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Yucks Digest V1 #2
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To: yucks
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Subject: Yucks Digest V1 #2
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From: spaf (Gene "Chief Yuckster" Spafford)
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Date: Mon, 31 Dec 90 01:16:09 EST
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Reply-To: Yucks-request
Yucks Digest Mon, 31 Dec 90 Volume 1 : Issue 2
Today's Topics:
10 Things Eric S. Raymond hates about unix...
algol lives!
anon wire (2 msgs)
Children's books for Xmas
cutie
End of the World
JOTD
O Baby Baby
The truth about Santa
Verb the INS
yuck: Accident on anthill leaves royal insect headless, but loved
The "Yucks" digest is a moderated list of the bizarre, the unusual, the
possibly insane, and the (usually) humorous. It is issued on a
semi-regular basis, as the whim and time present themselves.
Back issues may be ftp'd from arthur.cs.purdue.edu from
the ~ftp/pub/spaf/yucks directory. Material in archives
Mail.1--Mail.4 is not in digest format.
Submissions should be sent to spaf@cs.purdue.edu
**********************************************************************
Date: 22 Dec 90 18:31:11 GMT
From: eric@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond)
Subject: 10 Things Eric S. Raymond hates about unix...
Ten Things I Hate About UNIX
(by a UNIX weenie who has
(at least for the duration of this message)
Seen the Light...)
1. The @!$#! file system is so stupid that it has to masturbate for
three to five minutes before it's sure it's retained enough of
its vitality to let me boot up.
2. X. Don't get me started about X. Only in X could you need to write
three pages of Old Sanskrit to do "Hello, world!". Yes, X, the
window system so hoglike and slow that it brings even RISC machines
to their knees. And the X documentation? Don't make me laugh...
3. Kitchen-sink kernels that enshrine every incompatible special-purpose
hack in the last ten years. Fer cripes' sake, who *needs* cruft
like the Indian Hill IPC package or ioctl handlers for every I/O device
more recent than a @#!$% stone tablet to be resident all the time?
4. Four different (and, of course, mutually incompatible) wild-carding
notations. Was that `.' or `?', sir? Do you want `*' or `.*',
sir? Can I use `+' here? or `|' here? Sheesh...
5. The `editor' vi. Oh, this is a good one. Don't you just *love*
insert vs, command mode? Doesn't it make your day to press an arrow
key and get `[[B' munged into your text?
6. The $#@&!!# default octal escapes in all the tools, which we're
stuck with forever because Ritchie thought it was more important
to support hand-hacking three-bit PDP11 opcode fields than to be
able to actually read data dumps on a byte-addressable machine.
7. The pcc compiler, perpetually about three to five years behind the
times and the *only* major implementation not to support the bloody
ANSI standard (not that X3J11 doesn't have its own share of brain-
damage).
8. Data dependencies in all those nice clean `filters' UNIXoids like to
rave about. Did you ever try passing nulls for a graphics escape
through nroff or the print spooler? Or typing high-half graphics
characters to cat(1) through the shell's `cooked' line discipline?
Yeah, you'll find out about `cooked' all right...
9. Text-processing tools that `silently truncate' long lines.
Better than that: fixed-length buffers as far as the eye can see in
tools with no input-length checks, so you can garbage static data,
smash your stack or worse (``worse'' as in the RTM worm).
10. And there's no !@#$@ legal *source* any more for less than the
approximate yearly GNP of a small third-world nation, so I can't
*fix* things. *That* is the most unkindest cut of all.
--
Eric S. Raymond = eric@snark.thyrsus.com (mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
P.S.:
Serious replies to this will be flushed.
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Date: Sun, 23 Dec 90 20:35:29 -0500
From: "Claudia Cloutier" <cmc@beach.cis.ufl.edu>
Subject: algol lives!
To: spaf
:
: Whatever did happen to Algol? You see alot of the old ACM algorithms
: programmed in it and it looked rather interesting. I can remember
: seeing satellite ephemeris programs written in it 20 years ago, but you never
: hear of it anymore.
:
Algol suffered some unfortunate adverse publicity when Pascal came out,
and was forced underground. However it has been kept alive all these
years by a small but dedicated network of users. Sorry I can't tell you
who they are--in the spirit of data hiding, each of us only knows the
names of two others.
