Cockroaches Make Group Decisions?
The Discovery Channel is reporting a recent study indicates that cockroaches govern themselves using simple group consultations before anything that affects the entire group. From the article: " The research determined that cockroach decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish and even cows. Cockroaches, Blattella Germanica, are silent creatures, save perhaps for the sound of them scurrying over a counter top. They therefore must communicate without vocalizing.
Not only can they communicate, but they also have a staunch work ethic. They've been known to make every attempt to get to work on time regardless of whatever transformations may happen to them over night.
... er ... smell to him.
Poor Gregor, no matter how hard he released pheromones, his parents just wouldn't listen
My work here is dung.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Similar to group dynamics at a mime conference.
...politicians, pollsters, and focus groups. Seems many species of roaches act this way.
That explains all those committees and cabinets then that politicians constantly set up. Only cockroaches are obviously much more effective in their efforts.
Blog via SMS text messaging
Feeling/"reading" electric currents?
In the X-Files episode "War of The Coprophages" cockroaches are seen to group together to murder people. The character Dr. Berenbaum (based on the University of Illinois entomologist) suggests that it is actually swarms of flying cockroaches that are responsible for most UFO sightings (they generate an electro-static field which can be illuminated dependent on atmospheric conditions). In one of the scenes, a cockroach that escaped can be seen crawling over the camera, making it appear that the viewer's television has become infested. Though the shot was not planned, the producers decided to leave it in the episode.
Cockroaches have regular staff meetings in order to create synergy, redefine their core competencies, implement new strategems, and satisfy shareholders.
Termites can do it too, but they hold theirs inside a plank of wood, hence the term "board meeting."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This is new to our understanding of roaches, but the article doesn't realy go in to what's amazing about this. Ants are pretty well understood, an ant colony is an aggregated indirect fitness machine. Since all the female offspring of the queen are related to eachother by 3/4 (why? because they're way cool!!), and the worker caste is sterile, they promote the fitness of their sisters who will become queens themselves and leave the colony, reproduce, and therefore replicate their sister's genes. This genetic system is called haplodiploidy. Roaches on the other hand, are diploids like you and I. The genetic incentive for the cooperation that we see in ants is just not there in roaches. Instead, what the roaches are doing is more similar to reciprocal altruism.
from the article: After much "consultation," through antenna probing, touching and more, the cockroaches divided themselves up perfectly within the shelters. For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 roaches huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.
A completely selfish roach would say "screw you, I'm not going to that other house, I want to stay where everybody else is!". But because other roaches are willing to go to the second house so is any extraordinarily selfish roach. So this is an evolutionarily stable strategy. This challenges how smart we think roaches are. They are truly making decisions. It's not that some of the roaches are genetically predisposed to being the roach who decides not to stay with everyone else while other's lack that genetic predisposition. If this were the case the numbers of each group when they divide would never be even.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
Who do you think is always trying to get us to push the buttons and release the nuclear weapons? Only cockroaches will survive, right? As I understand it, there are two disguised cockroaches currently on the board at Cyberdyne Systems of California. Not that I'm trying to start a conspiracy, but they ARE attracted to warm weather, and have you ever noticed how you never see cockroaches in the data center? That's because they are in the cabinets, in the PC's silently absorbing data as the ones and zeros whiz by. Oh yeah buddy, they communicate alrighty! Come to think of it, the guys who do back-ups sort of shuffle around the data center like cockroaches under the kitchen cabinets.... hmmmmm
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
It's interesting to see other animals, and now possibly insects, demonstrate intelligent behaviour and communicate with each other. Wether they use body language, chemical emmissions, or sign language with their antenna, I'd say it looks like we keep finding intelligent life on our own planet.
But, if I find one in my house I'm still going to squish it.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
cockroach decision-making follows a predictable pattern
/. for validating what I knew all along.
So some of my past managers really were dumber than cockroaches? I knew it! Thank you
Developers: We can use your help.
I always wondered why Balmer and Gates made group decisions in most cases. Now I know why! :p
I, for one, welcome our new silent Big Brother cockroach overlords.
Poor Scarface. He didn't realize those cockroaches he was going to bury were colluding together against him.
Words of wisdom, I guess.
Why I feel like a cockroach after a meeting. :P
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
... welcome our new organizational management overlords.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
No Politics topic?
They therefore must communicate without vocalizing.
Is this still a matter of debate?
When I was studying Entomology 15 years ago (egad!), the the leading theory for insect communication is that that they communicated primarily using scents and vibrations on the ground in the air. They can hear, but not necessarily vocalize.
