Who knew ant farms were this popular?

"Man caught with 2,000 live ants in his luggage..."

Headline that I wish wasn't literal: "Needy Caterpillars Vibrate to Complex Rhythms to Communicate With Ants."

It's just a Smithsonian article about some damned thing actually caterpillars do to con ants:

They found that the caterpillars with the most significant myrmecophily, or relationship with ants, communicated signals with exceedingly regular timing and particularly intricate rhythms very similar to those that ants employ. On the other hand, the caterpillars with weak or zero myrmecophily had simpler and less regular rhythms....

Great. Good for the caterpillars and I hope the ants are digging the good vibrations.

I want the article — about human beings — that would fit that headline if only it were metaphorical. Clearly, we the People are the ants, and the needy caterpillars are politicians. 

I love the serendipity of one more chance to use my "insect politics" tag.

This just crawled onto the front page of the NYT:

We're told: "The ant world is filled with Machiavellian dramas.... Now experts have identified a kind of regicide that has never been documented before.... 'It’s like a story out of "Game of Thrones,"' said Daniel Kronauer, an evolutionary biologist.... The discovery was made by an ant enthusiast... not a scientist...."

"She interviewed elders in the community about traditional yogurt recipes.... Then her grandmother said, 'Oh, do you know that I used to use ants?'"

"... Mutlu Sirakova’s uncle gave the research team a crash course in ant yogurt making. The team took four red wood ants and dropped them in a small container of warm milk. They then sealed the container, buried it in the ant hill, and left it there overnight. The next day, the researchers removed the insects from the partially coagulated concoction and gave it a taste. It 'had a slightly tangy taste with mild herbaceousness and pronounced flavors of grass-fed fat,' according to the research paper...."

From "This Traditional Yogurt Recipe’s Secret Ingredient Has 6 Legs/Scientists recreated a formula involving ants and milk that is used in Bulgarian villages to yield yogurt with an herbaceous flavor" (NYT).

"They determined that the ants contributed several types of acids and enzymes that worked together to coagulate the milk. These include formic acid, which the ants produce as a defense mechanism, as well as strains of lactic and acetic acids produced by bacteria living in the ants’ guts. And once the ants start the yogurt culture, more yogurt can be created by adding additional milk — no need for more insects."

I like the part where they buried the container in the ant hill. I don't think that figured into the scientific explanation. It made me think of folk remedies that have burying something as a step. For example, speaking of grandmothers, my grandmother said you could cure a wart by cutting open a potato, rubbing it on the wart, then burying the potato. Maybe there was some curative chemical in the potato — akin to the formic acid in the ants — but the burying must be imagined magic.

"I turned into a dolphin/I rang Maud, told her the latest...."

Book’s out now. Link in bio. This sort of thing. 🐬 pic.twitter.com/JrB0PduW7F

— Tim Key (@timkeyperson) November 6, 2023

I don't think you can buy "Chapters" in the U.S. yet, but you can read just about everything at Instagram, here, including this:

"I tried to convince people to slow down — slow down AI — to regulate AI. This was futile. I tried for years. Nobody listened. No one..."

"Normally the way that regulations work is very slow — very slow indeed. So usually, there'll  be something — some new technology — that will cause damage or death. There will be an outcry. There will be an investigation. Years will pass. There will be some sort of insight committee. There will be rulemaking. Then there will be oversight — eventually regulations. This all take many years.... If you look at, say, automotive regulations: How long did it take for seatbelts... to be required?... This timeframe is not relevant to AI. You can't take 10 years from the point at which it is dangerous. It's too late...."

Said Elon Musk, talking to Joe Rogan, in September 2018 (Episode #1169, embedded below). 

That part came right after a discussion of the way Google, Instagram, and Twitter have us "plugged in like the nodes on the network, like leaves on a big tree." Using these services, he said, we become "one giant cybernetic collective." We're "fueling this thing that's constantly around us all the time and it doesn't seem possible that people are going to pump the brakes."

He said we seem to be following "an instinct," as if we're "the ants that build the anthill." "It feels like we are the biological bootloader for AI." Because we're acting on instinct, the resulting AI is "our id writ large." It is a "projection of our limbic system" — all the "things that we like and hate and fear." This "combination of electronics and biology" is "a cyborg," "a sort of an organism."

At this point, he brings up that Instagram — with more images and video and consequently more engagement — has more "limbic resonance" than Twitter.

I listened to all of that to extrapolate what Musk intends to do with Twitter. We keep talking about how he wants to rid it of censorship and bias and institute freedom of speech. But that would be "our id writ large." And, at least back then, he sounded as though he was deeply worried about what we were creating and doing to ourselves and how terribly hard it is to regulate. The people who work at Twitter now are furiously regulating, but it's not the right kind of regulation. They're just more ants, projecting their limbic system. They don't see the larger phenomenon, as Musk does. 

Maybe Musk just wants to be the consciousness of this "cyborg" while the rest of us are blithely behaving like instinct-driven ants. Maybe he's a benefactor who genuinely wants to figure out how to make AI develop in a way that is good for humanity and not dangerous.

Today's list of TikTok selections goes up to 11. Let me know which ones — which I chose for delightfulness — are your favorite.

1. Ants methodically receive goldfish crackers.

2. Horses make it hard to deliver a political message.

3. Men who love sticks.

4. To annoy her brothers is this girl's career.

5. Did this dog go in the trash?

6. A college degree in theater is absolutely not absolutely useless.

7. A brilliant 3-D portrait of Nikola Tesla.

8. A comedian does impressions of iPhones.

9. Affirming brain differences.

10. Recoating the warehouse floor.

11. Waiting for the statue to throw the ball.

It's the time of year to go to Governor Nelson State Park and see the Dutchman's breeches.

 

 

"Dutchman's breeches is one of many plants whose seeds are spread by ants, a process called myrmecochory. The ants take the seeds to their nest, where they eat the elaiosomes, and put the seeds in their nest debris, where they are protected until they germinate. They also get the added bonus of growing in a medium made richer by the ant nest debris." 

"Governor Nelson State Park is a 422-acre Wisconsin state park... on the north shore of Lake Mendota. It is named for former Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson [founder of Earth Day]... Away from the lake one can find restored prairie and savanna, effigy mounds, hiking trails and ski trails.... A portion of the site of the park originally hosted a boys' camp called Camp Indianola. Orson Welles was a camper at the camp in his youth."