Under our care Algol has continued to grow. The number of reserved
words is now 10,523, and the syntax diagrams are three-dimensional.
The latest version is Algol-88, but an object-oriented derivative
called Algol:= is under active development.
To appreciate fully the features of Algol-88 you must be aware of some
things about the old Algol-68. Algol-68 was written in two separate
styles, one for publication and one for actual programming. With the
advent of desktop publishing this is no longer necessary, and Algol-88
programs are now entered directly in Times-Roman, with reserved words
in Helvetica Bold.
Data types supported are integer, real, complex, quaternion, character,
string, sentence, paragraph, stream, list, record, tape and compact disk.
Among the features of Algol-68 criticized as too complex was the
loop construct, for-from-by-to-while-do-od. In fact it had not
reached its full potential, and in Algol-88 has the more general form
for-from-by-to-with-while-using-do-od-until. The basic conditional
construct has been expanded to if-then-elif-unless-yet-ontheotherhand-fi.
In the interest of simplicity we have abolished the goto.
Algol-88 has extensive support for multiprogramming. Processes may be
lightweight, heavyweight, bantamweight or overweight, and they communicate
via semaphores, monitors, message queues, interrupts and exceptions,
not to mention shared memory and rendezvouses. There is something for
everyone in Algol-88.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 90 18:56:00 PST
From: anon
Subject: anon wire
Weather Stops Thief Cold
OLATHE, Kan. (AP)
A man who allegedly held up a fast food restaurant while wearing a
George Bush mask was arrested after his car wouldn't start and he
asked the restaurant manager for a jump start.
Olathe police were holding an 18-year-old Texas man, who was not
immediately identified. He was in the parking lot trying to jump
start his car in frigid cold when officers arrived about 12:30 a.m.
Sunday.
"When he went to leave, his car wouldn't start, so he went back in
and asked the manager for a jump start," Olathe police Lt. Vernon
Watson said.
Watson said the man was being held in the Johnson County Jail
pending arraignment. He was expected to be charged with attempted
aggravated robbery and aggravated kidnapping.
Another police spokesman, Lt. Larry Griffin, said today that he
couldn't explain why the man would be charged with attempted robbery
rather than robbery, except that he never left the restaurant's
property.
Police said the restaurant manager found the masked man in a
restroom after the shop had closed. Brandishing an air pistol, the
robber forced employees to open a safe and then locked them in a
cooler.
Then, when his car wouldn't start, the man brought the manager
outside with him to work on the car, Watson said.
The manager had called police through a computer and officers
surprised the man while he was trying to get the car started, Watson
said. The man had been in the area only a few days and was staying in
a motel, he said.
Olathe is just south of Kansas City, where the temperature at the
time of the robbery was 2 degrees.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 90 22:07:51 PST
From: anon
Subject: anon wire
Trends & Events
SCIENCE SOUFFLE Shuttle fuels
Copley News Service SOLID VS. LIQUID
The great debate has begun between liquid rocket fuel and solid
rocket fuel enthusiasts in America.
Those who support liquid rocket fuel usage charge the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration with polluting Earth's ozone
layer each time a space shuttle is sent aloft using solid rocket fuel.
Lenny Siegel, chief researcher for the National Toxics Campaign
Fund, cites government statistics showing each shuttle launch
delivers 75 tons of hydrogen chloride to the upper atmosphere.
Siegel claims this does as much damage as a single factory in an
entire year, and the prudent solution would be a switch to cleaner
liquid shuttle fuels.
NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham says the space agency is already
comparing the relative merits of the two fuels.
CRUMBLING EVEREST
Scientists have known for years now that the geological plates
beneath the Himalayas are slowly colliding, and thereby pushing the
mountain range to an even higher elevation. This means the world's
tallest mountain, Everest, could grow from its present height of
29,078 feet to 40,000 feet in several hundred thousand years.
But new satellite evidence shows it may never get past 30,000.
Dr. Clark Burchfield, a geologist at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, claims once Everest grows another 972 feet or so it'll
crack and melt from sheer weight.
Burchfield says satellite analysis of our continental plates
shows that when Earth's mountains reach 30,000 feet, the planet's
gravity crushes its own mantle and sends the mountain careening down
into a molten abyss.
