A nice weekend read that doesn't smell like AI but if you're short on time or interest:
Though the locusts had a huge migratory range stretching all the way to the eastern seaboard, its reproductive range was only a handful of river valleys in Wyoming and Montana. Once plowed, irrigated and trampled by livestock the species had nowhere left to lay eggs.
I have very fond memories of the occasional Monarch I would see growing up (and the lengths I would go to in order to ensure they were not the similarly colored Viceroys). Equally sad is the dramatic decline of songbirds and bird biodiversity in general (though I don't know if it's due to similar destruction of breeding grounds).
This answers the title question but the most interesting part about the article is the fascinating way in which the locust’s behavior is triggered by crowding. An amazing biological adaption.
Sorry guys haha!! I intended the insects to come without prompting only on scroll pause but for debug purposes of the article I had set them to once every 15ish seconds[0]. I thought it was really great and love it personally as it really gets the AAA factor in, though I should probably respect use-reduced-motion lol
I couldn't help but think office politics is a bit like that. Over populate a company or starve employees of opportunities and thy will be less helpful to each other and more focused on self-promotion politics.
Absolutely - Right Wing core theorem is that people work as individuals - competition brings out the best, only the fittest/fastest/strongest will survive.
I know right! It was a super interesting rabbit hole of mine while writing this to discover how boids simulations work, I'm personally very interested in whatever the mathematics of simple rules giving rise to complex and chaotic systems is. It'd be very interesting to do an article about the population dynamics and such of locusts (esp tying into general math).
I love what a gnash equilibrium (I think) it is of their behavior - and really funny, the constant march of canibalism haha
Thanks for the heads-up. I skimmed through looking for the answer to the title and my radar didn't go off immediately. I'm happy the humans involved are realizing they shouldn't let the AI phone it in.
No, it's not AI generated. I wrote the outline then the article. Parts of the code for the site itself (code only) are AI generated but the article I wrote by hand over the course of a day and a half or so! (Referencing my outline)
My earliest introduction to locusts was as a biblical plague. These Sunday school lessons did not include pictures. I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects, and was disappointed to finally discover they were just grasshoppers.
> I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects
Behavioral ecologist Stephen Simpson has proposed the cannibalistic forced march hypothesis[36], that is, the forward motion of a locust swarm is essentially sustained by each individual’s imperative to avoid being eaten by the locust behind it: 1) Align their body axis with neighbors (parallel) to minimize the chances of a side-on attack and present their narrowest possible profile to the individual behind. 2) March forward to bite and feed on the abdomen of the locust immediately ahead.
A billion crazed insects marching through eating all your crops while cannibalizing each other does seem relatively twisted and demonic.
Also, there’s the stimulus causing nymphs to not be solitarious slow green grass-nibbles, but instead transform into armored, black and yellow, upright marching machines that mature into stronger-winged battle bugs. With soft tasty abdomens exposed to the soldier behind them…
Woah up until now I was thinking locusts were a different but related species, but indeed they are the exact same species as grasshopper, just with a different end-product of metamorphosis. And the trigger is just contact with other grasshopper/locusts.
Put them under a microscope at 10-40 times magnification and you've got your demons. Claws and hooks and fang-like attachments everywhere, faceted eyes, crusty exterior. The western image of demons was partly derived from insectoid creatures by painters like Hieronymus Bosch so it makes sense for insects to look demonic.
I have been in a locust plague once. It does feel very weird. Yes they are grasshoppers but you might be underestimating just how many there are. Plus they don't look normal, they actually change appearance when they're in a plague.
One small detail I remember was when the sun was just behind a building, you could see this glow around the building which was the sun reflecting off all the locusts that were flying around it
I don't know if it qualifies as a plague of locusts because I do not know where the line is drawn, but the grasshopers were thick one year at my parents' house (which is itself surrounded by flatness and farm fields).
They were ravenous things. That ate everything. Not just "food," either, though eating a snack outside was certainly impossible and merely being outside was treacherous.
These bugs ate things like window screens, cut slivers from a vinyl swimming pool, and dined upon the siding of the house. It was really fuckin' weird even being inside of the house, since the noise of it being pelted by grasshoppers (locusts?) never really slowed down.
That was probably 25 years ago. It never happened again.
Is it really true about the unpalatable chickens? Every mention of "caloptine" that I can find is from 1878, and derives from the annual Report of the United States entomological commission, which expressed hope of making commercial locust products, mainly formic acid. That entomological comission is the cited Charles Riley. Nobody ever seems to mention the substance again.
On that page you can click “read sample” and then search for “chicken” and the reference on page 3 seems to be the main source of that claim. Where that is quoting, I’m not sure.
