Ant mill. An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will eventually die of exhaustion. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in ant colony simulations.[1] This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies.
Each ant follows the ant in front of it, and this will work until something goes wrong and an ant mill forms.[2] An ant mill was first described by William Beebe in 1921 who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference.[3] It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.[4] Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.[5] See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] Shattering the American Illusion. For over half a century, America has been celebrated as the land of liberty whose foreign policy is synonymous with promoting freedom and democracy. But now, in the wake of WikiLeaks and the people's revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, we finally have confirmation of what many of us have long suspected: America is no longer living up to its noble promise. We know now that for years, America has been giving millions of dollars of military aid to the Tunisian government, a regime that America's own ambassador called, in a leaked diplomatic cable, "a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems.
" [1] Likewise, in Egypt, America has provided billions of dollars of mostly military aid to a government known to use torture, as another leaked cable testifies: "torture and police brutality in Egypt are endemic and widespread" and "there are literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone. Hedgehog's dilemma. Both Arthur Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud have used this situation to describe what they feel is the state of individual in relation to others in society. The hedgehog's dilemma suggests that despite goodwill, human intimacy cannot occur without substantial mutual harm, and what results is cautious behavior and weak relationships. With the hedgehog's dilemma, one is recommended to use moderation in affairs with others both because of self-interest, as well as out of consideration for others. The hedgehog's dilemma is used to explain introversion and isolationism.
Schopenhauer[edit] The concept originates in the following parable from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's Parerga und Paralipomena, Volume II, Chapter XXXI, Section 396:[1] A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse.
However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. 8 Star Wars Pickup Lines. Mongolian Death Worm. The Mongolian death worm is a creature purported to exist in the Gobi Desert. It is generally considered a cryptid: one whose sightings and reports are disputed or unconfirmed. It is described as a bright red worm with a wide body that is 2 to 5 feet (0.6 to 1.5 m) long. The worm is the subject of a number of extraordinary claims by Mongolian locals such as the ability of the worm to spew forth sulfuric acid that, on contact, will turn anything it touches yellow and corroded (and which would kill a human), as well as its purported ability to kill at a distance by means of electric discharge. Though natives of the Gobi have long told tales of the olgoi-khorkhoi, the creature first came to Western attention as a result of Professor Roy Chapman Andrewss 1926 book On the Trail of Ancient Man.
Habitat and behavior: The worm is said to inhabit the southern Gobi Desert. The Mongolians also believe that touching any part of the worm will cause instant death. 9 Lists To Keep Updated, and Keep Handy - Stepcase Lifehack. I bought a Moleskine notebook a long time ago, and for a while it got zero use. My productivity system is totally digital and Web-based, as is my personal journal.
I bought the Moleskine because it looked awesome, and because so many other people found it useful. The Moleskine, though, made its way into my pocket or backpack all the time, because of one simple use I found for it: a list manager. Not a list of things to do, or people to call – different lists. The Moleskine is my perfect list-manager, and that’s all I use it for.
That said, I’ve also discovered how useful it is to keep a small number of lists both updated and handy at all times, for a whole variety of uses. Here are nine lists that can be enormously helpful to all of us, if kept both current and accessible. “Things I Want” Every year, people I know ask me what I want for my birthday, or for Christmas, or just because they love giving me gifts (that last would would be nice, huh?). “Gift Ideas” “Got a Minute?” BHAGs. The Stoned Monkey, Ethnobotany, and The Spirit Molecule. Confused and kind of awesome: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of my favourite films. It isn't perfect, but it is one of those beautiful and interesting messes. Every time I re-watch it I am again impressed with its visual imagination and bewildered by its depiction of women. Tina's nightmare in the opening sets the stage with a subtlety that is unexpected for a scene where a dude with knives for fingers is hunting a girl in a nightie.
But the movie's dream world is almost impressionistic in some of its details. The real world of the movie is less compelling, though there are some interesting characterization choices. His dialogue and behavior is written as though he forgets that he's actually having these nightmares too. Nancy struggles to understand what is happening to her, and then takes steps to find and implement a solution. The flip side to the strong survivor female in horror movies is that women are constantly under threat. But that bathtub scene is also brilliant. Consumable Youth Rebellion. Over the past 30 or so years, most people have chosen to pursue the rewards of conformity instead of the fruits of revolt. What they have been left with are ugly and stupid lives, ugly and stupid places and a planet pushed to the very edge of destruction by capitalism’s efforts to keep feeding them new promises of consumable happiness. But the thought that one is wasting one’s life is not a cheerful one, and respectable citizens everywhere have gone to considerable lengths to avoid it.
They cling to these illusions with ferocious desperation; but the whole house of lying ghosts and grim parodies is a fragile one, and it is threatened by the depredations of delinquency. To the extent that delinquency prevents respectable citizens from misperceiving themselves as happy and free people who are blessed with rich experiences and who continue to grow as individuals, it provokes their fury. “It probably had a little to do with the gangster films we saw. How To Convert A Tanker Truck Into A Post-Apocalyptic Home. The Birth of Altermodern. I received a crash course in postmodern thought during my first semester at Swarthmore College. In a lesson that was to be repeated throughout my undergraduate education, the professor opened the class by admonishing us to reject binary thinking. As the class was staring at her dumbfounded, she divided the chalkboard in two with a thick vertical line and asked us to name the dualisms that structure our world.
After she provided a few examples to get us started – male/female, white/black – we jumped into the game, calling out binaries one after another: rich/poor, smart/stupid, human/animal, cool/lame, skinny/fat … The game went on until the board was full and the air saturated with chalk dust. Pausing a moment, our comparative literature professor asked us if we noticed anything odd about the list we had constructed. The postmodern project of overcoming binary thought, however, is more difficult than it may appear. Micah White, www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org. Unclick Google. On March 11, Google revealed its latest plan to violate your privacy: they will now record the types of websites you visit in order to gather a behavioral profile of your interests purportedly so that they can send you targeted advertising.