FRENZIED HORMONES
Those awkward junior high school years are not only a time of
social turmoil, but of physical turmoil as well.
Hormones in the human(body go into a frenzy in preparation for
release of fertile eggs and sperm production. It's this same hormonal
activity that brings on puberty in teen-age boys and girls, and
influences the social groupings they choose throughout the rest of
their lives.
Now researchers at the University of California at San Francisco
have discovered the group of brain cells responsible for
manufacturing reproductive hormones.
It's called Gn-RH, and contains as few as 1,500 individual brain
cells. But it's because of these little cells that the world found
Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and bikini briefs so fascinating.
Gn-RH may even be the true cause of all our wars. And without
it, you wouldn't be here.
FISH THEORY
Researchers at the University of Nevada fed mice diets high in
either corn oil or fish oil. Then they implanted human breast cancer
cells in the mice and a week later started anti-cancer drugs.
The mice fed fish oil had tumors that were less than half as
large as the mice fed corn oil. The researchers plan more studies to
test their theory that the fish oil diet made the anti-cancer drugs
stronger.
SAFE SUNGLASSES
Race car drivers and pilots have British inventor Jorge
Contreras to thank for the latest in safe transportation technology.
Contreras combined two popular styles in sunglasses those that
are dark at the top and light at the bottom, and polychromatic
sunglasses, which darken only when the sun is bright.
And he won the London Times/Honeywell Corp.'s British Innovation
Award for the effort.
Now operators of high-velocity vehicles can shield their eyes
from glare and still see control panels.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 90 20:35:29 -0500
From: "Claudia Cloutier" <cmc@beach.cis.ufl.edu>
Subject: Children's books for Xmas
To: spaf
These titles are sure to please the child on YOUR Holiday list.
Spot Goes to Hell
In the next of the fun series, the puppy Spot and his friend Billy
Bluejay visit God's domain of Eternal Punishment. They meet Cerberes,
and go on fun tour through the inferno. Your child will meet many
damned souls and learn the virtue of piety in this fully illustrated book.
Curious George and the Audi 5000.
The final book starring the famous monkey who always gets in trouble.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles explain Human Reproduction.
A bunch of deformed cartoon reptiles work together to explain to your
child the medical facts behind the miracle of birth. Also enclosed is
coupon towards the purchase of TMNT condoms and diaphragms.
Green Eggs and Spam
And so Sam ate Green Eggs and Spam.
But now his stomach goes flim-Flam!
Salmonella is what he gots,
and look, here comes the backdoor trots!
Off to the hospital goes Sam,
To have pumped out his eggs and Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.....
Your Pet Squid
A chock full of information book on the raising and breeding of what
is becoming the pet of the 90s. Learn about feeding, changing the water
and the other necessities of keeping your little friends happy. Also
how to flush the smelly bastards down the loo when you're sick of them.
Old Fart Hybrid Shotgun TreeFrogs.
These trademarked action figures fight crime in Bridgeport CT. Join
Vinnie, Nunzio, Dorkbreath and NoEyes with their mentor Elmer, a giant
squid, as they have one adventure after another in this action-packed
book. From their secret hideaway under a bra factory, they help keep
the city in shape.
Hope for the Caterpillars
Little Bobby is a AT600 series Caterpillar Bulldozer. He needs to plow
down the icky swamp so the town can open its Landfill. Can Bobby do the
job before time runs out?
Everything I need to know I learned on Kindergarten Recess.
"The teacher on duty was a real pain. We learned to keep on eye on her.
We learned how to sneak off in the woods to play doctor, and if we were
caught it meant time in the principals office. All the rules and
enforced naps ruined the morale of even the toughest kids. I remember
this one kid, Robbie Folghum. God, what a wimp fag little teacher's pet
he was. At recess we used to take turns beating him up, including the
girls.."
Thirty-Something Radioactive Karate Cows
These trademarked action figures fight crime in Madison, Wisconsin. Join
Thesius, Heracles, Achilles and BiggusDickus with their mentor HungWell,
a miniature polecat, as they have one adventure after another in this
action-packed book. From their secret hideaway under a trojan factory,
they help keep the city standing tall.