This has been studied extensively in ants & termites -- As far as I know, this is still the leading theory.
It's hard to prove, because "smells" are hard to detect.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Is that why I keep finding my Raid cans with the nozzle broken off? Damn bugs!
As the article is scarce on pics, here some more pictures of the cockroaches meeting up before making decisions. :)
Even more significantly the researchers showed that this equilibrium was dynamic. If a bunch of atoms drifted from one partition to another then another bunch would go back the other way. It's not always the same atoms that stay in any particular partition. This demonstrates that the atoms are actually smart enough to be able to count how many atoms are leaving and entering a partition at any time.
"This could revolutionize thinking about atoms," claimed the researcher.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
Cockroaches, Battlestar Galactica, are silent creatures
Just look at Moussaoui's lawyers...
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
Sounds like the Japanese.
if it wasn't, I would not be out of gas in my car after driving PAST a gas station, for if atoms truly want to be free, I'd have suddenly gained a half tank of fuel.
unless, of course, the atoms are taking orders from the cockroaches. we don't get along.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I would have liked to have seen how these groups split up. Mark half, those in the same community group, with some sort of colored agent for distinction purposes. Also attach numbers to their backs for singular ID.
Are certain roaches more active than others in the "communicating" phase? Do they exhibit "Leadership?" Do the roaches split themselves based on swarm? Is there a consistent distribution of the numbers inside the shelters?
recent study indicates that cockroaches govern themselves using simple group consultations
Of course, how else are MCSE and A+ cert morons supposed to figure out something simple like setting up a file server? You think any single one of them is capable on their own? heh
CR1: Is that the sound of a light-switch I hear?
CR2: Yes!
CR3: What should we do?
CR4: Run!
CR5: Do I have a second?
Maybe not!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Did anyon else read Battlestar Galactica?
that is a powerful deduction. I don't know if i would have ever drawn that conclusion, but I guess that's why I don't study insects.
You can't hear it because they're texting!
'tis but a scratch.
Actually that was quite an amazing article. On a tangentially related subject, a mosquito researcher once explained to me how mozzies find blood: when they get a wiff of CO2, they simply angle themselves into the wind and go forward.
Bugs are pretty smart for things without brains.
---------
Contact management, phone backup, sales automation
Well, how else are politicians going to get their laws passed?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Instead of using EGroupware or PHPGroupware, we should just start using using silent communications like cockroaches...
....HEY!"
"...So does that mean I'm #1, or
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Congresspeople Make Group Decisions
March 30, 2006 — Congresspeople govern themselves in a very simple democracy where each insect has equal standing and group consultations precede decisions that affect the entire group, indicates a new study.
The research determined that congressperson decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish and even cows.
"Congresspeople use chemical and tactile communication with each other," said José Halloy, who co-authored the research, which is outlined in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "They can also use vision."
Halloy, a scientist in the Department of Social Ecology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, added, "When they encounter each other they recognize if they belong to the same colony thanks to their antennas that are 'nooses,' that is, sophisticated olfactory organs that are very sensitive."
Halloy tested congressperson group behavior by placing the insects in a dish that contained three shelters. The test was to see how the Congresspeople would divide themselves into the shelters.
After much "consultation," through antenna probing, touching and more, the Congresspeople divided themselves up perfectly within the shelters. For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 congresspeople huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.
When the researchers altered this setup so that it had three shelters with a capacity for more than 50 insects, all of the Congresspeople moved into the first "house."
Halloy and his colleagues found that a balance existed between cooperation and competition for resources.
He explained to Discovery News, "Congresspeople are gregarious insects (that) benefit from living in groups. It increases their reproductive opportunities, (promotes) sharing of resources like shelter or food, prevents desiccation by aggregating more in dry environments, etc. So what we show is that these behavioral models allow them to optimize group size."
The models are so predictable that they could explain other insect and animal group behaviors, such as how some fish and bugs divide themselves up so neatly into subgroups, and how certain herding animals make simple decisions that do not involve leadership.
David Sumpter, an Oxford University zoologist, told Discovery News that the new study "is an excellent paper."
Sumpter continued, "It is important because it looks both at the mechanisms underlying decision-making by animals and how those mechanisms produce a distribution of animals amongst resource sites that optimizes their individual fitness. Much previous research has concentrated on either mechanisms or optimality at the expense of the other."
For congresspeople, it seems, cooperation comes naturally.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Researchers find that unlike roaches, human make a single group decision on who will make all the group decisions every 4 years.
