Resisting the urge to intone the overlord meme, resisting the urge to intone the overlord meme… Shit!
A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.
Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another.
The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.
What’s more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.
Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.
I for one, think we have much to learn from our tightly bonded insect friends.
At the future mother-in-law’s place, while some rather conservative guests were present at dinner, and I (of course) had been getting wasted, on the topic of Governor Sanford:
“I guess the republicans are experiencing the sexual revolution in reverse: they sssstarted out screwing young boys and have now progressed to getting with women”
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin has paid more than $8,100 to reimburse Alaska for the costs associated with nine trips taken with her children.
Palin’s attorney, Thomas Van Flein, says the governor paid $8,143.62 to the state on June 19 for the nine trips, some with more than one of her five children, taken between January 2007 and February of this year. The payment was due Tuesday.
An ethics complaint had alleged Palin abused her power by charging the state when her children traveled with her. The Alaska Personnel Board found no wrongdoing, but Palin agreed to reimburse the state for trips found to be of questionable state interest.
LOS ANGELES – A plan to cap a vast, long-neglected deposit of the pesticide DDT on the ocean floor off Southern California got its first public airing Tuesday — nearly four decades after the poison was banned from use.
The estimated $36 million proposal by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls for a cover of sand and silt to be placed over the most contaminated part of the estimated 17-square-mile area declared a Superfund site in 1996.
The cap won’t clean the site, but it could reduce the health risks for people who eat fish caught off the Palos Verdes coast, said Mark Gold, executive director of the watchdog group Heal the Bay.
Go have sex with your Argentine lover! Oh wait, your timing was shit on that one. Oh, and your state’s bible thumping ways (those same ways you shamelessly exploited during your election campaign) have just made your life even worse.
Okay, so that thing I said about cool headlines in the post below? We have a new winner.
Luxury yachts offer pirate hunting cruisesLuxury ocean liners in Russia are offering pirate hunting cruises aboard armed private yachts off the Somali coast.
Wealthy punters pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous waters in the world hoping to be attacked by raiders.
When attacked, they retaliate with grenade launchers, machine guns and rocket launchers, reports Austrian business paper Wirtschaftsblatt.
I imagine this is total bullshit (if any country is going to start the most dangerous game, it’s going to be us or China.), but if it isn’t… Holy Shit!
A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said today.
Jason Everett Keller, 40, allegedly accosted another homeless man, Stephan Fava, on the 200 block of Grand Avenue in South San Francisco at about 1:45 p.m. March 30.
At the time, Fava was chatting with an acquaintance, who is also homeless, about “quantum physics and the splitting of atoms,” according to prosecutors.
Keller joined in the conversation and, for reasons unknown, got upset, authorities said. He picked up his skateboard and hit Fava in the face with it, splitting his lip, prosecutors said.
I move that lectures halls across the country adopt this new conversation finisher.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever explicitly spelled it out here, but in (one of) my day job(s), I investigate equipment failures, mostly for insurance companies. When something technical goes boom, I get called in to find out why. In four short months, I’ve investigated everything from computers to elevators to bone densitometers to golf simulators to eyeglass lens coating machines and tons of other weird stuff all over the country.
As a result, I do quite a bit of traveling and all that time driving throughout the southeast and flying around the country gets me thinking. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t be able to make a living doing this. My job (my industry, in fact) exists because of (are you ready, Moneyball fans?) inefficiency in the market of technical information. In a more efficient market, insurance companies would understand what the hell it is they are insuring and not need me to explain to them their liability or why their nice $500,000 mammogram machine is worthless with that tiny chip in the scanning surface.
From there I thought more about how market inefficiency is responsible for much of our economy, and how quickly that’s shrinking in some sense. In a totally efficient market for music, where music fans knew (or had access to) all of the information about every band in the world, there would be no need for record stores. Of course, the dismal performance of most record stores is proof of that.
It got me thinking to Old Job® and how poorly they were run. The CEO knew very little about the technology we were selling and really was just a glorified salesmen. Kinda like most CEOs. In an efficient market, where companies knew everything about each others products, the CEO position would be the first to disappear. Interestingly enough, that’s not happening. In fact, the rapid ascent of CEO pay has been well-documented. Why is that?