Thanks! So the connection between the tainted taste (source on that still unknown) and this essential oil of locust is just Lockwood spitballing:
> Although the insects had no defensive chemicals in their bodies, a diet saturated with locusts rendered the eggs and flesh of chickens inedible. Studies at the time found that the locusts were remarkably rich in a “reddish-brown oil of very pungent and penetrating odor,” and perhaps this accounts for the tainted meat.
For most of my sources I didn't trace back to the original source but rather just cited the first source, if it ends up being inaccurate let me know and I'll revise it! The main focus of the article is breadth not depth =)
I highly recommend one of the books cited in this article (Jeffrey A. Lockwood's Locust). He writes about hiking to the glacier to find preserved locusts, the formation of the Entomological Commission which discovered that existing anti-locust practices were ineffective, all sorts of details.
Lots of Jank still at this point in its life but the hover to popover extra context has been really helpful to keep the main post body more focused than it would otherwise be. I'm not that good at structuring my thoughts yet because I'm so new at writing (the post I linked isn't even finished).
Really interested to see others who are clearly much farther along in their writing journey experimenting with asides and popovers. Your underline animation is very cute. I am trying out a click-to-expand-acronym typing animation that I thought was kind of whimsical.
If you're interested in popups/popovers and sidenotes (https://gwern.net/sidenotes), be sure to check out my website. Did you notice OP also does inflation adjustments (https://gwern.net/static/build/Inflation.hs)? I do them inline, because I think that requiring effort like OP does just leads to the same pervasive lack of numerosity that providing no adjustments at all does, because no one is going to bother to hover over most of them.
Your website is wild. I am going to explore it a lot more later because there are a few more concepts that have overlap with what I am working on (like a personal kind-of wiki that I use to organize information I come across). I wanted to have a thing that grows alongside me over time and it seems very much like your website is that, but in your clearly unique way.
Are your about personal and about website pages the best place to get introduced to (what feels like) your Gwerniverse?
I also agree that the adjusted value should be displayed and if you wanted to you could popover the original value.
I frequently visit your website to get design inspiration for my own. Thanks for being so detail-oriented and all your writing in general!
Edit: Actually, while I have you here: do you think that the modal popups for links (the ones that pop up when you hover on a link) should be a standard browser feature? I'd be curious to see if a web extension could replicate it more generally for all sites.
OP here! I love your website and didn't realize you also had an inflation adjustment component - I like the idea of providing them inline but my general philosophy here (which seems different from yours in my mind) was to create a single flow very similar to a regular article one would see in any print media but with as many opportunities for proactive additional engagement as possible. I absolutely love your website and the style and voice it has, though it more leans towards the encyclopedic, mind map, interconnected side of things. That's a distinctly different vision than what I was going for here. Thanks for reading!
Wow! Very pleasantly surprised to see how popular this got! A few short disclaimers and the like answering general comments:
1: The article is a draft but a mostly complete one - I wrote it in two sittings mostly linearly after doing a bunch of research. I intend to revise it to meet my personal standards sometime soon ish
2: About half of the point of this article for me was to present an article in as pleasing, interesting, and useful way as possible, here are the major features of the site to play around with:
- Squiggle line tooltips: inspired from Codrops but then I procedurally generate the squiggles per line and draw them - I see tooltips as a way to answer questions, and the hovercards as a way to inspire curiousity
- Hovercards on the side of the article: Meant to encourage people to enjoy what they're reading - Skim! Pause! Skip! I don't care - reading things like this should be fun and I wanted to encapsulate that, the hover cards are very pleasing in that sense to me
- Background images on hover: There are many times I wanted to include visual aids but said visual aids weren't quite important enough to break the reading flow, that's what those are for! This effect I had created several years ago for my portfolio: ( https://explosion-scratch.github.io/portfolio ) and got to reuse it here
- Money conversions: A fun component idea that I had, converting old monetary values to present ones accounting for inflation (and back again), turned out nicely I think
- Side timelines: I really wish I had these when I would read articles, it helps me skim and brings clarity to what's going on. I put a lot of work into making these work bidirectionally
- The spanner (grasshopper banner across the page): I really like having this banner and can repurpose it with any other images later =) - Try clicking them
- The jumping locusts: This was the most fun part of the site but it seems people either very much like it or very much don't! I intend to make it more subtle in the future, but double clicking spawns a locust, on which you can click to make it jump lol
- All the jokes and cheesy bits of the article: I am not writing a textbook, I'm writing something I personally would want to read
Also some people commenting about AI usage: I didn't use AI for any of the article content itself (the article was entirely written by me, after tons of research, outlining, etc). The article was essentially written linearly after I made a detailed enough outline to go from there. Someone said that the article was created with AI based on the human outline, this is tickling but no– humans write based on prior outlines too! I'm sure the process is different for everyone! The code _was_ aided by AI though I had a very very heavy hand over it and wrote / repurposed (my own work) much code personally. The site itself represents a UI I personally am very proud of, put countless hours of work into, and take responsibility for! This was a case study for me personally to find a productive usage of AI - not for the content of the article, nor the ideas, nor the creativity, but simply as a tool to guide me towards that.
