Thoughts on society and the human race

[Minimalist]

Branch water=clean cool creek water.

That some redneck asshole upstream pissed in.

[The Grand Nudger]

Hehehe, interesting observation on ants. A single ant may not be as "smart" as a human, but as a colony their system of heuristic organization can be impressively complex. An ant has about 250k brain cells, and so a colony of 40k ants would have the same collective number of brain cells as a human being. This is a very important piece of information, since ants think collectively. If we were to assign 7 bits as the processing power of each ant (based on chemicals they use for communication, and ignoring the relative strength of the chemicals...assigning only yes or no), we could extrapolate the processing power of the colony as a whole. One of the largest known ant colonies is in Japan, and numbers approximately 306 million workers and one million queens. That's 7675 human brains worth of brain cells, and roughly 268 megabytes of communicative power, all counted individually. Most colonies are much smaller, but there is a floor whereby the ants cannot effectively communicate and thus the colony perishes for lack of organization, as well as a ceiling at which point new colonies are formed (though in the Japanese case for some reason this has not happened). Queens may live up to 30 years, producing eggs the entire time, and the average ant life span is 40-65 days. Most colonies number in the thousands, or tens of thousands.

(ants and emergent behavior ftw!)

Ants do in fact go to war, they do have weapons (some even chemical weapons), they build fortifications out of sourced material or their own bodies and limbs, arrange themselves into structured social groups, engage in forms of agriculture and slavery, have open and quiet rebellions, care for their young, communicate with each other, and exhibit complicated burial behaviors. Chew on that.

Given their substantial physical advantages its a wonder that they ever developed any sort of complicated behavior at all, it's only required in the context of their being social creatures. Which, at least in this case, is everything.

[Rayaan]

Ants do in fact go to war, they do have weapons (some even chemical weapons), they build fortifications out of sourced material or their own bodies and limbs, arrange themselves into structured social groups, engage in forms of agriculture and slavery, have open and quiet rebellions, care for their young, communicate with each other, and exhibit complicated burial behaviors. Chew on that.

Some of them are even suicide bombers ...

"Its defensive behaviours include self-destruction by autothysis, a term coined by Maschwitz and Maschwitz (1974). Two oversized, poison-filled mandibular glands run the entire length of the ant's body. When combat takes a turn for the worse, the worker ant violently contracts its abdominal muscles to rupture its gaster at the intersegmental fold, which also bursts the mandibular glands, thereby spraying a sticky secretion in all directions from the anterior region of its head. The glue, which also has corrosive properties and functions as a chemical irritant, entangles and immobilizes all nearby victims."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camponotus_saundersi

These ants have been doing this before humans but (obviously) for a different reason than going to Heaven unlike Muslim suicide bombers. Ants are more rational than humans in that regard, at least.