Notices by myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)

@zappes @GreenSkyOverMe

Would a pressure washer work with water that was sticky like a milkshake? Maybe? 2cm is bigger than most ants, but even big ants struggle with surface tension.

I say we shrink it and find out.

*zaps ya*

@resonancewright @dalias

I think the point was just that "AI" has been used as a marketing term for almost a century, thought this most recent round has been notably annoying.

What is "real AI" ? Creating a simulation of a human mind?

I think the point about intelligence not being well-defined are valid.

AI wasn't the "next big thing" ... the market has missed it. Maybe it's not obviously profitable enough. But, there are ideas out there growing that will change the world and only the people close to them even know what they are.

It's not totally possible to just decide that something is going to "change the world." You can fake it for a bit, but eventually reality sets in.

That doesn't mean that nothing is happing. You just might need to listen in different places.

Breaking News: Mourning Doves 43 Percent more Fluffy than Ever, Doves Flagrantly Flout Laws of Roundness, Scientists Alarmed, Illegal Levels Surpassed AGAIN.

Cooing Imminent.

#birds #borb #borbAlert #pointlessVideo #looklooklook

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVZXDgdWIQs

Thank God for giant salamanders and I pray they will only grow bigger and bigger.

Quick update on my new queen carpenter ant: she seems to be doing well living in her glass test tube inside of my pen drawer. I checked on her today and gave her a drop of water which she accepted and drank. Her eggs are slowly developing.

(How to keep people from taking your fancy pens.)

Queen update! Her eggs have hatched and are now larvae. She will feed them “trophic eggs” which are special eggs that cannot hatch. This is an ant food storage hack. Young ants need protein but she cannot leave the nest to raise this first generation.

While I was bugging her with a photo today I also gave her a drink of water which she seemed to like.

If you look carefully at the eggs and larvae you can tell the ones that have hatched because they have a mouth. That is the little bit that curls over.

The eggs without mouths are probably trophic and will be food.

There is a hit resource management mobile game in this I swear!

There is some reason to believe that ants could have memories from their time as larvae. They are exposed to the food and other ants in their colony. They have a sense if it's a time of plenty or a time of precarious survival and this may shape their size and personality.

Though they really become "real ants" after they emerge from their silk pupae.

In weaver ants the larvae are used like silk guns to hold leaves together.

People imagine the adult ants squeezing them like little tubes of glue, but this *isn't* how it works.

In fact, the larvae is an active participant in the weaving. She will lean out and attach new silk anchor when tapped on the head by her older sister, then spool out silk as she moved until she is tapped again... this makes her make another attachment.

They are both aware and working together.

So, weaver ant larvae can respond to signals and help with colony work even as larvae.

All while their older sisters drum on their head with their antennae.

walking by the courthouse this morning it was delightful to see the happy brides and grooms just married. Friday is the most popular day for courthouse weddings I am actually working in the Merrick office is an exciting and interesting job. What would it be like to see so many different people at that particular junction in their life?

RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116525530358581582

When I moved from teaching college to high school (best decision ever, by the way) I assumed everyone in the HS math department would use LaTeX and overleaf. And for some reason several people were intimidated by me (I think being in a college environment had caused me to project a certain ominous math aura as a matter of self preservation) so no one wanted to tell me they had no idea what LaTeX or overleaf was.

HS teachers math use word, and I have seen some horrors ... My god.

The math teachers at the HS had developed all of this wonderful material for teaching. But it's all in Word and Google docs. I've learned to work with it, and I've taught a few people a little LaTeX.

After the rough first months people stopped being intimidated and now we all get on great.

I still dream of getting all those documents converted, though...

someday...

I'm remembering sending an email to another teacher with a possible set of problems with a calc test. I just sent the *.tex file with a little note "I compile them in overleaf, lazy I know" the teacher had no idea how to open it, or why I thought they might be lazy.

😆

I thought "of course they all have LaTeX installed on desktop and use the command line... I hope they don't look down on me for using a web app"

🤣

@stevewfolds

I love LaTeX so much and still want to win the world over. When I taught college everyone used it exclusively. It was just the culture.

Now I have a google doc, converted from word and the diagrams are from old scans of worksheets from the 80s.

It's wild!

I got into making LaTeX math problem sets that would automatically generate with unique numbers and diagrams and put the solutions at the end. That was so much fun, and they still use my system back at the college.

"I started out with beetles but soon moved to the harder stuff, like ants and then sawflies... now it's all about obscure arachnids and mites."

My carpenter ants moved their graveyard to a new location. It took them only a day and I didn't catch them in the act. I was, at first alarmed by the pile of dead ants, then I realized that they have decided they like using the back of the extra log slice as a clubhouse for older majors. They cleared away the trash pile near the door to the next chamber over.

I decided to give them some nice feeders having noticed this.

Then realized I'm probably accidentally starting a kind of ant religion.

Alan Turing was a visionary. Super-perceptive computer scientist and it annoys me to no end that what he's most famous for outside of computer science is the "Turing Test."

He gave one of the first and most succinct accounts of how a computer should work and they still work that way to this very hour as I type.

Talk about Turing Machines more and Turing Tests less.

A student solves a problem. Their diagram doesn't match the situation described. Even working with that diagram, their application of trig functions is incorrect. The algebra contains more errors in arithmetic and logic.

But, after a half page of equations and numbers and diagrams they have the correct answer.

Out of ten points how many would they receive?

From me? 3/10

Knowing that a problem requires a diagram, trig, a numerical answer with the right units shows some understanding.