I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that boardrooms are stocked with boards who blindly trust CEOs who were hired because of their communication ability and salesmanship to steer them in the right direction? Since CEOs set the direction of these companies, they have the most ability to increase market efficiency. They are in the position to exert great influence over the percieved value of many different kinds of service. Something tells me there aren’t many CEOs out there who are telling their boards that they’re overpaid.
I don’t have much more than that at the moment. Just some idle thoughts from a drive to Virginia.
One particularly charged finding is that in most species besides humans, same-gender pairings rarely lead to lifelong relationships. In other words, when one attractive bonobo male eyes another in a lovely patch of Congo swamp forest, they occasionally kiss and then move on to other oral pleasures, but they don’t bother anyone afterward about trying to legalize their right to an open-banana-bar ceremony. In fact, they are likely to move on to girl bonobos: most animals that engage in same-gender sex acts do so only when an opposite-sex partner is unavailable.
Not sure how I feel about the fact that every politician in North America is tweeting. On one hand, I’ve pretty much reached Newt Gingrich overload and don’t need another source of his bigoted bloviation. (I swear the fucker is everywhere these days.) On the other hand, if it continues to contribute to the downfall of the GOP by giving its members an easy forum to go ahead and try the whole racist angle out, then I’m all for it.
I studied control theory in graduate school. My advisor was one of the world experts in the field and I happened to write a pretty kickass master’s thesis on the subject. (Forgive my lack of modesty, it happens to be my magnum opus.) After that, I worked at fucking Kinko’s for a year schlepping printouts all over downtown Raleigh because nobody would hire my overeducated ass. Anyway, it’s nice to see some of the ideas I toiled over being discussed in this fascinating article which looks to apply control theory ideas to economics.
70’s and 80’s cinema was rife with the loose-cannon-cop-who-plays-by-his-own-rules-but-he-gets-results drama. Something about teh Clenis kept this kind of movie from being made in the 90’s, but the new millennium has brought these back, albeit in different form.
The 2000’s version of these movies are more often about females instead of males and are just as likely to feature medical professionals as law enforcement officers. Don’tbelieveme? Seeforyourself.
The recession likely will end in September and be followed by a mild recovery, according to the new USA TODAY/IHS Global Insight economic outlook index.
“We’re two to three months away from an upturn,” says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist for IHS Global Insight.
Well, if USA Today says things are going to get better, who am I to argue?
RICHLAND — Workers cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation are going after radioactive wasp nests.
The Tri-City Herald reports 6 to 12 inches of top soil are being dug up this month from 6 acres near the H Reactor. And, workers will dig up more individual mud dauber wasp nests over about 75 acres of the nuclear reservation in southeast Washington.
The contractor handling the clean-up, Washington Closure, says the nests were all built in 2003 when water was used to dampen dust during demolition of an H Reactor basin. That attracted the wasps that used the mud to make tube-shaped nests for eggs.
Spokesman Todd Nelson says the nests are “fairly highly contaminated.”
I was in Los Angeles from Thursday until late last night. Observations:
Most of the places I wanted to visit had to do with the music I love. I only sort-of realized that:
Hermosa Beach: The Last sing about this place in “Every Summer Day” it was beautiful.
Manhattan Beach: The Descendents are from there.
Redondo Beach: Black Flag is from there.
Hot Dog on A Stick at Cafe 405 in Long Beach: Song by The Vandals. Also, they have Veggie Dog on a Stick!
Amoeba Records: I got some great stuff there. An original vinyl copy of Dag Nasty’s “Wig out at Denko’s” with the Dischord don’t-pay-more-than-8-dollars-for-this disclaimer.
Alfredo’s in Lomita: Ummm… yeah. It was also my first stop in California after the rental car place.
Just as we hit the PCH, a Beach Boys song came on the radio. That made me happy.
Speaking of the Beach Boys, Turn it Down scores again with a great interview with the Barbaras. Although reading this somehow made me a little less excited about their new album. At first I thought production by Jay Reatard would be a good thing, but they make it sound like he’s producing a Jay Reatard album for them. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I got to go to Dodger Stadium, and it was great! We sat in right field and heckled the shit out of Raul Ibanez. It was the game of the week on Fox on Saturday.
