances...

I'm supposed to look up Bjork cuz

Biophilia: Hollow

Here we have her singing of being part of a molecular dance chain of ancestors way way back.

Truly it is amazing that there are these self replicating DANCES of molecules, takes a billion molecules of a 1000 different kinds to make this self replicating dance and it's been dancing, replicating for at least 3.8billion years, 100billion generations, not fading, not disrupting, surviving, creating...

We still have no clue how it happened.

But of course i'm supposed to be working on it

http://blackskimmer.blogspot.com/2007/07/before-decending-into-question-of-wher.html

Obviously i should be making music videos of it instead!

At least a full length animated film of a generation in the life of this dance would be.. but of course it can't have just molecules... 

 

Some of this too:

The Fountain

When humans discovered the new winding territory inside the jungle of their 20billion tangled neurons, they began winding a story that is too long to let go of.

Watch a Human's flesh rot. A man's flesh can rot out from under him while he's not yet finished spinning his yarn.

We are addicted to a story with an end, it galls us if a story remains unfinished.

Yet, for every story, we can imagine another episode. For every epic, we can imagine another verse. We imagine infinity.

With millions of sensors, trillions of recognition circuits, falling in love circuits, we fall in love deeply, as deep as an endless muddy pit we fall into in misstep in the jungle, roots hanging out the sides.

With twenty thousand billion connections registering, we can attain concentration, attain attunement with life to the 10th decimal place. This is eternity.

When we tie each bleeding end of the rootlet falling down that deep hole, when we identify each detail, when we identify ten thousand details, that's attachment. When we tie ourselves nervelet to rootlet to life ten thousand details, we can't let go.

When we sink into our lover ten thousand nights in a row spreading our roots into her deeper and deeper, we can't let go.

When life becomes so intricate, death becomes such an alien mystery. We become entranced by it.

We can remember vividly her face, her smile, her laughter, her story, but when we cut into our flesh and the blood spills out, the memories are not there. When we cut into our flesh the memories are not there.

 

 

well, one day...

Ego vs The Weedy Reality Of Biology

 

Im walking past a weedy patch and i imagine someone apologizing for it - yeah that should get cleaned up and i say -oh no thats the most beautiful patch in gloucester, thats earth doin its creative beautiful thing, and she goes -oh no its messy ugly disease will come from there...

and so then i think.. what IS disease?  genetic diseases, cancer, us treating our bodies poorly and they fail and all maner of infectious germs and whatnot tryin to live in us and ultimately that bodies DO come apart horribly and die

and i realize that's the wrong question.  disease isn't the thing to wonder about as an oddity.  disease IS life.  disease is the act of life growing exploring failing creating.

the oddity to wonder about is ego, what are these egos that we've come to hold onto so tightly that we've long ago imagined some perfect eternally static riskless infantile bliss heaven where we were once perfect eternal souls and then we performed some crime (the cime of growing up and becoming adults!) and got sentencd by our raging alcoholic father to this nighmare of what we percieve as corruption.

I wonder when humanity will come to embrace adulthood? (he muses... while we contemplate electing an 11yr old as president of 300,000,000 people)

Sketch of 50 Activities To Do With Kids At Nature Camp/Summer Camp With Science Activities

 
                    LIST OF ACTIVITIES FOR SUMMER CAMP


                        PHYSICAL STUFF
3) begin day with  tai chi inspired by natural rhythms
                   mad rannung around in circles
16) morning hike to warm up

44) walking around in the field spacing ourselves out:
    how far is a 100 ft ?
    how far is 1000ft ?
    how much is an acre?  can 12 of us surround it?
    can we spread ourselves out in a line a mile long?
    whats it like to run 100ft, 1000ft?
    walk a mile, 5 miles?

    make pilobolus like animal and tree sculpture acts

35) learn some yoga.  learn to stand on your head

36) move like different animals

30) how from how far away can we hear each other? see each other?

31) can we discover what's happening out there by smell?  track people
animals by smell?

32) what's it like to wander around in the woods blindfolded, can you
recognize stuff, find your way?  do it in pairs: one blind one not

33) sit in front of a patch of grass pond etc.. for an hour and just watch!
pretend your a frog.  take notes?



                                    CONTESTS
25) contests/games:
    which team can find the most insects/leaves etc..  maybe over the whole week
    track animals
    one team hides stuff or makes some kind of puzzle... and the other team solves it...

34) scavenger hunt with teams




                            INTERPERSONAL STUFF
5) getting to know each other:  what nature stuff do you like, sports games,
hobbies

13) are they really into baseball, nintendo taiquando pop music...

7) find out which kids are into running around and playing games, and which are quieter, want to explore things...

27) make teams by the second day of 3-4 kids to stick together during the week for diff activities?


6) on this week long nature expedition each of you is the group's expert at something, let's find out what it is.

14) each kid gets to lead an activity of their choosing related to their interests like tai quan do, music, sports...

42) different group adopts a diff area of the farm to get to know and has to take the rest of us on a walk to show us what's there




                                SHAMAN STUFF
4) first day: "this is a special place, it has things to say to you, can you hear it?  let's listen before we begin all our busy activities

17) each kid finds an animal guide/study at the beginning and sticks to it all week and sees what he finds



                                PROJECTS
44) do some simple surveying and make a map

45) make a topo map!

21) spend the week on a project to find something new to report to science     write it up

30) do a bird plant tree... survey to keep on record.

31) each week my group makes observations on something that accumulates all summer

22) make an (animal story?) puppet show

23) make up a symphony of the meadow with recorders, drums, whatever





                            CRAFTS
10) find stuff to make crafts out of

11) find stuff to make every day useful items out of

12) make paper

28) make jewelry

26) carve different kinds of woods.  are they allowed to use knives?

27) make animals, puppets out of plant stuff

37) find natural dies to paint with

1) its beautiful out here, draw it, paint it

2) pressed plant collection

28) if a bunch are into computers, lets make computer programs to do simple ecology simulations




                            COLLECTION
32) collect stuff to take home?  (what are they allowed to take off the grounds)

33) collect a jar of pond water to take home and observe

24) make terrariums to take home

38) leaf collection




                            SCIENCE
8) learn to use an Identification key

9) who think there are a 100 different creatures out here?

29) teach em conway life, to play GO.  compare chess and go?

39) collect stories, ie watch and find things that happen, as many
interactions between two diff creatures as possible.

40) look at the place using only nouns for objects.  then look at the place using only verbs for interactions

43) what can we count and calculate?  how many leaves on a tree?  total surface area?  how high?  how much does a tree weigh?  How many snails in the pond?  how much water flows through the stream every minute, hour, year?
how much soil gets moved every year, century, million years?...
    time sound delays, get speed of sound
    if thunderstorms calculate how far
    how high are clouds?





                            STORIES
18) Native american stories: coyote!

19) spenser holst stories!

25) if they have summer reading assignments talk about them



                            MUSIC
23) get em all recorders, teach em to play

24) imitate bird calls

25) find good songs to learn





29) repair/maintain a path  or do some kind of work project around the farm.

15) build a fort  (can we?)

16) or at least lashing poles, make a shelter, a (the carrying injured
people thing we did at scouts),


20) who lived on this land before us?  find evidence?


26) whole foods lunch. enjoy its aliveness. discover where it came from
how it grew



41) come up with the best names for different plants and animals
that don't have common names


46) how diverse is a population of individuals?  how about us?  who's the fastest, longest endurance, see the farthest, best hearing, strongest, lightest, heaviest, tallest, shortest, best memory, best at balancing, sing the highest note, lowest note, most limber...