Damn I got this seersucker mostly for the camp value— but it turns out it really does make me feel less hot and miserable on a humid day! Saratoga here I come!
It’s such a privilege to share my home with living breathing royalty. I check on her in the morning since she’s least likely to be disturbed. They are nocturnal and she’s been up all night laying eggs and being fussed over by her daughters. At this time of day she’s sleeping deeply enough that she won’t stir if I remove the light cover. Sleeping Beauty!
I never settled on a name for her. She’s just “the queen” —
I wonder if she dreams of that bright day when she had wings. When she flew over NYC looking for seat for her empire? I don’t think ant memory works like human memory— (though they do remember AND learn.)
Ants radically reshape their brains to suit each stage of life— the parts of her that knew of flying are probably as gone as her wings—
Maybe she dreams of the feeling of her daughters massing around her in such great numbers that they all feel that impulse to produce new queens & drones.
@elan Sometimes! Though he’s very … youTube influencer styled (which is the only way to make such work a sustainable profession) but I think it harms the quality of the content— he used to make much better but less “viral” videos.
But at least it gets people thinking about ants. So I can’t be a hater.
I know N. flavipes is invasive but they are still very pretty ants. This is what we get for importing so many plants. The garden trade is almost wholly responsible for nearly all of the invasive ants! Stop planting non native plants!
Say good morning to a lucky squad of Nylanderia flavipes. They attacked this Archips sp. oak leaf worm as it was feeding. The worm tried to escape by jumping from the tree but the little army was too numerous and relentless. Urban ants tend to be a little protein starved. Our built environments are crusted with sugar— but thin on arthropods to snack on.
(sometimes I think about what would happen to the NYC roach population without the pressure of ants— then I shudder) Ants are omnivorous.
In the Algebraicist by Ian M. Banks some aliens come to earth in early human history and take a bunch of humans and human DNA and set them up all over the galaxy— get them up to speed on tech and those humans and the aliens just leave Earth alone to develop “naturally” — so when humans on earth eventually explore the galaxy some of the aliens they meet are just other humans. (this is just a minor plot point if you can imagine)
There is an ant colony that lives in the cracks of the asphalt in 2nd ave. In the center of the street. I don’t know if I should call them absolute legends or idiots. They use the cracks as highways like sidewalks ants. It’s a big colony although I can never get a good look at them without getting hocked at.
You can sniff at block-based programming if you like, but I do find that students who used such languages in middle school have an easier time adapting to object oriented and nonlinear programming later — the downside is that nonlinearity is nearly always an illusion in computer science. And under those floating islands of functions and classes there is an absolute order —
I’ll work with some middle school students next year and so I’m learning about all this scratch nonsense.
@futurebird My daughter had some fun playing with Scratch when she was very little, though she never really took to it as a thing she wanted to pursue further.
The thing I liked the most about it was that it was inherently both object-oriented, multithreaded and event-driven. Those are things I thought of as advanced wizard stuff when I was first learning programming. Here they were in a system a toddler could play with.
What I least liked about it was that there was no capacity for defining functions (e.g. making your own blocks)! But I think they added that later. There was a functional extension of Scratch called BYOB that did that; I guess it evolved into Snap!
OH my god these little ants with their "gallery traps" are diabolical.
(I wish machine translation worked better with scientific names... it's going to take me a long time to find out the names of all the species of ants in this video. )
Documentary makers no matter what language you work in... please put the names of people and the names of species on the screen!
Wow... Repulicans think FBI agents and cops shouldn't be armed. I mean that's the only way they wouldn't be moaning and crying about the FBI showing up being an "assassination attempt on Trump" ... if agents were simply not armed.
I think one reason there aren’t better resources for 8-12 grade CS education is a reluctance to admit that it’s a core subject— but the other issue is so many CS people are largely self taught: creating a kind of RTFM gate keeping only matched by higher mathematics.
@futurebird
We love it, and we'd love it even more if it didn't feel to us like a very clever riff on the Sorcerer's Apprentice! (Which we also love, to be fair.)
Uranus is my favourite, in part because it's underplayed and good fun and a little gremliny, but we get pretty powerful visualisations with Jupiter.
1: “… a big sexy fireman.”
2: “oh no girl”
2: “… even has one of them spotty dogs. Takes it jogging.”
3: “Dalmation! Dalmation!”
1: “Yeah!”
2: “You shure he’s a real fireman?”
1: “He’s got the dalmation!”
3:”he got 101 bitches!”
1: 😡
2: 🤭