Why ants? A very relevant question!!
Basically, ants have an incredible work ethic just like you, our customers. By necessity they work in teams to get a project completed.
More scientifically, Biologist Dr. Brian Goodwin, author of “How the Leopard Changed His Spots: The Evolution of Complexity,” observes how ants create order out of chaos: “What we’ve found in the case of the ant colony was that these chaotic individuals, when they reach a certain density, then suddenly you get a transition to order. You might ask, ‘Why should they occupy such a state? What’s the advantage of it?’ And the general perception now in complexity theory is that living near the edge of chaos gives systems, the complex systems, maximal adaptability, the capacity to respond adaptively to a constantly changing and unpredictable world, which is the world we live in.” Sound familiar? Just like being on a multi-disciplinary project team?
A quick fact check on Wikipedia tells us that “successful techniques used by ant colonies has been widely studied especially in computer science and robotics to produce distributed and fault-tolerant systems for solving problems. This area of biomimetics has led to studies of ant locomotion, search engines which make use of foraging trails and fault tolerant storage and networking algorithms. (See also Langton’s ant and ant colony optimization). One example is AntWeb — The Adaptive Web Server Based on the Ants’ Behavior. Another is The Apache Ant Project which, according its original author, James Duncan Davidson, was an acronym for “Another Neat Tool.” However, later explanations go along the lines of, “ants do an extremely good job at building things,” or “ants are very small and can carry a weight dozens of times their own,” to describe what Apache Ant is intended to be.
Ants have often been used in fables and children’s stories to represent industriousness and cooperative effort, such as in the well-known Aesop fable, “The Grasshopper and the Ant.” The human fascination with ant society has been written about humorously and seriously. Mark Twain wrote about ants in his “A Tramp Abroad.” Some modern authors have used the example of the ants to comment on the relationship between society and the individual. Examples are Robert Frost in his poem “Departmental” and T. H. White in his fantasy novel ”The Once and Future King.” More recently, animated cartoons and 3D animated movies featuring ants have included ”Antz," ”A Bug’s Life,” ”The Ant Bully,” ”The Ant and the Aardvark” and ”Atom Ant.” There is a comic book superhero called Ant-Man!
Some of us I’m sure have even owned an ant farm at one time or another as a popular educational toy, albeit that we did not necessarily have access to resources like the Ant Farm Universe, “for hobbyists, educators, students, science projects, home schooling, & gift giving” in our day.
So we think that The Newformant is in good company. In the modern world of internet-based social networking and global community, we have chosen a metaphor predicated on social behavior which is focused on getting work done. We hope that you will frequent this community site often in order to interact with other Newformants to ask questions, share advice, engage in discussions, exchanging ideas, learn and hopefully enjoy some fun stuff along the way.
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