![]() ![]() ![]() There’s no good reason he’s there except that Captain Dan Stokely is way too old to carry the picture by himself. The passengers include old couples, a middle aged woman who just got fired from her job and is looking to start her own business, and a young, cool guy whose personal life is in a shambles. If Dan Stokely looks a bit familiar to you giant bug aficionados out there, it’s because after he got done fending off giant ants, he battled an island of killer cockroaches in The Nest. She has some stud on retainer named Charlie that she pushes around as well as the gruff captain named Dan Stokely. She’s not a terribly bright businesswoman though because she gives out all this free food and booze and boat rides which seems to attract a certain type of clientele – the kind who only have enough money for free food, booze, and boat rides. Joan Collins stars as Marilyn, a chick who is trying to trick people into buying worthless swamp land for some paradise community with the prissy sounding name of Dreamland Shores. I also made the mistake of looking into our own use of pheromones and found out that it is thought pheromones released from the armpits may cause women living together to have “synchronous menstrual cycles.” Let see those ants beat that! They actually use this stuff to communicate with each other about dangers, sex, and the location of the right ant hill. Sensing an opportunity to turn this dopey giant bug movie into a learning experience, I hit the world wide web to find out if pheromones could really cause giant ants to take over the world. They also have this super sweet gimmick where they spray pheromones on people to make them do their bidding! Of Ants and Men shows how all of these issues fits into the emerging bigger picture of social complexity.Things begin ominously enough when the unseen narrator starts droning on about how cool ants are and how they can do all this great stuff like push aphids around and dig up dirt between the cracks of sidewalks. Each of these books deals with slices of the problem. Examples include: The Tipping Point (Gladwell) Black Swans (Talleb) The Singularity Is Near (Kurzweil) The Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki) A Short History of Progress (Wright) Faster (Gleick) and Critical Mass (Ball). The past decade has seen a host of books that begin to tackle the problem, each tackling some aspect of the problem. Understanding social complexity is a huge challenge. His other recent books include Complexity in Landscape Ecology and Dual Phase Evolution. An early pioneer of the World Wide Web as a distributed information resource, he also contributed to national and international efforts to create comprehensive information resources about the world's biodiversity and environments. In the course of thirty-five years of research he has investigated the problems posed by complexity in fields as diverse as forest ecology, proteins and social networks. He is internationally well-known for his research on complexity, especially the fundamental role played by networks. Keywordsĭavid Green is Professor of Information Technology at Monash University. In our race to create new technologies and sustain indefinite economic growth, we are at best dimly aware of the ways in which we are transforming society and threatening our environment. ![]() Finally, it looks at the way side effects of new technologies, especially computers and communication, have created an Information Revolution, the full repercussions of which are yet to be seen. It looks at the role played by complex networks of interactions. The book examines the ways in which limitations in our thinking and behaviour lead to unintended side effects. Every action has side effects that people often ignore or fail to see. One of the greatest challenges today is the complexity of our social and economic systems. The book traces the way these trends emerge and the role they play in some of the major issues of our time. Just as ants create an anthill without being aware of it, unintended side effects of human activity create all manner of social trends and crises. Why do things go wrong? Why, despite all the planning and care in the world, do things go from bad to worse? This book argues that it is because we are like the ants. ![]()
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