think or thwim

The movie was removed from Google Video, but you might be able to download it using bittorrent. I haven’t tried it myself. Somebody posted my favorite part to YouTube.

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If you’ve never considered ants to be particularly interesting, this should change your mind.

This film is full of incredible stuff. Here are some notable examples:

• Indonesian ants have domesticated mealy bugs and feed on sugar and vitamin rich honey dew excreted by the mealy bugs. The ants are nomadic, periodically moving their mealy bug herds to new plants for fresh grazing.
• When a colony is disturbed, scout ants spread out looking for a new site. The site is selected by a form of democracy. Individual ants vote by leaving pheromone trails to preferred sites. At the end of voting, the site with the strongest pheromone trail is used.
• Grass cutter ants use relay teams to transport food. Each team covers a set distance and hands it over to the next team.
• Wood ants harvest tree resin to use as an antibiotic and fungicide.
• Grass cutter ants cultivate underground fungus gardens. They build gravity ventilation systems to maintain desired temperature, humidity and CO2 levels.

My favorite part is toward the end. They fill a grass cutter ant hill with concrete. After it dries they excavate the site revealing the underground ant architecture:

For more information check out: Bert Hölldobler & E.O. Wilson | The Ants. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. It’s been on my Amazon wishlist for years, but I haven’t been able to justify paying $200. Hölldobler is listed as a scientific consultant in the credits of this film.

ants, bert holldobler, documentaries, eo wilson, insects

Citizens for Tax Justice compared taxes collected as a percent of Gross Domestic Product:

Read the entire four page report here (PDF).

:: Greg Mankiw

economics, taxes

Circlo is a nice simple game:

that’s more challenging that it looks.

:: Ursi :: RGS

games, online games

Hopefully this won’t ever come in handy either.

:: Lifehacker

cars

Joel Spolsky wrote guest column for Inc.com about how his company recruits the best employees:

I keep hearing people say that they only hire the top 1 percent of job seekers. At my company, Fog Creek Software, I want to hire the top 1 percent, too. We’re doubling in size each year, and we’re always in the market for great software developers. In our field, the top 1 percent of the work force can easily be 10 times as productive as the average developer. The best developers invent new products, figure out shortcuts that save months of work, and, when there are no shortcuts, plow through coding tasks like a monster truck at a tea party.

From a recruiting perspective, the problem is that the people I consider to be in the top 1 percent in my field barely ever apply for jobs at all. That’s because they already have jobs. Stimulating jobs. Jobs where their employers pay them lots of money and do whatever it takes to keep them happy. If these pros switch jobs, chances are the offer came through networking, not because they submitted a resumé somewhere or trolled a job site like Monster. Many of the best developers I know took a summer internship on a whim and then stayed on. They have applied for only one or two jobs in their lives….

Read on to see how they do it: Joel Spolsky | Recruiting the Top 1 Percent

Aardvark’d, the documentary about Fog Creek’s 2005 interns, is at Google Video for $10 (5 minute preview is free), or the trailer is here.

joel spolsky, recruiting

This clip is from a show called Man vs Wild. Bear Grylls is surviving in the French Alps with only a water bottle, flint, and knife. In this excerpt he jumps into a frozen lake and shows how to deal with it. Hopefully this won’t ever come in handy.

This actually happened to Andrew Skurka during his 7700 mile hike across North America. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with no change of clothes, Skurka stripped down and ran to keep his body temperature up.

The entire episode is available at Google Video. It’s intense.

andrew skurka, documentaries, hiking, hypothermia

In the fall of 2005 I was at REI buying hiking shoes and the guy helping me asked if I was going to the presentation. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I wandered into their meeting room based on his promise that I would like it. I was in for a real treat. Andrew Skurka had just finished hiking 7700 miles from Maine to Oregon, and he gave a great 2 hour talk about his experiences and passed around the gear he used.

Unbelievably, Skurka averaged 23 miles per day over his 339 day trip. He obviously travels light. In fact, he wears running shoes (Montrails Highline or Masai) rather than hiking boots, and his winter pack only weighs 12 pounds without food and water. After he assembled his pack, he cut out 40% of the weight by obsessively examining every item for things to remove. Here’s what’s was left:

1. GoLite Jam Pack with some of the straps removed to save weight (1 pound)
2. Sleeping bag rated to 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-7 degrees Celcius)
3. Pyramid Design one-person winter tent
4. Alcohol stove made from aluminum cans
5. Titanium pot with handles removed (3.4-ounces)
6. Rain jacket
7. Insulated down jacket
8. Glove liners
9. Waterproof mitts
10. Winter hat
11. Digital SLR camera (heaviest item at 2 pounds 6 ounces)
12. Swiss army knife with red plastic sides removed
13. Toiletries and a journal

Skurka’s mom was his supply chain. About every 10 days she mailed boxes of food, clean clothes, and stove fuel to post offices along his route. At the post office he would fill his pack, change clothes, put his dirty clothes back in the box, and mail them back to her to wash. In total, she sent him 15 pairs of new shoes to replace the ones he’d worn out.

He just started his next long hike: a 6800 mile loop around the western United States. He’ll encounter extreme winter and summer conditions, and he has comprehensive gear lists for each on his website. He’s also got good information on diet and preparations, and I really like his lightweight philosophy:

Early on my efforts to “go light” were aimed solely at my backpack, but nowadays the lightweight philosophy extends into all other areas of my life as well. There are two reasons for this: (1) my quality of life is better, and (2) even more important, my impact on something I care about deeply, the environment, is much less.

andrew skurka, hiking

The Flickr Then and Now pool is a collection of photos comparing a place about 100 years ago to the same place today. I particularly like guil3433’s photos of Montreal. Two are shown here:

The Robert Stanley Bagg mansion, Montreal 1900 and 2003

Southeast corner of St. Denis and Ontario, Montreal 1894 and 2007

After a lot of confusion I finally figured out that there are two similar groups:

• Then and Now
• Now and Then

Some photos show up in both groups. Some don’t.

:: All Things Cool

architecture, historical photos, history, photos

At least, that’s how the real estate listing describes Vatu Vara Island. Listed at $75,000,000, that’s only $75,000/acre, which seems pretty reasonable. The top of the 1000 foot high volcano (not recently active) in the middle is 40 acres.

Currently the only access to the island is by boat, in a 20km trip from neighbouring Kaibu island. However there is a large flat limestone area on the eastern side of the island large enough even to land a jumbo jet or private jet.

If you need to borrow a cup of sugar, Mel Gibson will be your neighbor. He bought Mago, the relatively large island straight east for $15 million in 2005.

The island might even pay for itself. From South Sea Reminiscences by T.R. St. Johnston (1932):

The island was at one time bought and occupied by Joe Thompson, and American seaman to whose movements and affluence a great deal of mystery where attached. He seemingly had an endless supply of gold coins, the source of which he could never be induced to divulge; and as there was one part of the island which he would allow no one to approach, it was thought that he had buried the treasure there. The truth of the matter was never known. Thompson was insane at the time of his death, and the secret of his buried treasure, if it ever existed, died with him.

By the way, I think I saw Vatu Vara in the The Mystery of the Human Hobbit at 21:17.

Wikimapia

:: Nothing To Do With Arbroath

islands, real estate