Carnivorous Pitcher Plant "Out-Thinks" Insects 111
schwit1 writes A carnivorous pitcher plant is changing its behavior in response to natural weather fluctuations, allowing it to give up its prey in order to capture more. The pitcher plant, which has liquid-filled leaves shaped like funnels, has the ability to allow some of its prey, such as ants, to escape by "switching off" its trap." The first ant reports back to the other ants that it found a large batch of sweet nectar, causing a large contingent of ants to descend upon it. If the trap captures the first ant, it won't be able to capture many more ants later.
Pitcher of sweet nectar? (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe you just haven't noticed the followup part of the metaphor...
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Maybe you just haven't noticed the followup part of the metaphor...
What?
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that many more came after you.
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that many more came after you.
ha ha! :-P
oh yeah, that happened too.
I tell you, if you take this story, substitute "pussy flower trap" for "pitcher flower trap," and change wet->dry and dry->wet, you're writing a science article about how my wife trapped me into marriage.
So that's how Voyager escaped (Score:3)
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And they wouldn't have doctor programs that can't sing. I mean they will have doctor programs that can't sing, but none that think they can in fact they don't.
smarter than many people I know (Score:5, Interesting)
>. If the trap captures the first ant, it won't be able to capture many more ants later.
I wish all people were as smart as this plant.
Give up some free time now to do your school work, get paid $800,000 more later.
Give up the opportunity to cuss your boss out today, end up with a raise next month, after discussing the issue calmly and professionally.
Give up the girl offering easy sex now, have a self-respecting partner for the rest of your life.
Give up the Starbuck's and iPhone 6 today, retire 10 years earlier.
SO much of wisdom, and of success, comes down to this one thing, to delayed gratification.
I've scrubbed toilets, been CEO. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked in a lot of fields. The examples listed were all things I've done both ways - making the short-term, impatient decision the first time, than when I had another chance I tried the long term option. I've scrubbed toilets, I've flipped burgers, I've been a programmer at the bottom of the totem pole, I've been the CEO of several different companies. I've been hired, I've been fired, and for 20 years I've been hiring and occasionally firing other people.
Most of my big mistakes through all of it were when I was thinking about what I want now, rather than the results I want five years bfrom nowm
ps - I dumb, impatient things often (Score:2)
It occurred to me my post could come across as arrogant. I screw that up plenty. I make a ton of mistakes. MOST of my dumbest mistakes involve trying to get what I want right now, rather than what will make me happy in the long term . All of the examples I listed are things I've screwed up and had to fix.
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Logic says we're more likely to be alive tomorrow than dead.
If some of your thoughtful choices include not participating in needlessly dangerous activities or unhealthy behavior, the odds move even more in your favor.
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actually, logic says the opposite: you're more likely not to wake up in the morning with each day that passes. Each day you live is one day closer to your demise. The odds of you dying in your sleep increase every. single. night.
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Wow, I heard Apple products were overpriced, but that's just ridiculous.
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But you might be able to retire 1 year earlier if you laid off
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I place no stock in what my car says about my 'image' and I save money in fuel because my co-workers would rather take their cars than ride in mine.
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Re:smarter than many people I know (Score:5, Insightful)
You are not wrong, but this can be taken to extremes also. I mean, you probably could retire at 40 if you worked two jobs and lived in a one room apartment where you went only to sleep.
There is a point where working for that early retirement takes so much out of you, that you'll be broken by the time you manage it. Lead management is an important factor in your life: Sure, it makes sense to procrastinate as little as possible and quit the habits that give you little but cost much, however you cannot just do without all amenities of life. You don't know whether you will survive to your retirement goal. If you don't, you'll have lived only for work and a dream you didn't get to enjoy. At all.
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*Load management
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I'm set pretty good for retirement. However, I am working my butt off. I am now 44 years old. I am already starting to realize that some of the things I enjoy doing: hiking, skiing for example, are beginning to be a challenge for me even now. I don't know if I will be capable of enjoying them at all in 25 years or so when I retire. However, I don't have the time to do them now. I think we have this whole work thing backwards. We should get out there and enjoy life while we are young, and then sit our
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My wife wants to retire later with more money, I want to retire earlier with more health. She said, "With more money we'll be able to travel more." I said, "I'll be damned if I'm going to visit the Great Pyramid using a walker." The debate continues.
