Good time to plug the incredible Honeyland documentary.[0] It's rather short and doesn't have any explicit lesson in mind but somehow it was one of the few documentaries I find myself regularly thinking about over and over and learning new lessons from.<p>[0] <a href="https://honeyland.earth/" rel="nofollow">https://honeyland.earth/</a>
<i>>Contradicting prevailing scientific views, his findings demonstrated that honeybees possessed learning, memory and the ability to share information through symbolic communication, a form of abstract language. As he wrote to a confidante in 1946: “If you now think I’m crazy, you’d be wrong. But I could certainly understand it.”<p>>Frisch was right to worry. When he finally went public, many scientists dismissed his research and argued that insects with such tiny brains were incapable of complex communication. The American biologist Adrian Wenner launched a challenge to Frisch’s theory, arguing that bees locate foods solely by odors, a theory that was subsequently proved wrong, although odors are important signals for bees. Eventually, Frisch’s results were definitively and independently validated, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973.</i><p>The Nobel committee called the dismissal of Frisch’s novel ideas “shameless vanity”
>Perhaps Seeley’s most startling finding was that, in choosing a new home, honeybees exhibit sophisticated forms of democratic decision-making, including collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, consensus building, quorum and a complex stop signal enabling cross-inhibition, which prevents an impasse being reached<p>And he discovered this with just a camera and computer vision/ML!
This reminded me of the Bee Dance Game[0] on Arizona State University's site.<p>[0] <a href="https://askabiologist.asu.edu/bee-dance-game/play.html" rel="nofollow">https://askabiologist.asu.edu/bee-dance-game/play.html</a>
Fine writing, but a deplorable lack of references.<p><i>As one researcher cautiously noted in a landmark study of a newly identified bee signal</i><p>How do you fill a whole paragraph with a quote from a study but not link to the study, or or include the title, journal, or author?<p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221000240X" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...</a><p><i>In the mid-2000s, Seeley convinced a computer engineer who was intrigued by the similarities between bee swarms and driverless cars [...] After two painstaking years, the algorithm finally worked:</i><p>WHO? WHERE? WHAT?<p><a href="https://www.goldengooseaward.org/01awardees/honey-bee-algorithm" rel="nofollow">https://www.goldengooseaward.org/01awardees/honey-bee-algori...</a><p>I am sick to the back teeth of the wealthy parts of the media (Noema is hiring an editor at $110-160k for 5 years experience, which is pretty generous) pumping out content while short-changing their readers. Daily news outlets are constantly writing stories about court cases without ever citing the names of the cases, and gatekeeping their access to public documents for an easy buck. While I greatly enjoyed this article, I'm also mystified by the decision of the author or the editors to withhold germane information that would profit the reader.