------------------------------
Date: 28 Dec 90 04:39:23 EST (Fri)
From: dscatl!lindsay@gatech.edu (Lindsay Cleveland)
Subject: cutie
To: purdue!spaf@gatech.edu
Contributed by: ihnss!mhtsa!mhuxt!cbosg!harpo!decvax!utzoo!utcsrgv!chris
Subject: Chicken Farming
It so happened that the Newfoundland agricultural ministry,
anxious to have something to administer, decided to set up some
chicken farms. They decided to give away free starter chickens.
Well, the first day this old farmer came in and ordered 10,000
chickens. "Great!!!", the minister's secretary exclaimed, "Give th' bye
as many as he wants". So the farmer went home with 10,000 chickens.
But a week later, the farmer was back with an order for 20,000
chickens. "He must have a really big operation, this is great!! Fill the
order", the secretary ordered. The farmer went home with his 20,000.
It wasn't long again, though, that the farmer was back for
30,000 chickens, the biggest order the government had seen. Of course,
it was filled, and the farmer got his 30,000 chickens.
After all this, the secretary decided to go and see this fantastic
chicken farm, and to show some other bigwigs the effectiveness of his
department at getting the Newfies off fishing boats and onto the land.
So, they got a government car and drove to the address they had for the
old bye's farm. But when they got there, all they could see was dry
old fields and a run-down empty barn, and, of course, the old farmer.
"Where in hell are all the chickens we sent you? Thought
you had a real spread going here", the secretary blustered.
"Well ya' know", the farmer drawled, "Those chicks was the
dumbest things. I've been growing things before, y'know, but I guess
I'd never see any to beat them. I planted 30,000 of the little suckers,
but not one came up!!"
(if you think I'm going to sign this, forget it!)
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 90 22:27:42 -0800
From: bostic@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: End of the World
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU
The paper "National Geographic, The Doomsay Machine" which appeared
in the _Journal of Irreproducible Results_ predicts dire consequences
resulting from a nationwide buildup of _National Geographic_. The
author's predictions are based on the observations that the number of
subscriptions for _National Geographic_ are on the rise and that no
one ever throws away a copy of the _National Geographic_.
In a similar vein, yesterday I was reading a collection of essays by
David Mermin (co-author of the world's funniest solid-state physics
text), where he observes that, extrapolating from the current rate of
growth, soon volumes of the Physical Review will be filling library
shelves at a rate exceeding the speed of light. There is no violation
of special relativity, however, as no information is being propagated.
Mermin attributes the comment to Rudolf Pierles (sp?).
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 90 14:23:09 -0800
From: bostic@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: JOTD
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU
It seems that the councils of the reuninted Germany's have finally
resolved which city shall be Germany's new capital.
Paris.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 90 19:14:20 -0800
From: bostic@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: O Baby Baby
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU
I wrote this in January of 1989 when I entertained thoughts of writing
free-lance humor columns for a local newspaper. I never submitted it
though, so I thought I'd dust it off and share it with you netters.
O Baby Baby
My wife, Anne, and I are expecting our second child in about three weeks.
This is a positive development for our family in the sense that it means
we have survived just over eight months of pregnancy without so much as once
having succeeded in making our first child, Laurie Beth, an orphan.
This remarkable accomplishment is a tribute to all the help we get from kind,
helpful people like my brother-in-law Jim. Jim is really a swell,
understanding guy in this matter -- largely due to the fact that his wife,
Linda, just happens to be expecting a baby in only two weeks. So he and I
often chat cheerfully about the Exciting Event about to take place in our
families:
ME: "I'm going to kill your sister, Jim."
JIM: "Lay one hand on her and I'll reach down your throat and rip
your heart out."
ME: "You mean like you tried to do to Linda?"
And so on. This kind of intimate, brotherly friendship -- coupled with the
fact that Jim is approximately as big and strong as the NY Giants defensive
unit -- has helped me to earnestly look forward to Delivery Day as if it were
the Second Coming, only I sometimes still pray that the Second Coming would
happen first.
Now don't get the wrong idea here -- my wife does have the harder job. She
has to endure drastic hormonal changes that make her want to scream at me and
cry all the time. But the most difficult part of pregnancy for any woman is
the fact that she ultimately ends up looking like a middle-European refugee
girl, breathing heavily and smuggling watermelons back to prison camp under
the military tent she's wearing. The very thought of looking like this often
brings on many endless weeks of nausea, but the Doctor says that if I drink
lots of Maalox, the feeling should go away.