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making those decisions all the time (Score:2)
I have an LG Volt with 1.2 Ghz quad-core processor. It's just as productive as the new iphone. I paid $120. The guy down the hall paid $620 for a new iphone. So I paid $500 less. Suppose we make decisions like that once every three months. I put the $500 in an index mutual fund, he puts it into shiny toys. We do that from age 25 to age 50. At 50, I'll* have $183,909 in my fund, he'll have some broken antique phones. At 60, I'll have $468,368 more than him, just from buying the newest shiny electronics or "s
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http://9to5mac.com/2010/11/11/... [9to5mac.com]
Re:smarter than many people I know (Score:4, Insightful)
Give up the girl offering easy sex now, have a self-respecting partner for the rest of your life.
Why are these exclusive? You can have both.
Also, I don't like the moralizing tone of your post, it smacks of dog whistle racism.
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You can, but if your busy looking for the one it makes it a lot less likely to find the other.
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The looney left thinks that planning ahead is racism. People who plan ahead typically do better in life, but the idea is to claim that anybody who "does better" is in that position due to societal structures that benefit them.
The Seattle Public Schools issued a statement that talked about racism and one of the elements was "future time orientation", another way of saying "planning ahead".
http://www.seattlepi.com/local... [seattlepi.com]
According to the district's official Web site, "having a future time orientation" (academese for having long-term goals) is among the "aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype and label people of color."
The school district took the site down a few days later after widespread criticism, bu
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Easy, sloppy, careless sex, while admittedly fun, can have some long-term disadvantages, you know.
A baby is a commitment pushing past 2 decades - longer if special needs - with a babymama who may not be a suitable parent (though not legally unfit). Contraceptives fail and are also subject to sabotage - and there are women whose entire career plan consists of having at least one child by at least one man.
A virus is forever - so far - and tends to limit one's future prospect pool to the easy, sloppy and care
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This is more like "conflation" [reference.com] rather than "dog-whistle" racism. You get people agreeing with your speech and then throw in something discordant. They want to agree with the majority of your statement, and it order to do so, it seems like they're agreeing with the discordant note as well.
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Give up the girl offering easy sex now, have a self-respecting partner for the rest of your life.
Why are these exclusive? You can have both.
Also, I don't like the moralizing tone of your post, it smacks of dog whistle racism.
"Dog wistle racism"? Well ignoring the inapplicable metaphor, I didn't read any morals into this comment. Yes you could have it both ways, but in matters of sex we tend to just repeat past behavior, statistcally speaking of course. Perhaps you would be more comfortable with the Marshmallow Experiment: You could eat this one marshmallow now, or wait 20 years for a successful career and relationship instead.
Re:smarter than many people I know (Score:5, Insightful)
Apart from the dog-whistle racism issue raised by a fellow poster, there are a few more problems in your post:
Regarding free time, school work, gadgets: I was given the exact same advice by my parents and I severely regret it. I feel I lost my youth. What's the point of being able to possibly retire earlier if the requirement is that you can never be really happy for first thirty years or so, and your prioritisation of study and work has left you with such a small social circle that early retirement would be pointless? My advice to my children would be to aim for sevens rather than tens and live a little. Besides, I think that the effects that has on your personality might be even better for your career than high grades.
And how in heaven's name are you supposed to get that self-respecting life partner if you reject her first?
Delaying gratification is (mostly) bullshit. Where I live, life expectancy is only about 80 years. Your ability to achieve happiness falls over time; in addition, achieving happiness now often improves your ability or opportunity to be happier later. The only thing delaying gratification achieves is that you get less years and less opportunity to be happy.
There are a few traps of course, but they're pretty obvious. Don't smoke, don't run big debts, go easy on the alcohol, and so on, but these tend to be pretty obvious.
Re:smarter than many people I know (Score:4, Insightful)
Delayed gratification is not about increasing the amount of work you do, it's about being able to plan ahead. I saved up my dollars from a summer job working on my Dad's farm, and bought a computer for $1400 at the end of it. My brother spent his money as soon as he got it, but when I got a computer he wanted one too. So he got some kind of 'lease to own' deal, which he was still paying back years later, long after that thing was an obsolete piece of shit. Ended up costing him almost three grand.
Who ended up working more? This is not a trick question.
The only thing delaying gratification achieves is that you get less years and less opportunity to be happy.
The opposite is true. The ability to save money, to be financially responsible, and to study for an education all reduce the amount of work you need to do over your lifetime. And it will tend to be more enjoyable, satisfying work.
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"I wish all people were as smart as this plant."
anyone ever tell you be careful what you wish for
"Give up some free time now to do your school work, get paid $800,000 more later."
tried that, had awesome grades then no job of course i was unwilling to take up debt to go to school.
