A New Leaf

There’s a real dearth of accessible information about the current economic situation. I’ve been trying to think of a way of describing TARP and the “bailout” to a layperson, but it’s a hard task that requires more time than I have at the moment. Before you get to the bailout, though, it’s important to understand what this financial mess is all about. This video does the best job I’ve seen so far – take the 10 minutes to watch.

From a review in the New York Review of Books of The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, chock full of interesting ant-anecdotes:

Beginning as simple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cattle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of foreign ants (much like cuckoos do among birds), leaving the upbringing of their young to others, and there are even ants that have discovered agriculture. These agricultural ants represent the highest level of ant civilization, yet it is not plants that they cultivate, but mushrooms.

There’s something amazing. The straight-line comparison to human civilization is a bit strained, I think, but you have to wonder what a 4-dimensional alien from another galaxy might think about us scurrying around.

Another completely cool fact, both for the result and the experimental method:

It has recently been found that ant explorers count their steps to determine where they are in relation to home. This remarkable ability was discovered by researchers who lengthened the legs of ants by attaching stilts to them. The stilt-walking ants, they observed, became lost on their way home to the nest at a distance proportionate to the length of their stilts.

Every once in a while I switch browsers and lose all my bookmarks… or switch bookmark systems (del.icio.us, Google bookmarks, etc.) and lose all my bookmarks. So it is especially great to rediscover a beloved site after a long hiatus and many lost bookmarks.

Today that site was McSweeney’s, a collection of short humorous writing. Its information architecture leaves something to be desired, but on the other hand, the tall narrow unstructured list of links gives you the feeling that it goes on forever. Thankfully, this is a good thing – I’ve yet to find a piece that hasn’t made me chuckle, and more often staving off an unprofessional guffaw in the middle of the office.

Read, explore, laugh. Here are just a few random links to get you started:

• Short Imagined Monologues: “SUBWAY SANDWICH ARTIST’S STATEMENT. …I think I’ve made it obvious that the even rows of roast beef are a satirical comment on the 1931 Iowa Cow War.”
• Reviews of New Food: “Homemade Mint Ice Cream: …And my lost childhood tasted like when you drop ice cream into a pile of dead leaves and then pick it up and eat it.”
• Open Letters to People or Entitles Who Are Unlikely to Respond: “An Open Letter to My Neighbor Who Frequently Sits Alone in His Truck: …Sometimes your wife is home when you do this, sometimes not. When she is, I often wonder if she looks out the window and wonders why her husband is sitting alone in the cab of his truck. ”

I’ve been a miserable blogger… it’s a difficult thing to integrate into a busy day.

I was excited to get my beta invitation to daytum last week – see my first attempts here: daytum.com/nate_c.

Life is now a series of meetings interrupted by weekends and vacations.