It should be Blattella germanica, not Blattella Germanica (the linked article gets it right). The specific epithet (the "germanica" part) is not capitalized in a binomen. Likewise, Homo Sapiens, Tyrannosaurus Rex, or the abbreviation T. Rex would be wrong. They should be Homo sapiens and Tyrannosaurus rex or T. rex. Well, unless you are talking about the band for the last one.
that the last girl who ever visited slashdot was on 4th April who read Roaches who make group decisions
Striving to be common...
What happens when you divide your shoebox into three sections? Do the molecules in the air divide themselves evenly between two of the sections, but leave the third empty? I think you missed a few details from the article. I don't think this is incredibly revolutionary, but it is still interesting. The roaches seem to attempt to maintain large but evenly sized groups. Instead of the bugs all distributing evenly among the shelters or squeezing as many as would fit into one shelter then all the rest into the second, they struck a balance between group size and eveness.
Now if we could just get them involved with a religious cult that would inspire them to all commit mass suicide... Roach kool-aid anyone?
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Hm, that's an interesting site they have a lot of interesting information I've never seen before. I"m sure you meant to flame that site but you turned me on to it.
correct me if i am wrong, but isnt a cokroach Periplaneta americana?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
What is th price of Tea in China right now?
They could just as well have studied the United Nations to find that out. /. doesn't scare me enough to post anonymously.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
cockroaches govern themselves using simple group consultations before anything that affects the entire group
:)
I've seen them make this decision, repeatedly! My wife walks around outside wearing sandals during the warm summer months, and you can clearly hear one the roaches (sight unseen) go "hey check out the blonde chick with her toes hanging out! Lets go make her scream bloody murder!!!" and then 2 or three come out of nowhere and run over towards her general direction and do exactly that.
No science needed; it's a routine observation
2 pieces of cerial hit the floor, one a cheerio, the other a peanut butter captin-crunch.. the teams deliberates.. even though the CC is further from the hole in the wall and may cause more loss, in the end its worth more than the cheerio.
Kill your TV
After much "consultation," through antenna probing, touching and more, the cockroaches divided themselves up perfectly within the shelters. For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 roaches huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.
Now from this, we can deduce that the cockroaches, after armageddon, will choose to live in mansions and luxury apartments, and stay clear of public housing.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
there was this one roach, strutting across the counter alone, singing, "I've got to be meeeeeee - I've got to be ..." .
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I knew thoose little bastards were smarter than they let on to be !
I watched roaches in my house, err lab, for 6 months with no funding & all I could determine was that they don't walk backwards but they can turn on a dime (literally).
I'd try to cook somthing on the stove, err, bunson burner, one would sit on the ceiling looking like it was watching me then when I would look over at the fly swatter, that one & its' buddies would dive-bomb my lunch, err, experiment before I could get to the swatter. Like little raptors.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
The mod system works, right?
Group consultations? Decision making? (MBA major?) Fancy words used in context of a roach , but what is the point? Roaches have attenae's like every other bug (and silent like every other bug) and EVERYONE knows they communicate via radio waves.... duh....
Yes, especially when they join forces and become what is called a "law firm".
Given an appropriately-complex apparatus, could one devise a device to utilize the computing power of cockroaches for opimization problems?
The potential of this cock-puter is mind-blowing...
Last post!
In the prophetic words of starcraft, Evolution Complete!
=\
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
After all these years of humans cranking out 90+ db sounds, and setting our volume to 11, maybe they decided not to worry so much about that bit, and concentrate on just replacing us.
Their cunning plot to remove the world's pirate fish and create global warming is working really well, don't you think?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You're telling me, they voted me out of my own apartment.
I can just hear my boss now, "Why can't you guys agree upon a plan of action! Hell! Even cockroaches can make group decisions!!"
Yes, especially when they join forces and become what is called Al-Qaeda Operations, how may I direct your call?
Cheers,
K. Trout
Cockroaches, Blattella Germanica, are silent creatures, save perhaps for the sound of them scurrying over a counter top. They therefore must communicate without vocalizing.
I never would have guessed that! Thank God for these clever scientists!
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
OK, so now let's do this experiment again, this time with 51 roaches. Will there be 17 in each of the three shelters? What if we reduce shelter capacity to 30 roaches? or 25?
As another poster has suggested this may have less to do with intelligent decisions and more to do with scripted behavior: if roach population here is above X, branch to new location. The threshold X may be set by a number of factors such as total perceived population, observed population in the current shelter, etc. Tweaking shelter size, number of roaches, and other conditions in a controlled way may reveal the decision motivators and help to discern if there is some consensus at work or if it's just a survival script. Just as roaches avoid light because they have evolved to recognize it leaves them detectable and therefore vulnerable, they may scorn large groupings to avoid being wiped out by the loss of a single population center.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
...cranium rats...