"Give up the opportunity to cuss your boss out today, end up with a raise next month, after discussing the issue calmly and professionally."
that is a strawman cussing the boss out will get you fired.
"Give up the girl offering easy s
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I'll address this one as an example since it can be shown objectively, with just a little arithmetic:
>> "Give up the Starbuck's and iPhone 6 today, retire 10 years earlier."
> ten years earlier huh? for one thing the smartphone is part of modern culture how can a person who gets their data on dead trees compare to someone who has always on access to all the information in the world?
I have an LG Volt with 1.2 Ghz quad-core processor. It's just as productive as the new iphone. I paid $120. The guy d
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We'd build robots to do that or redesign tasks... (Score:2)
AC wrote: "If all people were that smart and all of them qualified for $800.000 jobs who would clean out the sewers and clean the floors?"
See also, by Bob Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink... [whywork.org]
Or "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon.
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It's amazing how you manage to take obvious platitudes and come across as a complete fuckwad. Congratulations, that's quite a talent.
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I'm spending about $5,000 on a vacation now. Because my kids are only kids for a very short period of time.
My father gave up a lot to ensure that he had a solid plan for retirement. 15 years in the company raided the pension and now he is still working with no plans for retirement.
Delayed gratification is important, but there is a reason that the saying "Take time to stop and smell the roses" exists, and it's only partially because your sense of smell degrades as you age.
On credit, or because you saved it and can afford (Score:2)
> I'm spending about $5,000 on a vacation now. Because my kids are only kids for a very short period of time.
Did you save up $5,000, so you are now able to do that without worrying about?
Or are you putting it on credit, potentially creating a problem for yourself later?
If the former, that's awesome, and an example of the kind of thing I aspire to.
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> I'm spending about $5,000 on a vacation now. Because my kids are only kids for a very short period of time.
Did you save up $5,000, so you are now able to do that without worrying about?
The fallacy here is that a $5k vacation is five times better than a $1k vacation -- or that it's even close to five separate $1k vacations. One of the best family vacas I ever had as a kid involved staying at cheapo motels along the midAtlantic coast, getting up early to check out the local birding scene, dining at local indie establishments, etc. No Plastic Kingdom or Floating FoodOrgy can compare.
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Give up some free time now to do your school work, get paid $800,000 more later.
wtf? i did school work. where's my $800,000!?
Any bachelor's degree: $900,000+ lifetime salary (Score:3)
The census bureau reports that:
over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/... [about.com]
And that includes people who got degrees in African-American Art History! People who chose degrees with a thought toward doing productive work earn even more.
PS - more of the same thinking = more money (Score:2)
Also, if you apply the SAME type of thinking to choosing which company to work for, choosing the job with the best prospects for advancement rather than the best starting salary, you do even better.
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>. If the trap captures the first ant, it won't be able to capture many more ants later.
I wish all people were as smart as this plant.
I hope more people would be so smart as not to listen to life tips by people who accredit "smarts" to a plant. That's just bananas.
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This will blow your mind. $733,637 coffee (Score:3)
> Cite, please. Even a $5 cup of coffee a day and a $600 iWhatever per year only add up to ~$2000 per year. Over 40 years, that's $80,000. Can YOU live on $8,000 a year??
Check this out. This is going to blow your mind, and if you're smart, change your life. It comes out to not $80,000, but $733,637.22! Here's the thing:
The first year, you sock away $2,000 in your low-risk index mutual fund. At the end of the year, the money has earned you $180, so at the end of the first year you have $2,180 from that
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edit: "and dollar cost averaging into a RISING market makes one look like an investment genius."
ANY 10 - 20 year period in an index, since the gre (Score:2)
You CAN try to become very educated in not only stocks, but in specific industries, then try to pick the right stocks. Some people do that. If you're good or lucky, you might make quick money. That's not the way I do it, or the way most people do it.
If you pick ANY decade any time in the last 80 years, the indexes never lost money. Which means broad bases mutual funds never lost money. Ever. Over ANY 20 year period, the returns are about the same. For exanple, the economy was booming when Clinton took o
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The census bureau reports that:
over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/... [about.com]
And that includes people who got degrees in African-American Art History! People who chose degrees with a thought toward doing productive work earn even more.
If you apply the SAME type of thinking to choosing which company to work for, choosing the job wit
windows classic pinball (Score:2)
remember the paddles at the top of the chutes? First time you hit them, they're in place and divert the ball back to the launch flippers, then they disappear so the next time the ball comes down it disappears down the chute.