Thanks for reading everyone, and star on GitHub if you get the chance =)
The locust jump scare got me. Great article though - super fascinating. I had no idea an organism could effectively become a different species based on its environment.
A nice weekend read that doesn't smell like AI but if you're short on time or interest:
Though the locusts had a huge migratory range stretching all the way to the eastern seaboard, its reproductive range was only a handful of river valleys in Wyoming and Montana. Once plowed, irrigated and trampled by livestock the species had nowhere left to lay eggs.
I immediately thought of how destroying the Monarch Butterfly wintering grounds in Mexico would have the same impact on Monarchs.
I disapprove of eminent domain but this is a great steelman case for it.
Monarchs are threatened during migration. It’s about how many individuals survive the round trip to breed more.
Drought and fire are two natural factors that destroy their migration routes’ food supply. Another is agriculture.
Folks like Monarch Watch and Xerces encourage planting of the few milkwood species (ie weeds) that the butterflies depend on for energy or egg-laying.
Restoring prairie is also effective. But there’s still drought and wildfire.
I have very fond memories of the occasional Monarch I would see growing up (and the lengths I would go to in order to ensure they were not the similarly colored Viceroys). Equally sad is the dramatic decline of songbirds and bird biodiversity in general (though I don't know if it's due to similar destruction of breeding grounds).
This answers the title question but the most interesting part about the article is the fascinating way in which the locust’s behavior is triggered by crowding. An amazing biological adaption.
It’s well-worth reading the whole thing.
It was until the animated insects. I threw my phone
This was exactly my response
Gotta give credit, the gimmick is not superfluous.
I don’t enjoy horror movies. But the locust was a horror!
Sorry guys haha!! I intended the insects to come without prompting only on scroll pause but for debug purposes of the article I had set them to once every 15ish seconds[0]. I thought it was really great and love it personally as it really gets the AAA factor in, though I should probably respect use-reduced-motion lol
[0]: https://github.com/Explosion-Scratch/locusts/blob/main/src/c...
Loved them. Wish they were more realistically animated :)
Jesus, that was a shocker for sure. I slapped my screen in reflex.
I couldn't help but think office politics is a bit like that. Over populate a company or starve employees of opportunities and thy will be less helpful to each other and more focused on self-promotion politics.
It's this that always makes me laugh - right wing people demanding people act like teams, and work for the common good...
right wing?
Absolutely - Right Wing core theorem is that people work as individuals - competition brings out the best, only the fittest/fastest/strongest will survive.
Well, prisoner's dilemma defectors demanding that everyone else cooperate, obviously.
I know right! It was a super interesting rabbit hole of mine while writing this to discover how boids simulations work, I'm personally very interested in whatever the mathematics of simple rules giving rise to complex and chaotic systems is. It'd be very interesting to do an article about the population dynamics and such of locusts (esp tying into general math).
I love what a gnash equilibrium (I think) it is of their behavior - and really funny, the constant march of canibalism haha
>that doesn't smell like AI
Note that it is AI-generated. It appears to be based on a human-written outline: https://github.com/Explosion-Scratch/locusts/blob/main/artic...
Thanks for the heads-up. I skimmed through looking for the answer to the title and my radar didn't go off immediately. I'm happy the humans involved are realizing they shouldn't let the AI phone it in.
No, it's not AI generated. I wrote the outline then the article. Parts of the code for the site itself (code only) are AI generated but the article I wrote by hand over the course of a day and a half or so! (Referencing my outline)
My earliest introduction to locusts was as a biblical plague. These Sunday school lessons did not include pictures. I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects, and was disappointed to finally discover they were just grasshoppers.
> I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects
Behavioral ecologist Stephen Simpson has proposed the cannibalistic forced march hypothesis[36], that is, the forward motion of a locust swarm is essentially sustained by each individual’s imperative to avoid being eaten by the locust behind it: 1) Align their body axis with neighbors (parallel) to minimize the chances of a side-on attack and present their narrowest possible profile to the individual behind. 2) March forward to bite and feed on the abdomen of the locust immediately ahead.
