Friday links: General mish-mash

Mississippi towboats, ant memories, and the Decadent Society.

Ant colony memories

Cardfile entry | https://aeon.co/ideas/an-ant-colony-has-memories-that-its-individual-members-dont-have

Super interesting article about emergent ant behavior and superorganism memory. (Ants are fascinating, it’s fun comparing ant colonies to our own brains.)

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(Also: Radiolab’s episode about emergence is one of my favorites

Mississippi towboats

Cardfile entry | https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/triumph-tribulations-towboats-mississippi-river

“The Triumphs and Tribulations of Towboats on the Mississippi River”, Atlas Obscura, Oct. 2019.

Wild article about some insanely badass people hauling barges on the Mississippi.

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Peter Thiel: Back to the Future

Cardfile entry | https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/back-to-the-future

Review of Ross Douthat’s “The Decadent Society: How we became the Victims of our own Success”, outlining “four aspects of decadence: stagnation (technological and economic mediocrity), sterility (declining birth rates), sclerosis (institutional failure), and repetition (cultural exhaustion).”

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