Ants and Agriculture.

Agriculture in humans arose around 11,000 years ago give or take a few thousand years with the domestication of grasses across the world. Wheat, Rice, Maize, and others were the domestic crops upon which agriculture was based. Before that Hunter gather groups did grow plants but not in an organized social way like they do in agriculture.
Ants evolve something like generalized agriculture 50 million years ago. Around 15 million years after the Dinosaurs kicked the bucket. This is co-evolution of species (the ants harvest fungi) not merely breaking up of the ground that ants normally do that's beneficial to plants.
I'd never given that much thought to ants, they're not as easy to study as bees which have a fascinating dance language and an industry appeal right of the bat. But Ants have been recently on my mind due to the connection to flowering plants that I hadn't considered. Ants don't pollinate plants, so their contribution went unnoticed by me, but they are essentially micro terraforming creatures.
The other day they put some new pavement on the road next to my apt. I was walking a few days after and ants had broken through and their colony (which had been sealed under) was thriving, bringing food and other items from the grass on my neighbor's yard.

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Building my own home.

I've decided. I want to build my own home. There is something special about building your own things. I built a desk for my tiny room when I first moved to L.A. My room was so small that I had to sit on the bed to use the computer so I build a high desk so I could sit on the bed and work on the computer. My roommate Trentity helped me cut the ply-wood to the right side. I still have that desk. It now sits on the living room covered by a cloth hiding the surplus of costume parts my current roommate Sean uses in his creations. Learning to build and fix things continue. And the feeling of satisfaction from fixing even small things is great. So a few years ago I heard on the NPR program the Story about a couple of educators that moved to a tent in their back-yard so they could rent their house and afford to send their kids to college. They had a special type of tent called a yurt and cooked and showered in an RV they had parked next to it. I thought I could do that. Housing in Lo

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Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior to stud

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