This policy is in addition to their current policy of keeping a record of every single web search you have ever made along with as much other personally identifying information as they can gather. Of course, these behavioral profiles and detailed search histories will also be made available to law enforcement personnel upon request.
The disregard for user privacy is a long standing tradition at Google and one that should be challenged. Just as Facebook was recently forced to cave after protests, Google too can be made to backtrack from their creeping violations of our privacy. As every internet user knows, the web is inundated with advertising. Because Google ads are targeted, certain advertisers are willing to pay top dollar for clicks. Trail of Tears --Reading 2. Determining the Facts Reading 2: "You cannot remain where you now are.... " The Cherokees might have been able to hold out against renegade settlers for a long time. But two circumstances combined to severely limit the possibility of staying put.
In 1828 Andrew Jackson became president of the United States. In 1830--the same year the Indian Removal Act was passed--gold was found on Cherokee lands. Most Cherokees wanted to stay on their land. My sun of existence is now fast approaching to its setting, and my aged bones will soon be laid underground, and I wish them laid in the bosom of this earth we have received from our fathers who had it from the Great Being above.¹ Yet some Cherokees felt that it was futile to fight any longer. The U.S. government submitted a new treaty to the Cherokee National Council in 1835. My Friends: I have long viewed your condition with great interest. I have no motive, my friends, to deceive you.
John Ross persuaded the council not to approve the treaty. 1. 2. RS Part17: Appreciation. PART 17 Experiencing life is all a matter of perception: physical events exist only in our mental awareness of them. There is a popular Ch’an koan which asks: “if a tree falls in the woods, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” The answer is no. What we call sound is only a disturbance in the atmosphere until it reaches something that can “hear” it, and a mind that can interpret it as a noise. A manmade mechanism left in the forest can detect the level of air disturbance, but it is not a sound until a mind defines the reading or recording as such. “One must truly appreciate what it means to have the opportunity to exist in this form.
Realizing the significance of your life, because every specific sensation is available to you only once, and never again, leads one to understand that life has great value. William Burroughs. 9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down | Raptitude.com. Over the years I’ve learned dozens of little tricks and insights for making life more fulfilling. They’ve added up to a significant improvement in the ease and quality of my day-to-day life.
But the major breakthroughs have come from a handful of insights that completely rocked my world and redefined reality forever. The world now seems to be a completely different one than the one I lived in about ten years ago, when I started looking into the mechanics of quality of life. It wasn’t the world (and its people) that changed really, it was how I thought of it. Maybe you’ve had some of the same insights. Or maybe you’re about to. 1. The first time I heard somebody say that — in the opening chapter of The Power of Now — I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. I see quite clearly now that life is nothing but passing experiences, and my thoughts are just one more category of things I experience.
If you can observe your thoughts just like you can observe other objects, who’s doing the observing? Political Myths WE Live By by Peter Lach-newinsky. Whenever most conversations I have these days move around to matters political I often find myself in a quandary. I have the choice of either accepting the tacit assumptions behind the other person’s remarks or questions, or else remaining largely silent and trying to change the topic. This is because I don’t share the tacit assumptions. I would classify most of these usually unexamined assumptions as social democratic or liberal. They dominate all corporate media for reasons that will become obvious below. In my view, these prevalent myths of our age do not hold up to rational scrutiny and are a, largely unrecognised, form of mind control.
Here is my attempt to list fifteen of them and briefly comment on them from the viewpoint of critical political science and a radically democratic ethics. 1. If ‘democracy’ means ‘rule by the people’, it isn’t. 2. Just like any communist party, when it comes to the crunch, the major parties are all run top-down from head office. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Thirteen Recycled Steampunk Gas Masks | 1-800-Recycling. Image: Tom Banwell At the intersection of futurism and romance, steampunk marries Victorian steam power with science fiction technology. Think of the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, or, from a more modern perspective, BioShock and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. There's not much that embodies the ideas of steampunk more than these steampunk gas masks — creations of leather, resin, brass and copper that, in an eerie and freakish way, show our fear of a dystopian future disaster. Ukrainian workshop Bob Basset and American leatherwork artist Tom Banwell are masters when it comes to repurposing unwanted materials and recycling them into steampunk works of art! 13. Image: Tom Banwell Sentinel is a creation that combines a fire helmet, a gas mask and a collar that seems to be modeled on a medieval design. 12.
Image: Tom Banwell If an elephant were ever in need of a gas mask, it could wear this amazing creation, called Pachydermos. 11. Image: Bob Basset 10. Image: Bob Basset 9. 8. 7. 6. Garbage City: An Unbelievable Real-Life Urban Wasteland « Dornob. More amazing than the trash-strewn architecture and garbage-stuffed city streets is the strange fact that this place is fully occupied and abuzz with activity. People live, work, eat and sleep within this object graveyard outside the city center of Cairo, Egypt. Spaces not occupied by people are given over to livestock (fed with trash scraps) and guerrilla urban gardens. Officially known as Manshiyat Naser, this district has shops and apartments like any other, but its residents earn their keep by specializing in collecting, sorting and recycling specific types of trashed materials.
A group of children can be found sifting for plastic bottles while an organized team of women scours the remnants for cans or glass. Other items are burned locally as fuel. While it might not meet any health standards on Earth, the unique urban phenomena is arguably sustainable in a certain sense – even ‘green’ in a some ways. 75 Ways To Stay Unhappy Forever.