Ant rules
The building specs for The Suite didn’t specify a paved driveway so what we have is a rectangular patch of ‘road crush’. Apparently, road crush is a blend of sand and gravel, but seemingly mostly sand. Silty sand at that. It’s a satisfactory parking surface in dry weather, but when it rains, the limitations of road crush become obvious. I figure that we do need at least a gravel driveway.
A few years back, I started reading a book called Emergence about how within certain complex, even chaotic systems, order can emerge in the absence of an organizing intelligence. Ant colonies are my favourite example.
Your basic ant is capable of about 22 ‘thoughts’. Among them, they can search for food, move stuff (tunneling and waste disposal), care for larvae, lay a pheromone trail, follow a pheromone trail, and figure out what other ants are doing. So, a basic ant will set about clearing debris from a tunnel. It meets another ant and determines that it too is clearing debris. It keeps clearing debris and meets another ant and who is also clearing debris. After a certain number of these encounters, the ant will spontaneously reassign itself to a task other than clearing debris. Thousands of ants, utilizing only these 22 thoughts, build, operate, repair, and defend an integrated complex, optimally designed (e.g. locate waste dumps as far away from food storage as is possible), without any form of central planning at all.
I love the irony of it.
You could think of an individual ant as not even alive. An individual ant is incapable of surviving on it’s own. It can only live as part of an astonishingly intelligent collective.
On the other hand, I think of humans as the pinnacle of evolution. The creative potential of every individual human is marvelous. But the collective behavior of humanity is suicidal insanity.
This is all just segue to say that I’ve adopted “ant rules”. For example, “if I see a littered, returnable beverage container (while riding my bike), I must stop and pick it up.” It’s a rule. This past Saturday, I redeemed $22 worth of beverage containers at my neighborhood bottle depot, which is only impressive if you recall that the deposit per container is 5-cents.
Another ant rule applies to my bike commute home from the CEBAB. It’s a multi-step rule:
1. pick up a littered cup - like a McDonald’s fountain drink cup, or a Slurpee cup - and place in bottle cage
2. fill with gravel size rocks found in the street
3. place rocks on driveway
4. dispose of cup in proper receptacle
My gravel driveway is slowly growing like a groundcover across the silty sand. Building it this way has me constantly thinking about value; about how we arrive at the purely subjective opinion that something has it, and how this ephemeral perception affects our experience of life. Within the confines of this small, four-step paradigm, I find that it imposes perceptions of value that didn’t seem to exist before.
Relatively-speaking, you can carry a lot more gravel in a bottle cage with a cup in it than in an empty bottle cage, so for the length of my bike commute that my bottle cage is empty, I feel deprivation. And when I spot that littered fountain drink cup I perceive value in it, in having it. And that tiny bit of litter-free streetscape that’s created after I pick the cup up, that seems a little more valuable as well.
I think about the rocks, too. A couple of rocks on the asphalt doesn’t make much of a difference one way or the other. Maybe picking up a stone will keep it from being kicked up into a windshield by a passing car, or prevent a roller-blader from stumbling on it. But relocated to my driveway, along with all the other stones from my trips, now that rock has identifiable positive value.
Further, in sum, open pit gravel mining destroys more of Alberta’s landbase than tarsands mining. When complete, my hand-picked driveway will have made no net contribution to that environmental impact.
A few years back, I started reading a book called Emergence about how within certain complex, even chaotic systems, order can emerge in the absence of an organizing intelligence. Ant colonies are my favourite example.
Your basic ant is capable of about 22 ‘thoughts’. Among them, they can search for food, move stuff (tunneling and waste disposal), care for larvae, lay a pheromone trail, follow a pheromone trail, and figure out what other ants are doing. So, a basic ant will set about clearing debris from a tunnel. It meets another ant and determines that it too is clearing debris. It keeps clearing debris and meets another ant and who is also clearing debris. After a certain number of these encounters, the ant will spontaneously reassign itself to a task other than clearing debris. Thousands of ants, utilizing only these 22 thoughts, build, operate, repair, and defend an integrated complex, optimally designed (e.g. locate waste dumps as far away from food storage as is possible), without any form of central planning at all.
I love the irony of it.
You could think of an individual ant as not even alive. An individual ant is incapable of surviving on it’s own. It can only live as part of an astonishingly intelligent collective.
On the other hand, I think of humans as the pinnacle of evolution. The creative potential of every individual human is marvelous. But the collective behavior of humanity is suicidal insanity.
This is all just segue to say that I’ve adopted “ant rules”. For example, “if I see a littered, returnable beverage container (while riding my bike), I must stop and pick it up.” It’s a rule. This past Saturday, I redeemed $22 worth of beverage containers at my neighborhood bottle depot, which is only impressive if you recall that the deposit per container is 5-cents.
Another ant rule applies to my bike commute home from the CEBAB. It’s a multi-step rule:
1. pick up a littered cup - like a McDonald’s fountain drink cup, or a Slurpee cup - and place in bottle cage
2. fill with gravel size rocks found in the street
3. place rocks on driveway
4. dispose of cup in proper receptacle
My gravel driveway is slowly growing like a groundcover across the silty sand. Building it this way has me constantly thinking about value; about how we arrive at the purely subjective opinion that something has it, and how this ephemeral perception affects our experience of life. Within the confines of this small, four-step paradigm, I find that it imposes perceptions of value that didn’t seem to exist before.
Relatively-speaking, you can carry a lot more gravel in a bottle cage with a cup in it than in an empty bottle cage, so for the length of my bike commute that my bottle cage is empty, I feel deprivation. And when I spot that littered fountain drink cup I perceive value in it, in having it. And that tiny bit of litter-free streetscape that’s created after I pick the cup up, that seems a little more valuable as well.
I think about the rocks, too. A couple of rocks on the asphalt doesn’t make much of a difference one way or the other. Maybe picking up a stone will keep it from being kicked up into a windshield by a passing car, or prevent a roller-blader from stumbling on it. But relocated to my driveway, along with all the other stones from my trips, now that rock has identifiable positive value.
Further, in sum, open pit gravel mining destroys more of Alberta’s landbase than tarsands mining. When complete, my hand-picked driveway will have made no net contribution to that environmental impact.