Ha ha! Just a little humor there about what the Doctor says! He never gives
any instruction to the father, except, of course, to tell him how much of the
bill the insurance carrier didn't pay. And despite the fact that my wife has
never, ever listened to a Doctor's advice before, she relays the Doctor's
orders to me and does exactly what she's told:
DOCTOR (to my wife): "Get plenty of sleep; remember that you're
eating for two; don't lift heavy objects; don't
climb too many stairs; don't overheat yourself;
go for a walk every day to get some exercise
and relieve stress."
(...hours later...)
ME: "Hi honey! I'm home! What did the Doctor say today?"
ANNE: "The Doctor said I should sleep late in the morning, so you'll
have to get your own breakfast and lunch; he said I can eat as
much as I want; also, I can't do the laundry any more because
it's too heavy and besides I can't climb stairs; and I can't
make dinner any more because he doesn't want me standing over
the stove and getting overheated. So I'm going shopping at
the mall while you make dinner and do the laundry."
ME: "But the stairs and all that walking at the mall..."
ANNE: "That's DIFFERENT. He said I needed to go for a walk to
relieve stress."
ME (on the phone): "I'm going to kill the Doctor, Jim."
You have to treat your wife very delicately during those last few weeks.
Sure, her body is in a fragile condition, but her emotions are also, let's
say, just a teensy bit more sensitive. For a woman like Julie Andrews this
means she might frown gracefully at a joke that otherwise would have made
her laugh, but for any other woman not fitting this description it means
Marital Armageddon.
To give an example of this, my wife and I were having a pleasant chat the
other evening when I made the mistake of burping while still within earshot
of her. I couldn't help it; it's just one of those things that happens when
inexperienced cooks like myself attack perfectly normal spaghetti sauce with
chemical warfare levels of crushed red pepper and garlic. This somehow caused
our pleasant chat to turn into a Marital Discussion, which escalated into a
Marital Debate and finally into an Extended Marital Debate which finally ended
at 3:17 a.m., when we reached a settlement on the central point of the Debate,
which had somehow mutated into who was going to fall asleep first so that she
wouldn't have to lay there and listen to me snore. Really. I am not making
this up. It was 3:17 a.m. Ask Jim.
(C) 1990 by Tom Pfannkoch (tap@ruhets.rutgers.edu)
May be reproduced and distributed freely in unmodified form on a
noncommercial basis provided that this notice remains intact.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 90 20:35:29 -0500
From: "Claudia Cloutier" <cmc@beach.cis.ufl.edu>
Subject: The truth about Santa
To: spaf
_Spy_ magazine research has uncovered some shocking facts about Santa Clause
and his distribution of presents:
Excluding non-Christians and bad children, Santa must visit 91.8
million homes within the 31 hours of Christmas Eve darkness afforded by the
Earth's rotation.
He must travel at least 72,522,000 miles, not counting ocean crossings.
Given his 31-hour deadline, he must maintain a speed of 650 miles per
second.
Assuming 2 pounds of presents per child, his sleigh must carry a load
of 321,300 tons, plus a hefty Santa.
The massive sleigh requires 214,200 reindeer to pull it, increasing the
total Santa payload to 353,430 tons.
The 353,430 tons of reindeer and presents traveling at 650 miles per
second would create massive heat and air resistance, with the two lead reindeer
absorbing 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each, causing them to
burst into spectacular, multicolored flames, almost instantaneously!
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 90 10:33:30 -0800
From: bostic@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Verb the INS
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU
Names changed for the usual reasons...
[For those of you who tuned in late, I've been trying to import John
Smith from Canada for the last three months. The story continues...]
So after a fair amount of Sturm und Drang, John was finally on his way
to the airport, with all the necessary papers and lawyer-supplied
advice, to apply for a visa into the US, type TC (Free Trade), category
Management Consultant. (Why? Because Computer Systems Analyst requires
a degree, which John doesn't have. Yes, it's silly.)
