From the Fungus Garden, II
You can learn by watching the one who's watching you with just as much slavish voracity. You start to see what it is that's keeping you both interested: the structure of the thing, as it is inside as seen from outside the fungus comb. You crawl around during your free time, trying to get that perspective. For one thing, you see that this thing, this mound you're living inside, goes on and on, probably it's meters tall. The ridges on the walls, these are keeping the place cool. And a couple times a day a few lazy gaffers hanging out near holes in the outer wall move some wads of chewed crud to block or unblock the openings. Keeping things comfortable enough, temperature wise, that you don't think about marching out of those holes. Right out into the curious documenting eye of science. To sum up: right out into nothing.
Pretty soon, that eye becomes like the distant queen. It's there, you know it is, but thinking about it doesn't bring it any closer or farther away. You don't think about it until you have to, which is to say, not until the nest splits, or is split, perfectly in half.
Which gets to the more interesting business of what they hope to find. Here you are, small, but not the smallest among your kind, and admittedly as sterile as the next worker. And so you think, it's the nest they're into, has to be. So now, like you ever really wanted to know what life outside the fungus comb is like, to know what all those spongey upright creatures do with their heads and hands, you get to find out.
For one thing, they've made a word to describe how you all know what to do without being told. They call it "stigmergy," from a Greek phrase that means "incite to work." They use words like "dynamic" to describe how the nest interacts with you and your nestmates. As one guy* says, "in stigmergic labor it is the product of work previously accomplished rather than direct communication among nestmates that induces the insects to perform additional labor."
And they've been making termite nests that aren't termite nests at all, but simulations of termite nests. Factories and other industries could apply stigmergic principles to production, making a large, unweildy labor force a more cohesive entity that, gasp, does not need a tumescent queen dictating where and when not to build tunnels. Also, your nest is being used to design thermoregulation systems for big units of humans, like in the hotel below.
Is decentralization really so new? To you, it's as familiar as the fungus garden. But to the guys with microscopes and wires, it doesn't seem to be. They simulate traffic patterns on highways and ant swarm raid patterns and see similar principles being used in similar ways. They compare their brains' neuronal network to the internet. (And obviously using the same word, like "network," to describe different events makes it all more richly complicated.)
And so, moving away from the now hacked up nest, the fungus garden arid, you start thinking about hanging out in some moist crevice to go over some things.
Such as: are simulations simplifications? or just complex in a different way? or does that question beg an impishly intellectual/uninteresting answer? and do icons have anything to do with augmenting perspective? and is there termite life on mars?
*Edward Wilson
Pretty soon, that eye becomes like the distant queen. It's there, you know it is, but thinking about it doesn't bring it any closer or farther away. You don't think about it until you have to, which is to say, not until the nest splits, or is split, perfectly in half.
Which gets to the more interesting business of what they hope to find. Here you are, small, but not the smallest among your kind, and admittedly as sterile as the next worker. And so you think, it's the nest they're into, has to be. So now, like you ever really wanted to know what life outside the fungus comb is like, to know what all those spongey upright creatures do with their heads and hands, you get to find out.
For one thing, they've made a word to describe how you all know what to do without being told. They call it "stigmergy," from a Greek phrase that means "incite to work." They use words like "dynamic" to describe how the nest interacts with you and your nestmates. As one guy* says, "in stigmergic labor it is the product of work previously accomplished rather than direct communication among nestmates that induces the insects to perform additional labor."
And they've been making termite nests that aren't termite nests at all, but simulations of termite nests. Factories and other industries could apply stigmergic principles to production, making a large, unweildy labor force a more cohesive entity that, gasp, does not need a tumescent queen dictating where and when not to build tunnels. Also, your nest is being used to design thermoregulation systems for big units of humans, like in the hotel below.
Is decentralization really so new? To you, it's as familiar as the fungus garden. But to the guys with microscopes and wires, it doesn't seem to be. They simulate traffic patterns on highways and ant swarm raid patterns and see similar principles being used in similar ways. They compare their brains' neuronal network to the internet. (And obviously using the same word, like "network," to describe different events makes it all more richly complicated.)
And so, moving away from the now hacked up nest, the fungus garden arid, you start thinking about hanging out in some moist crevice to go over some things.
Such as: are simulations simplifications? or just complex in a different way? or does that question beg an impishly intellectual/uninteresting answer? and do icons have anything to do with augmenting perspective? and is there termite life on mars?
*Edward Wilson
posted by evelyn at 10:37 AM
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