Earlier this morning, Tim O’Reilly tweeted about this research published in the NYT and I am so completely fascinated and thus fixated on it today:

Dr. Dornhaus is breaking new ground in her studies of whether the efficiency of ant society, based on a division of labor among ant specialists, is important to their success. To do that, she said, “I briefly anesthetized 1,200 ants, one by one, and painted them using a single wire-size brush, with model airplane paint — Rally Green, Racing Red, Daytona Yellow.”

After recording their behavior with two video cameras aiming down on an insect-size stage, she analyzed 300 hours of videotape of the ants in action. She discovered behavior more worthy of Aesop’s grasshopper than the proverbial industrious ants.

“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,” she said. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.”

Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task — collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item — while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.

Why do some worker ants lean on their shovels and let the rest of the workers do all the work? “It’s like students living together — you’ll always find one will have a lower threshold for doing the washing up and will end up always doing it all,” she said.

It’s amazing it took us so long to figure this out – what with all the ant farms we’ve been watching for years and years. No one seemed to notice the slackers until now. Perhaps, they’re there for their personalities, for keeping morale up, or maybe for some other brutally apparent reason that we won’t notice for another hundred years?

Maybe they’re just slackers.

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If you weren’t there, then this isn’t at ALL interesting.

Go ahead and watch it though if you enjoy that sort of thing.

During my artist-in-residency in Barcelona, Pollee, Bergey, Tonya and I rented a car and took a week’s travel into the Pyrenees and the northern coastline.

These are some snippets of our brief journey set to some of the tunes we enjoyed along the way.

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By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 24, 2009

The genomes of man and dog have been joined in the scientific barnyard by the genome of the cow, an animal that walked beside them on the march to modern civilization.

A team of hundreds of scientists working in more than a dozen countries yesterday published the entire DNA message — the genome — of an 8-year-old female Hereford living at an experimental farm in Montana.

Hidden in her roughly 22,000 genes are hints of how natural selection sculpted the bovine body and personality over the past 60 million years, and how man greatly enhanced the job over the past 10,000.

As with other species, genes governing the immune system, the metabolism of nutrients and social interaction appear to be where much of the evolutionary action has occurred. The result is an animal that lives peacefully in herds and grows large on low-quality food, thanks to the billions of bacteria it carries around.

Selective breeding has exaggerated and spread some of those traits, producing hyper-passive Holsteins and muscle-bound Belgian Blues, and dozens of humpbacked breeds that combine characteristics of both.

[read more of this]

…you need to want more.

One thing a recession is good for is reminding us how much we need.

Raise your hand if you’ve been doing a lot of talking about the economy and the lack of growth and the rise of unemployment and the worry and the poor attitudes and the general malaise about productivity in the global markets [insert image of me raising my hand]

It’s clear those of us living in the States have huge appetites and tendencies to need to want more and more and more.

What’s the matter with “Good” that we blindly and zealously trade it for “Better” no matter what the cost? Surely there’s a time and place for that, but sometimes perhaps we should just hang back and enjoy really GOOD?

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We showed silent films that have been around for almost a century to 7-year-olds and they were rolling on the floor. Chaplin and Keaton are as relevant as ever.

Once they caught their breath, they made simple storyboards, title pages and backdrops for their own silent movies, acting out the scenes with toys.

Each crew of three had to rehearse at least once in front of the camera before we filmed their own, original silent film. Editing was done by me, to their specs, of course : )

There are quite a few of these, but the above is one of the favorites. Click on the image to watch. Enjoy.

Wanna see more? Click here.

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We showed silent films to 7-year-olds and I was quite surprised at how funny these kids found Chaplin and Keaton to be – even after 100 years they are as relevant to entertainment as ever. Our little folks were rolling on the floor.

After watching the likes of these, they endeavored to make their own silent films using toys and backdrops they created.

Will post them as soon as they’re edited.

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…does not always fall on the plain – regardless of what we’ve learned.

Having just returned from a week’s travels into the Pyrénées and the coast, we encountered weather much like that of our former residences in Southeast Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

We visited San Sebastián, Munitibar-Arbatzegi Gerrikaitz and Ansó.

Which isn’t to say the weather was ALWAYS that way, only that we saw a fair number of showers both in the mountains, on the coast and, of course, on the plains.

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