Same thing.
Why the lame title? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Out-thinks"? Basically it evolved not to produce a protein for part of the day because that resulted in better survival rates from more nutrients. Cool, but why call it thinking, even with quotes when we are big boys and girls and can understand evolutionary processes. Does Slashdot really have to resort to Buzzfeed fringy-worthy headlines these days?
Oh, come now . . . (Score:2)
Don't underestimate drift. (Score:3)
Re:Don't underestimate drift. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes exactly. Chemical production in plants doing things based on time of day such as opening flowers or generating nectar is typically based on levels of light of particular wavelengths that will change throughout the day as the sun rises and sets.
So the mechanism here is almost certainly simply that some members of this species weren't producing nectar until they got more light in a particular wavelength (probably red) than others. Those plants just happened to get more nutrients as a result and simply grew stronger, bloomed better and spread their seed more successfully as a result of that increased nutrient intake from the ants making this the increasingly dominant trait in the population.
The mutation will likely therefore have been one that simply requires an increased (or decreased) amount of light of a certain wavelength required to trigger nectar production delaying the time at which production typically began to a point in the day where the required wavelength was more (or less) prevalent and nothing more than that. As you suggest, it's likely this wasn't a single mutation, but simply the genetic drift of the population as random variation led those that produced nectar ever later to be more successful than those that produced earlier.
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It may not have been a radical mutation or even a series of minor ones, but rather the long-term weeding out of less successful genetic combinations.
And where such genetic combinations would have come from without mutations? Enlighten me.
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This is how evolution by natural selection actually works. Yes 'out-thinking' is too strong a word.
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Because it's all part of the fundamental question of what thinking really is.
You might equally argue that when someone "thinks" they're hungry it's actually just a natural chemical change in the brain to a change in chemicals in the body so they're not actually thinking at all.
It's all just chemistry at the end of the day, when does chemistry change from just chemistry to thinking? The only difference is complexity of the system and where does level of complexity cross the line from being simple chemical re
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Exactly. "Submarine 'out-swims' whale" would be a perfectly clear headline, too. Only on slashdot would a complaint about the word "swim" get +5.
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Bad analogy. Logical fallacy -5. Next time, try to think, don't try to swim.
Re:Why the lame title? (Score:4, Interesting)
Saying pitcher plant allows a few ants to escape communicates the idea, even when everyone knows there is no brain, no thinking, and it actually means, "over the last few thousand generations the plants that did not produce the sticky protein for parts of the day had better survival rates".
But you need to draw an even more important lesson from this, very very applicable today. Without any thinking, purely by chance, some people will find enormous success. So we need to discard the current political thinking based on, "ALL the rich people got rich by being smart and working hard. ALL the poor people are poor because they are dumb and lazy".
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So we need to discard the current political thinking based on, "ALL the rich people got rich by being smart and working hard. ALL the poor people are poor because they are dumb and lazy".
Right. A lot of smart, hard-working people do not get rich. And, about one-third of wealthy people get rich by inheritance. Another thing to consider is that there is simply not enough room at the top for everybody. The rich cannot become rich without the poor. They are the ones who both make and buy the widgets. This is also the simple reason why so-called trickle-down economics haven't worked. Supply is useless without demand.
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Though the really fascinating thing is that this is taking advantage of the ant's scouting behaviour, which not only an advanced cognitive process "I found a good food source and will return to it later" but is an advanced social process "hey friends, come check out this food source I found!"
There's obviously no actual thought involved but it's a pretty impressive feat of tricking the ants to draw them into a trap.
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That's moronic. "Thinking", like all *words created by humans*, has a reasonably clear definition in many contexts that doesn't include electrons or evolutionary processes.
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Wow, seriously?
You can define words to whatever you want them to be. PEOPLE MADE THEM ALL UP. DUH.
If you want to define a "pizza" as a giant cosmic object that can not be comprehended by humans, go ahead, but the rest of us will continue to think of it as a tasty flatbread covered with tomato sauce and cheese.
Though for you "thinking" seems to be more accurately defined as "mental masturbation"...
Respect! (Score:2, Insightful)
The plant is obviously outperforming our politicians in terms of foresight.
That's just cool (Score:1)
I love reading about the complexities of the plant kingdom. Plants that communicate [wired.com]. Plants that delay eating for a bigger meal later. All cool things from organisms that have been evolving longer than any vertebrate.
I want one! (Score:1)
...or one hundred. Now, if only the plant could do the same thing to mosquitoes....