Oops, There Goes Another Rubber Tree Plant

James Lileks, has Buzz now, but that doesn't mean he doesn't still Bleat (thankfully). Today's Bleat has an interesting digression regarding ants.

Funny thing about ants, they outweigh us. At least that's what Ted R. Schultz wrote about seven years ago, and who am I to argue with Ted R. Schultz? The wiki on Ant quotes his little factoid, and all the citations for that factoid seem to point back to this article by Schultz that isn't mainly about that factoid.

Did nobody think about the remarkable number of ants in the world before? That seems doubtful, but maybe he came up with the hook that brought it to everybody's attention and birthed an oft repeated factoid, or his was the first article to mention that concept that was readily searchable through google and the like.

I'm a little surprised that Lileks didn't dust off that factoid himself during his little ant related digression in today's bleatings.

When I was at UC Riverside, it was much easier to believe that factoid than here in Santa Monica. Anything sugary left out was an invitation for a full scale invasion. The dorms would get colonized from time to time, those ants meant business. If you didn't have good habits with regards to food disposal before being in those dorms, you had much better habits when you left. Ants in the Pants isn't just a plastic kids game from the 60s, it's also a really lousy way to start the day.

Speaking of UCR, you may have heard of a bomb threat that caused the postponement of some commencement ceremonies on Friday. Sucks, but you could tell the perp wasn't an engineering student, or else he would have cooked up something more effective. Luckily the idiot didn't know what he was doing, or else someone might have been hurt.

Back to those ants, with the slew of apocalyptic and semi-apocalyptic pictures released lately, I'm a bit surprised nobody's been tempted to remake Phase IV. Somehow this film hasn't ever been released on DVD. Not sure why given all the other crap available. My memories of this film are vague at best as I don't think I've seen it since the original release in 1974 (my memories are hazy from back then not for druggy haze reasons, but only being 5 at the time reasons). The idea that an intelligent hive mind could develop amongst a colony organism like ants is a compellingly creepy idea.

That film was the only feature directed by Saul Bass, a man whose work you've undoubtably seen. There's quite a bit of his work up on YouTube. I only embedded (above) the title sequence to Vertigo, but just search Saul Bass on YouTube and you'll see all the hits.

Speaking of YouTube searches, while seeing if any clips from Phase IV are there (none to be found), came across the above video titled Economic System IV. Not sure how the pretty pictures are supposed to help analyze anything. All complex systems show emerging patterns over time given the right limitations on what you put into the simulation.

Now, you may be wondering, what the hell does the Soup Dragons video above have to do with any of this? It's all due to a mistaken belief I had of the derivation of their band name. Given the use of fractal patterns on their cover art and in this video, I had thought that the phrase "soup dragons" was a reference for how we tend to visualize familiar objects out of the repeating fractal patterns. It's like seeing a dragon in your soup, or a fluffy bunny in the clouds, or The Virgin in your tortilla. I've always thought Homo Sapiens was a very incomplete description of what makes us unique as a species. It's not just that we think, it's that we feel compelled to see order in the chaos. This ordering of chaotic signals, and the ability to intuit patterns without complete data is what allowed us to be a tremendously successful species, and though ants may outweigh us in total, we can still kick their collective puny little asses when we need to. But I probably shouldn't talk too tough about those ants, wouldn't want to end up like one those rubber trees Frankie sang about (and just to put a neat little bow on all this, the people in the video below are so high up in Tokyo, that if the folks were visible down below, they'd look like . . .)