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Bonus cute photo of a queen and her minima worker. I love how the caption implies that the scientist could not separate them! 
#ants #atta #queenant #leafcutters #antposting
Later in the book the author reviews attempts to count all of the ants in leafcutter colonies and is critical of the method of weighing ants then using "average ant weight" to get an estimate.
If a queen can be 346mg and her minima fungus gardening worker just 0.4mg I think he has a point!
The minima workers do a kind of gardening that is beyond our imagination. They rearrange hyphae, they pluck away bad bacteria and add good, they monitor moisture levels with granular precision.
This is why only the ants seem to be able to grow their preferred fungi. People have tried, especially antkeepers who would love to keep a supply of extra living fungi to help their colonies... but our fingers are too big and fumbling to do the work, and we don't have the tiny granular senses required to care for the fungi.
What could we accomplish in collaboration with ants who can manipulate a garden with such precision?
It's time for nanobots! Have any attempts been made with robotics?
If we could make a tiny robot with 1/100th the dexterity and elegance of motion of an ant it would change the world.
They are remarkable and nothing we've made comes close at all. I can't stress this enough... all those little flying robots and tiny motors are clunky and clumsy when compared to any random ant.
Robotics is hard and we have not made as much progress as some would pretend.
I urge you, and everyone, especially the students I coach in robotics to watch, really watch, how ants move and manipulate their environment. Watch them and consider how many servos and stepper motors you'd need to do anything close.
Watch how the mandibles carry a larvae without harming its soft skin. Watch how she tears a cricket limb for limb with the same jaws.
Watch the way the two tarsal claws adjust allowing her to walk on glass upside down.
This is why when Elon claimed he'd have a robot walking like a person bringing you drinks I was disgusted.
I was disgusted anyone took it seriously at all. Why do people think robots are easy and solving such mechanical problems is something we already know how to do?
There is some kind of vast mental category error occurring in the minds of many people that they'd even consider such a thing possible.
@futurebird @illumniscate There was a burst of this kind of hype back in the late 1970s, probably because Star Wars had made people interested in robots. Lots of people hawking commercial robots, which tended to be simple toys, though some had interesting hobbyist features... but also conmen saying we'd have really capable home servant robots soon, and doing extravagant faked demos of products they claimed would soon hit the market.
@futurebird @illumniscate i remember this outfit called Quasar Industries (no relation to the home electronics brand, though I'm sure they intended the confusion) that kept demonstrating this hulking conical "robot" with a spherical head, sometimes called Klatu. It was going to be able to cook and clean and hold conversations. Of course the demos were fake, they had a remote controlled chassis with people running the motions and the voice. But this thing kept getting hype sporadically into the 80s.
@futurebird @illumniscate of course I was a kid at the time and mostly heard about this through uncritical secondhand reports in kids' media, so it was one of those things where the stories disappear after a while and you idly wonder what was up with that decades later.
@futurebird @illumniscate And there was a big burst of AI hype right after that in the 80s, then it was about "expert systems" and LISP machines and Japan's Fifth Generation Computing initiative.
@mattmcirvin @futurebird @illumniscate
in retrospect, the science-for-kids stuff of the 1970s-1980s was highly credulous. Well, even before then, and presumably after then as well.
I do recall a few exceptions; that episode of _The Bloodhound Gang_ where the young black woman was sure the "superheavy white dwarf" meteorite being auctioned really, actually, couldn't be any such thing ... : )
@llewelly @futurebird @illumniscate People wondering what happened to the old shiny future we were promised almost always underestimate the extent to which the promises were bullshit. Elon Musk is about my age and every single thing he talks up is some element of that genre of "World of Tomorrow" hype from the years around 1980. You could go through an Omni magazine and just tick them off.
@mattmcirvin @futurebird @illumniscate
Omni reminds me of spoon-bending hoaxes, telepathy hoaxes, hovering guru hoaxes, and all that ancient aliens crap. Yeah, I know, there was lots of other stuff in Omni, after all, it was called "Omni", but those were the things that Omni had that distinguished it from, say, "Popular Science".
@llewelly @mattmcirvin @illumniscate
Omni makes me think about how they managed to talk about sex bots an awful lot for a publication that tried to be so dour and serious. And how bashful and cheeky and thinly veiled all such speculations were.
I remember some really off-putting "sexy robot woman" illustrations making me think "this is very silly and a little pathetic and desperate" and still being a child.
@futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate It was Bob Guccione! A friend of mine pointed out a lot of it was the same content as Penthouse just without the explicit porn, just porn-adjacent stuff.
@futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate Yeah, they had a section called "Antimatter" that was ALL pseudoscience/paranormal crap, and feature articles on it. Lots of alt-medicine type hype, too. At one point they spun off a magazine called "Longevity" that was JUST stuff that was going to make you immortal. Which makes me think of Peter Thiel and his obsession with conquering death.
@futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate (let me register offense at calling the paranormal section "Antimatter" on behalf of antimatter, a thoroughly legit and stodgy physical phenomenon, albeit one that seems to attract this kind of attention. One my late uncle asked me if I "believed in antimatter". I told him I'd worked with the stuff, if only in lab courses, and he said he'd gotten that response from someone else too. I mean, they use it in medical imaging. But it still seems to be the kind of thing that people wonder about belief in.)
@mattmcirvin @futurebird @illumniscate
in retrospect, it's surprising that section wasn't called "Quantums". : ) A stroke of luck, maybe.
@mattmcirvin @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate
It was Bob Guccione, spurred by Timothy Leary. I don’t really have a beef with Leary, except that his “everything is going to be ok if we just change perspective” perspective was so naïve.
@mattmcirvin @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate
To some extent, OMNI spawned Mondo2000 (coparented with bOING bOING), which spawned Wired. It went from their first issue manifesto about it being about art and people that/who used emerging technologies, and then became about IPOs once it became Condé Nast.
This descent from creativity and hope into frangible money purchasing is how we got Stupid Future.
@JoshuaACNewman @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate Everything countercultural can be productized and sold back to us for profit; the entertainment industry figured that out long ago. You can ride it productively for a while but eventually the life gets sucked out of the trend.