Normally, I don’t heckle. It’s just that the Dodger fans’ heckling was so lame (Ibanez Sucks! Ibanez Sucks! repeated 10,000 times) I felt we had to mix it up a little with just plain weird shit.
“Hey Ibanez, give me back my hubcaps!”
“Ibanez can’t parallel park! It takes him, like, 12 tries!”
etc.
Got to see Joel McHale on Saturday at the Wiltern Theatre in Koreatown. He made a joke about Koreans eating dogs.
I also visited my Chinese friends from Grad School. Readers from HNTB know about these guys. For those who don’t, long story short, my officemates and coworkers in graduate school were from China and very FOB. We had a great time together, but they didn’t understand much about this country. Now the wife is a professor at Cal State Long Beach and the husband a structural engineer with a big firm in L.A. They were shocked at my vegetarianism as we went to the Korean BBQ.
“In China, we eat everything with four legs except table. Everything which flies except airplane.”
I stay in lots of hotels for work. In fact, I used Hilton points to get a few free nights during this trip. Usually, I’m in Hampton Inns or Fairfield Inns or the like. Those hotels have free WiFi, free parking, free (crappy, but still free) breakfast. The expensive-ass Hilton in Glendale charges plenty for all of that. That’s really annoying.
Only two celebrity sightings: My fellow Puerto Rican Benecio Del Toro at Amoeba records and this chick at the restaurant where we ate on Monday evening.
I’m in Hilton Head tonight, going to look at a generator tomorrow which has a 3.0 Liter, 300 HP V6 engine. (The Cangrejeromobile has a 1.8 Liter, 125 HP in-line 4 cylinder engine).
As you drive into Hilton Head, there’s a billboard with a confederate flag with the words “Never Forget” superimposed on it. I’m having a hard time figuring out if that was put up by people who are pro or anti confederacy.
I shouldn’t blame South Carolina wholly, I was on Topsail Island last year when I saw a flag reading “Rebel blood in my heart, Yankee blood in my lawn”
After living in the south for so long, I sometimes forget that most of the country stopped fighting (and talking about) the civil war 140 years ago.
(*The use of the phrase “anti-American” in this context is both factually correct and irony free.)
Fascinating New Yorker article on the Argentine coin shortage:
You could, then, dismiss the Buenos Aires coin shortage as an anomaly. But the Argentine experience actually underscores the degree to which all modern financial systems depend on confidence, and the problems that erupt when that confidence disappears. In the U.S., after all, the chaos of last year both led to and has been exacerbated by a shortage of its own: credit. As people became worried about the health of the system, they took money out of any investment that smacked of risk and put it into cash (bank deposits have soared in the past six months) or government bonds. That, in turn, made others more anxious: less willing to lend and more interested in holding onto their money. Fear bred a credit crunch, which, in turn, bred more fear. And if fear has left the Argentines with too few coins, it has left us, paradoxically, with too much cash (and too little credit). This isn’t to say that financial crises are all in our head; certainly our own was sparked by problems that were very real. But there is an irreducible psychological dimension to both crises and recoveries. And if it’s hard for people in Buenos Aires to give up their pennies, think how much harder it will be for Americans to start taking risks again.
While I certainly agree with the premise insofar as a lack of confidence in the financial system grinding said system to a halt, I disagree with the author’s concern for the eventual return to risk taking of Americans. As long as there are risky financial propositions for Americans to take, we’llbetakingthem.
I’ve only gotten to see Reigning Sound perform once, and have had to supplement liberally with youtube clips. One of the things I loved about their show was how it was basically a showcase for all things Greg Cartwright. During the (unfortunately) brief set, in addition to Reigning Sound favorites, they played:
“Stop and Think it Over” – Compulsive Gamblers
“Bad Man” – Oblivians
“My Heart is Beating” – Mary Weiss
They always deliver and I’m upset that the only touring they’ll be doing this summer will be in Spain, despite the new album coming out in June (Ed note: OMG!)
Anyway, here they are performing a song Cartwright first did with the Compulsive Gamblers, and one of my favorites: “Your Happiness”
I feel like I’ve been waiting for this new album forever.
