Some engineers at Georgia Tech had the idea — and who knows where such ideas come from — to pack ants into tubes and then, you know, squeeze them out like syrup. It turns out that the ants will blob and flow much like real syrup. Experiments like this, if they rise above mere curiosities, may raise salutary questions in one’s mind about the old claim that a mathematical description of a phenomenon is a complete description. Or, perhaps, it’s just interesting to look at:
All Manner of Thing
All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Recent Comments
December 12, 2010 at 7:27 pm
That’s fascinating, but…there’s something creepy about ants, and this doesn’t really improve that image.
December 12, 2010 at 7:27 pm
p.s. great title
December 12, 2010 at 9:12 pm
What? You don’t find ants appetizing? I would think they would be very nice on pancakes, with bacon. If you could prevent their running off, of course.
Aren’t fried ants, or chocolate-covered ants, or something similar, eaten down in your part of the world? I seem to recall something about that. It was somewhere south, anyway.
December 23, 2010 at 2:26 pm
1) No.
2) Hell, no!
December 23, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Must have been somewhere further south then!
December 25, 2010 at 1:46 pm
But Aunt Jemima was probably pretty close to Maclin.
AMDG
January 2, 2011 at 12:26 pm
I meant to come back several days ago and note that my original comment wasn’t meant to be about their potential as foodstuff, but about them in themselves–that is, creepy. I’ve always found them slightly disturbing somehow. Bees are very similar socially, and also sting, but somehow they’re warm and cuddly in a way that ants aren’t. Of course I’ve never met the Africanized “killer” bees.
January 2, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Oh, I agree completely. Ants are disturbing. There’s too many of them, they are too well co-ordinated, and too disposable. Scientific dystopias in which society is modeled on ants are the most dystopic.