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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.
@llewelly @futurebird @illumniscate and now he's in with goons who are scrubbing government science databases for wrongthink, which just shows you how much he cares about the process that makes any technical progress worth talking about.
@mattmcirvin @llewelly @illumniscate
About 10 years ago we took the train out to CA to visit a close childhood friend of my husband. He was the kind of guy really into tech and was so excited to show off his new Tesla to us. This was right about the time when people on the left were growing sour on Elon. I remember him asking me, as he considered me to be "the left" what I thought of all the mean things people were saying about Mr. Musk.
I remember not wanting to hurt his feelings.
@futurebird @mattmcirvin @llewelly @illumniscate People who are "into tech" but don't understand the least bit of the actual STEM parts *or* the sociopolitical aspects are the worst.
@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate This distinction between science-as-Promethean-wizardry, and *actual* science, which is usually boring and stodgy and about rigorously questioning your own ideas and not fooling yourself... not too long ago I read Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and was shocked to discover that it had a bit that was all about that, written by a practical kid in 1818. She had these people's number.
@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate You can read "Frankenstein" as, basically, what would happen if one of these cranks who find scientific method too boring somehow actually hit on a world-shaking accomplishment, and managed it in the way they do things? Oh, God, it wouldn't be good.
@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate People usually assume the story is just a "science goes too far and plays God" narrative but it's a lot more subtle and complex than that. Victor Frankenstein is this pampered heir who has been raised in the most sheltered environment imaginable, has never experienced anyone telling him no, and is really pissed off when he goes to university and learns that science tells you no a lot. Who is this gross ugly troll of a professor telling me no? I want beauty and ultimate forbidden knowledge and a world that tells me yes!
So he goes off on his own and in a more realistic scenario, he'd just fail utterly, but what if, what if... (Mary Shelley had already internalized the "one free assumption" rule of science fiction.)
@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate And then, through some means the book carefully declines to tell us, he actually creates an honest-to-God sentient being, the marvel of the ages... but just because the *look* of the thing creeps him out, he casts out this functional newborn baby with the brain and body of a grown man and leaves it to die, instead of giving it the parental love and guidance it obviously needs. And everything follows.
@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate there are a lot of clever takes about how wisdom is realizing that Frankenstein *is* the monster, and he is, but really the Creature is a monster too, very like Frankenstein in some ways. It's just that the Creature got there by being rejected and feared by the whole world, whereas Frankenstein had the opposite.