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
Now, we all know telescopes allow us to see distant objects. But what if we want to smell distant objects? Well now we can! Thanks to my new invention ... the Smellescope. The odour travels past this coffee stain here, around the olive pit and into this cigar burn. And this appears to be a doodle of myself as a cowboy. But the Smellescope is brilliant, I tell you! Think of the astronomical odours you'll smell thanks to me.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
There's a documentary out there which looks at the very advanced behavior and communication of a group of cockroachs in a New York city apartment. Their capacity for human like speech and their ability to work together to acomplish monumental feats is truly amazing.
/me runs away
The caption for the picture in the article reads, "...the cockroaches divided themselves up perfectly." And yet the picture clearly shows at least 4 roaches that are outside of the groups. That's a strange definition of "perfectly" to me. I imagine they are often running around and so perhaps capturing a picture with them all huddled together in their groups would be difficult, but when does the scientist declare that the split was "perfect" and "complete?" Is there a time period or does "perfect" in a biological sense just mean "mostly?"
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
My original analogy with gases is far better than the silly rule based thing that I wrote when jumping the gun in response to your accusing me of jumping the gun.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
Obviously, a blurb on the Discovery Channel website isn't the same as going to PNAS and reading the article for oneself, but from what little info was provided there, it doesn't seem to me that actual communication is necessarily what's going on.
In the case of parceling out a population of roaches into equal-size subpopulations, well, cockroaches stink. Er, that is, they emit chemicals into the air, and an individual cockroach may be able to detect the concentration of such a chemical as it approaches multiple sheltered areas to determine which area is occupied a little bit but not too much. The experimenter should attempt to determine what chemical accounts for such behavior and determine what concentrations are attractive or repulsive to roaches. This doesn't necessarily convey communication, because if the same chemical governs the entire behavior, then each individual cockroach isn't really conveying any information about the state of the colony in a shelter. The information results as the emergent property of having a lot of cockroaches in the same space.
In the case of roaches determining whether a cockroach is kin or not, this may be governed by similar chemicals which vary slightly among the world population of cockroaches. The same determination is made by single-celled organisms, which respond differently to the presence of certain proteins in the cell membrane. This doesn't indicate that actual communication is taking place, but rather that one cockroach is able to detect chemicals that the other cockroach would be emitting regardless of whether the two were interacting or not.
One has to be careful when deciding whether a phenomenon is explained by communication or not, because there may be many definitions of communication. Is it communication when one organism does something while oblivious to the reasons why it's doing it, and the results of that action later affect another organism? Does communication require the direct interaction of two organisms? Must the behaviors of both organisms - both emitting and receiving the signal - be neurally based, or can one or both actions be the result of a purely mechanical property of the organisms? Do the organisms have to be aware of the information they are sending or receiving (and there you bring in another ball of wax, because what constitutes awareness)?
Pointy Hair Roach: "So, let's see, I wonder if the technical department can create a turn-key solution for feeding tonight?"
Long Hair Roach: "Sure, what do you have in mind?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "Well, let's see, we need a diversion, why don't we have a volunteer climb up into the light fixture and drop onto her sholder, which will cause her to scream, flail about, and run out of the room."
Long Hair Roach: "Um, how do we get into to the light fixture?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "I dunno, go license some tech from the ants for hanging from ceilings and stuff."
Long Hair Roach: "Uh... ok."
Pointy Hair Roach: "Right, so while the volunteer is running back and forth avoiding the fly swatter, huge feet, and general mayhem, we'll monitor progress from the counter top."
Long Hair Roach: "So, who's going to volunteer?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "Well, since you brought it up..."
Long Hair Roach: "So, you want me to outsource the tech to the ants, then use it untested to scale a vertical wall, hang from a ceiling, get into a light fixture without being electrocuted - you didn't think of that, did you? And then dropping onto a human and avoiding getting crushed. Wait, what are you going to do to contribute?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "We'll be eating the toast."
Support for the parent statement: U.S. Federal Deficit by Political Party.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
All they need is Powerpoint and they can start applying for middle management jobs.
Now that is such beautiful irony... I think I'm going to cry...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Apparently not all of them are silent
some of them dance and sing and like Esther Williams routines!!!
http://imdb.com/title/tt0116707/
Ralph Roach:
Talk? We can sing!
