The Saga of the Cannibal Ants in a Soviet Nuclear Bunker

 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cannibal-ants-soviet-nuclear-bunker

Somewhere near Międzyrzecz in western Poland, there is an abandoned Soviet nuclear installation. Patches of pine and spruce, which had been planted as camouflage, are still doing their job. Vegetation entirely envelopes the concrete entrance, which is blocked off but accessible to bats and determined, rule-breaking humans. On top of a ventilation pipe that juts out from the mostly underground facility, there is big, mound-like nest of wood ants. It is a perfectly normal place for wood ants to live. They feast on the sweet honeydew secreted by aphids dwelling in nearby pine trees, and soak up the rays of post-Soviet sun.

But within the bunker, in a small room at the bottom of that shaft, there was a second colony of ants. These ants had no sun, no warmth, no light, and no honeydew. So they survived on the flesh of their fellow ants. 

[...]

To understand the bizarre nature of this colony, one must understand the layout of the bunker. Somewhere inside its reinforced concrete walls, which are over three feet thick, there is a small, closet-like room, cryptically numbered 12. The aesthetic of its walls screams “abandoned Soviet nuclear bunker,” with peeling paint and swelling limewash. The floor, once terra-cotta, is now a pile of rubble and soil. In the ceiling is a hole that holds the ventilation pipe, which is approximately a foot wide and connects the chamber to the outside world, about 16 feet above. Ant Colony One, which rejoices in the light and imbibes sweet honeydew, lives right on top of the pipe’s opening. “These ants are mostly eating aphid [honeydew],” Maák says. But when an unlucky ant takes one wrong step, it can tumble down the perilous chute, where it becomes a member of Ant Colony Two. No light, no aphids, no escape. “These ants are eating corpses,” he says.

Ant Colony Two’s drive to survive resulted in an extraordinarily meticulous ant necropolis that lined the walls of the small room and spilled through the doorway. “They were organizing their corpses in waste piles, putting neatly in the corners, and transporting it away,” Maák says. There were approximately two million corpses, many of which displayed bores from bites and fret holes—signs that their contents had been consumed, he says.

Dreams are a precious resource. Don't let advertisers hack them

 

In his book 50 secrets of Magic Craftmanship (1948), Salvador Dali documented a technique that he called 'slumber with a key'. Sitting in a chair with one arm on the armrest, holding a heavy key over an upside-down plate, he would bring to mind a problem he was working on and allow himself to drift off to sleep. With the onset of sleep, his hand muscles would relax, the key would fall and hit the plate, waking him up, often with a solution to his problem.

Mother Earth Mother Board

 https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

So the second library is some holes in a wall, and the first is an intersection. Holes and intersections are both absences, empty places, disappointing to tourists of both the regular and the hacker variety. But one can argue that the intersection's continued presence is arguably more interesting than some old pile that has been walled off and embalmed by a historical society. How can an intersection remain in one place for 2,500 years? Simply, both the roads that run through it must remain open and active. The intersection will cease to exist if sand drifts across it because it's never used, of it someone puts up a building there. In Egypt, where yesterday's wonders of the world are today's building materials, nothing is more obvious than that people have been avidly putting up buildings everywhere they possibly can for 5,000 years, so it is remarkable that no such thing has happened here. It means that every time some opportunist has gone out and tried to dig up the street or to start putting up a wall, he has been flattened by traffic, arrested by cops, chased away by outraged donkey-cart drivers, or otherwise put out of action. The existence of this intersection is proof that a certain pattern of human activity has endured in this exact place for 2,500 years.

Formerly, cable was plowed into the bottom in water shallower than 1,000 meters, which kept it away from the trawlers. Because of recent changes in fishing practices, the figure has been boosted to 2,000 meters.

The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, England, has a display of wrecked cables bracketed to a slab of wood. Each is labeled with its cause of failure, some of which sounds dramatic, some cryptic, some both: trawler maul, spewed core, intermittent disconnection, strained core, teredo worms, crab's nest, perished core, fish bite, even "spliced by Italians". The teredo worm is like a science fiction creature, a bivalve with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood - or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way, early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables received a helical wrapping of copper tape to stop it.

How to pray to a dead God

 https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-fulfil-the-need-for-transcendence-after-the-death-of-god

Even Darwin would write that the 'view now held by most physicists, namely, that the Sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life ... is an intolerable thought.' Such an impasse was a difficulty for those convinced by science but unable to find meaning in its theories. For many, purpose wasn't an attribute of the physical world, but rather something that humanity could construct.

In Germany, the Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher rejected both Enlightenment rationalism and orthodox Christianity, positing that an aesthetic sense defined faith, while still concluding in a 1799 address that 'belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion.' Like Arnold, Schleiermacher saw 'God' as an allegorical device for introspection, understanding worship as being 'pure contemplation of the Universe'. Such a position was influential throughout the 19th century, particularly among American Transcendentalists such as Henry Ward Beecher and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Those who practise apophatic theology - 2nd-century Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite - promulgated a method that has come to be known as the via negativa. According to this approach, nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists. 'We do not know what God is,' the 9th-century Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena wrote. 'God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not.'
    How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the centuries before Nietzsche's infamous theocide was to understand that God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This is the answer of how to pray to a 'dead God': by understanding that neither the word 'dead' nor 'God' means anything at all.

Made to measure - why we can't stop quantifying our lives

bhttps://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/26/measurement-why-we-cant-stop-quantifying-our-lives

Standard reference materials, or SRMs, created by NIST [...] others seem like ingredients lifted from God's pantry: ingots of purified elements and pressurised canisters of gases, available in finely graded blends and mixtures. Some are just whimsical, as if they were the creation of an overly zealous bureaucracy determined to standardise even the most peculiar substances. Think: domestic sludge, whale blubber and powdered radioactive human lung, available as SRMs 2781, 1945, and 4351.
    Each has a purpose, however. Domestic sludge, for example, is used as a reference by environmental agencies to check pollutant levels in factories. Standardised whale blubber helps scientists track the buildup of chemical contaminants in the ocean. Powdered lung, meanwhile, is used as a benchmark for human exposure to radioactive materials.

10,000 steps. It’s often cited as an ideal daily target for activity, and built into countless tracking apps and fitness programmes. Walk 10,000 steps a day, we’re told, and health and happiness awaits.

    This number is presented with such authority and ubiquity you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the result of scientific enquiry, the distilled wisdom of numerous tests and trials. But no. Its origins are in a marketing campaign by a Japanese company called Yamasa Clock. In 1965, the company was promoting a then-novel gadget, a digital pedometer, and needed a snappy name for their new product. They settled on manpo-kei, or “10,000-steps meter”. But why was this number chosen? Because the kanji for 10,000 – and hence the first character in the product’s Japanese name, 万歩計 – looks like a figure striding forward with confidence. There was no science to justify 10,000 steps, it seems – just a visual pun.

Last Night In Soho

Nice story of a country girl coming to London to design clothes where she finds she can travel back in time to her favourite period, the '60s, to learn that it's not all that it seems. Not exactly a twist, but nice.