[quote=“lightningrose, post:39, topic:16344”]Apparently, the near instantaneous oxidation of aluminum that protects it from any real deterioration can be defeated with a judicious application of mercury.
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Well that will be a comforting thought next time I fly. Cheers.
What a worthless human being and a pathetic attempt at “art”. Like the loser this person is, they disabled comments on the video page because they know they’d get flak for destroying entire ant colonies.
I hope this loser falls into a vat of their own molten aluminum.
Aluminum is tricky to weld, I’ve been told. Easy to cast.
This is why mercury, along with several other materials, is on the may-not-travel-by-air list.
They’re for sale on Ebay (surprisingly cheap, too)
Hey great Christmas gift for…
US $2,550.00
[spits out coffee]
I wonder if pewter would work, I could try it in my back yard…
The majority of Terrans were six-legged. They had territorial squabbles and politics and wars and a caste system. They also had sufficient intelligence to survive on that barren boondocks planet for several billions of years. We are not concerned here with the majority of Terrans. We are concerned with a tiny minority-the domesticated primates who built cities and wrote symphonies and invented things like tic-tac-toe and integral calculus. At the time of our story, these primates regarded themselves as the Terrans. The six-legged majority and other life-forms on that planet hardly entered into their thinking at all, most of the time. The domesticated primates of Terra referred to the six-legged majority by an insulting name. They called them "bugs."SCHRÖDINGER'S CAT
Oh that would be so much cooler than the models they have at the London Transport museum.
That is precisely why I chose to live in a wooden house above ground instead of an underground warren.
This sounds like the kind of question Randall Munroe would know the answer to.
Calm down, these are fire ants. Invasive, destructive, and just plain mean. They aren’t so good for the local fauna, and boy will they ruin your day if they swarm you.
I did once use liquid nitrogen to kill a colony of carpenter ants, but they weren’t just minding their own business – they had moved into a doorsill in my house.
I might be OK with using lAl on fire ants, but I don’t trust the average lAl-wielding citizen to be able to make the ID correctly.
The same could be said of humans. Hmmm…
But kill one small colony and everyone acts like you’re a monster. Some people have no perspective…
Especially for his “What If ?” physics blog.
Well someone has some mad BoingBoing money.
I guess we’re saying that a similar casting of a nest belonging to ants with better PR would not be tolerated, even if it had a radically different structure.
They may have been cheap until BB (and possibly others) called attention to them… Let’s hear it for supply and demand.
BTW, I’m sure entomologists will quibble with this, but I tend to think of an ant colony as a single animal with organs distributed into multiple bodies.
Living where these ants have invaded, they suck. They’re dangerous and have no problem killing out the native ant species. They don’t belong here. They hurt a lot too. Frankly, I admit perhaps it is because I am from where I am… but seriously… fuck fire ants.
If some one wants to make killing them spiffy, well that’s their business.
Now I’d feel bad if they were army ants, those poor things…
I think a random pair of ants in a colony share 75% of their DNA in common - not perfect clones of each other, but enough or ensure that the best way of propagating their genes (they’re sterile) is to help the queen. If Dawkins was an ant, he’d agree the arrangement is rational. I wonder if the same thing might evolve in humans, midwitch cuckoo style