Roaches: Garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage! / The garbage in the moonlight gives off a lovely smell - lovely smell / Sipping sewage with my baby in our little roach motel - please don't tell / zum zum zuma zum zum zum / doot de doot doot doot de doo doot de doot doot doot de doo doot de doot doot doot de doo doot de doot doot doodly doo / Take an ocean trip on our garbage ship with the cockroach I adore / We'll take a taste of the medical waste that washes up on shore / Oh sweetheart say you love me and crawl underneath my rug / You're one in a thousand billion baby - oh won't you be / My Bug! - won't you be my bug? / Please be my bug
hahaha....Suuuuuuuure.
I can see it now.. on the shelf right next to WoW, there will be a clear plastic box with a few 'plugged in' cockroaches.. For those so devoid of even 'internet social skills', they will finally have the option to forge their very own guild! ..or the cockroaches will be leveraged into a workforce and put the already under-paid MMORPG 'farmers' out of business!
Seriously though.. I wouldn't mind playing a game with a farm of cockroaches; just think of it.. Sims?
So do they use email, or IM?
Or do they communicate using discussion forums?
And by cockroaches, you mean 'lawyers', right? ;)
If I recall correctly, that was the episode with Bambi, the hot entomology PhD. She actually looked like one of the lab preceptors that was at University of Illinois, C-U, while I was there. (also when the show aired). I wish I remembered her name or even what her voice sounded like, but damn if the constant track of "oh-my-god-you're-so-hot" wasn't going through my head whenever she'd speak.
I seen this on Digg.com last week.
hello
when they form the number 42 with their bodies. Makes me wonder if we aren't the fourth most intellegent rather than third.
Emergence. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence Be enlightened. I was, when I came across the phenomenon the first time.
Cockroaches Make Group Decisions?
Ahh shucks, after reading the title I was sure this article was a cynical view of the movie industry's new download service.
Does this imply that roaches can count and do basic math?
How do we know that they're making group decisions rather than hypnotizing each other?
(you may recall a slashdot article about wasps stinging cockroaches to hypnotize them...)
Great, so cockroaches resemble a commitee at the office, making 'group' decisions before they attack that donut you dropped.. And this helps us how?
Hmm, now that you think about it, sounds a lot like where i work..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
*shrug*, think what you want, doesn't change what happened.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Ahh nothing like quoting a breakthrough cited by the Discovery Channel, network provider of "Psychic and Paranormal" programming
I must be VERY hungry.
I read the headline " Cockroaches Make Group Decisions?"
As " Cockroaches Make Great Soup "
I can't imagine how bad that soup would taste. I wonder when Slashdot became a recipie site.
Oh You POS
This isn't rocket science. We all know that Irak invasion, err liberation, was a group descision involving bush, cheney, as well as halliburton and lockheed martin board of directors.
perception is reality
"The research determined that cockroach decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish"...
... and females using the bathroom.
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
Here is a link to the original paper on which the article is based:
m e=&firstpage=&DOI=&author1=halloy&author2=&title=& andorexacttitle=and&titleabstract=&andorexacttitle abs=and&fulltext=&andorexactfulltext=and&fmonth=Ma r&fyear=2006&tmonth=Apr&tyear=2006&fdatedef=1+Janu ary+1915&tdatedef=4+April+2006&tocsectionid=all&RE SULTFORMAT=1&hits=10&hitsbrief=25&sortspec=relevan ce&sortspecbrief=relevance&sendit=Search
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/search?pubdate_year=&volu
Does anyone with a subscription to the National Academy of Sciences care to
post the complete text?
As for me, I'm just sad we have to wait until September for the new season of Blattellastar Germanica.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
So does this mean that I can now have my cockroach army to do my own bidding? Watch your balls bush.
Here comes the obligatory joke!
In Soviet Russia, cockroaches put YOU in 3 shelters!
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
Man, Stop being a dick and accept the fact that you made a stupid comparison. You tried to be Mr Smartypants and after you've been proved wrong, you are still trying to defend your stupid reasoning. Why don't you just shut up and sit in the corner like a good little cockroach? (not like a little gas molecule!)
----------
SIG: Expert Determination (950523) is the new Douche of the universe.
----------------
Tired of cockroaches in your sandwiches, your milk, your toothbrush? Tried every trap and poison on the market without success? Well, friend, it's time you tried the new cockroach confusion system. Our patented pest control technology places several little houses in the middle of your kitchen floor. The cockroaches can't resist them! They also can't resist sitting in the middle of your kitchen trying to figure out who goes in which house for half an hour, and this is when you employ our patented "sneak up and crush them with a book" technique. Only $19.95 folks, quantities are going fast.
Oooh.. Forbidden... sounds naughty.
;-)
Seriously, what kind of profits does she make delivering 403 pages