[Those of you who have been listening to me for the last couple months
can join in now--] They refused to grant the visa, not because he
didn't qualify according to their rules, but because he had previously
been refused under another category. Or, as John tells it:
"They asked me if I had ever been refused a TC visa as a management
consultant. I said no. [This is the first time he'd tried under that
particular category.] So later they claimed that they had asked if I
had ever been refused entrance to the US for any reason. [And the
answer to *that* question is yes--] They're supposed to consult with the
folks at Champlain [where he was previously refused] tomorrow morning,
and I'm supposed to call them at eleven, but it doesn't look good."
Expletives deleted due to lack of space. Shoot your friendly local INS
bureaucrat today.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 1990 21:07:59 CST
From: Werner Uhrig <werner@rascal.ics.utexas.edu>
Subject: yuck: Accident on anthill leaves royal insect headless, but loved
To: spaf (Gene Spafford)
[ local paper on Dec 16, 1990 ]
by William Booth, Washington Post Service
WASHINGTON - There has been an accident, a terrible accident at the
National Zoo. The cartakers at the Invertebrate House are in shock.
It seems the ants that live in a glass-fronted display case in the
Invertebrate House got exited. "They may have been too ambitious,"
said Ed Smith, the man who cares for the leaf-cutting ants from
Trinidad. "They may have gotten themselves worked up."
What the worker ants did, quite by mistake, was remove the head of
their queen. Apparently, the workers were trying to transfer their
egg-laying monarch from the chamber where she has resided since being
shipped almost four years ago from the Cincinnati Zoo. Apparently,
the hole they were trying to pull her through was small. The queen
was big.
At least that's how Smith re-creates the accident in his mind. No
one actually saw it happen. "Last Wednesday, one of the volunteers
said, "Hey Ed, take a look at this,' and let out a string of
expletives."
Ant specialists refuse to speculate on wether an ant can feel totaly
stupid. Basically, scientists think of ants as amazing little
machines, driven by their genes, which act in concert with a world
that they know largely through smell.
That is why an interesting thing is now happening at the
Invertebrate House. The workers are still tending their queen. "They
are continuing to hold her in the same position," Smith said. "As
long as she still smells like the queen, they will care for her."
There her body hangs, on display, her headless thorax and abdomen
suspended from the ceiling of her royal chamber, her back to the roof,
her legs dangling. Or rather the two legs she has left. The other
four mysteriously disappeared the same day her head did.
Where is the head? "We're not sure," Smith said. Did the workers
eat it? "No," Smith said. "I don't think so."
Is it on the trash heap outside the nest, where the ants deposit
their dead and discard pieces of their fungus garden? "No, the head
is someplace in the nest," Smith said. "And wherever it is, I am sure
they are taking good care of it."
Somewhere, nestled anmong the legs and loving mandibles of her
attendants, the queen's head is being cared for. They are probably
bringing food and trying to feed the head. A guess about what they
are doing with the legs would only be reckless speculation.
Meanwhile, back in the royal chamber, which is on public view and
can be examined in great detail with the aid of a flashlichgt and
magnifying glass, the queen's body rests. It would be reckless
speculation to infer that she misses her head.
Smith contens that among insects, heads are overrated as body parts.
Indeed, the queen may have continued to lay eggs for hours or even
days after her head was removed.
Still, removing the queen's head from her body was not a good idea,
Smith admits. Sooner or later, probably in weeks, the queen's head
and the queen's body will stop smelling like the queen and start
smelling dead. "The bacteria will start their work, "Smith said.
Even royalty rots.
The colony, eventually, is a goner. A queen from this common
tropical leaf-cutting species can live as long as 14 years. But
without a queen, there can be no eggs.
The eggs and larvae that are now being tended will probably be
reared by the workers, but eventually the colony will age, and finally
wind down.
At present, all seems strangely normal in the colony. "Life goes
on," Smith said. As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross would put it, the ants seem
to be in the denial stage.
The bigger workers are still collecting the leaves that Smith puts
out for them and carrying chiseled bits of greenery back to the nest
where smaller ants masticate the bits and place them in their gardens,
where still smaller workers plant thin hairs of fungi, which produce
spores that feed the wormlike larvae and workers.
There is, however, little chance of the colony saving itself.
------------------------------
End of Yucks Digest
******************************