A billion crazed insects marching through eating all your crops while cannibalizing each other does seem relatively twisted and demonic.
Also, there’s the stimulus causing nymphs to not be solitarious slow green grass-nibbles, but instead transform into armored, black and yellow, upright marching machines that mature into stronger-winged battle bugs. With soft tasty abdomens exposed to the soldier behind them…
Woah up until now I was thinking locusts were a different but related species, but indeed they are the exact same species as grasshopper, just with a different end-product of metamorphosis. And the trigger is just contact with other grasshopper/locusts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uURqcI08IC4
Put them under a microscope at 10-40 times magnification and you've got your demons. Claws and hooks and fang-like attachments everywhere, faceted eyes, crusty exterior. The western image of demons was partly derived from insectoid creatures by painters like Hieronymus Bosch so it makes sense for insects to look demonic.
I have been in a locust plague once. It does feel very weird. Yes they are grasshoppers but you might be underestimating just how many there are. Plus they don't look normal, they actually change appearance when they're in a plague.
One small detail I remember was when the sun was just behind a building, you could see this glow around the building which was the sun reflecting off all the locusts that were flying around it
One locust is an interesting bug. Billions of locusts are an apocalyptic nightmare.
I don't know if it qualifies as a plague of locusts because I do not know where the line is drawn, but the grasshopers were thick one year at my parents' house (which is itself surrounded by flatness and farm fields).
They were ravenous things. That ate everything. Not just "food," either, though eating a snack outside was certainly impossible and merely being outside was treacherous.
These bugs ate things like window screens, cut slivers from a vinyl swimming pool, and dined upon the siding of the house. It was really fuckin' weird even being inside of the house, since the noise of it being pelted by grasshoppers (locusts?) never really slowed down.
That was probably 25 years ago. It never happened again.
Is it really true about the unpalatable chickens? Every mention of "caloptine" that I can find is from 1878, and derives from the annual Report of the United States entomological commission, which expressed hope of making commercial locust products, mainly formic acid. That entomological comission is the cited Charles Riley. Nobody ever seems to mention the substance again.
Took a few clicks to track down source 10: https://history.nebraska.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/doc_..., which in turn cites this book: https://www.amazon.com/Locust-Devastating-Mysterious-Disappe...
On that page you can click “read sample” and then search for “chicken” and the reference on page 3 seems to be the main source of that claim. Where that is quoting, I’m not sure.
Thanks! So the connection between the tainted taste (source on that still unknown) and this essential oil of locust is just Lockwood spitballing:
> Although the insects had no defensive chemicals in their bodies, a diet saturated with locusts rendered the eggs and flesh of chickens inedible. Studies at the time found that the locusts were remarkably rich in a “reddish-brown oil of very pungent and penetrating odor,” and perhaps this accounts for the tainted meat.
They were not "rich" in this oil:
https://archive.org/details/firstanuualrepor01unit/page/442/...
Oil, .004 percent. Still, a little oil can go a long way, so perhaps.
For most of my sources I didn't trace back to the original source but rather just cited the first source, if it ends up being inaccurate let me know and I'll revise it! The main focus of the article is breadth not depth =)
Trigger warning: animated insect crawls on screen.
Yes, this should be higher. I fucking hated that.
I liked it. You can tap on them and they hop.
It’s not just science reporting. It’s visceral.
Seems to be changed now. The grasshoppers are now static until you click on them.
Or maybe it's my browser.
I think it’s just your browser. They got me.. just enough off the main text to give a little jump..
Scared the shit out of me!!!!! Lmfao
I'm trying not to spoil anything but this article reminds of this excellent short story: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/sins-of-the-children
Great article. I'm also impressed by the design of the webpage itself. Love the typography and clever UI.
The jumping grasshoppers at the bottom really surprised me :-)
They are interactive too!
Loved the design and the grasshopper had me pawing at my screen to make it go away!
I highly recommend one of the books cited in this article (Jeffrey A. Lockwood's Locust). He writes about hiking to the glacier to find preserved locusts, the formation of the Entomological Commission which discovered that existing anti-locust practices were ineffective, all sorts of details.
When I moved to Montana I resolved to hike to see them in the glacier, before they all melt. 25 years later haven't quite got around to it yet.
You know a government is out of ideas when they declare a holiday so that all the citizens can pray for an end to the locusts.
Probably psychologically helpful, anyway.
Love the UI design.
To OP: I have a very lateral thinking process during writing and I have been experimenting with how to format that in my personal site https://hankdoes.ai/posts/we-have-the-model-why-do-we-need-y...
Lots of Jank still at this point in its life but the hover to popover extra context has been really helpful to keep the main post body more focused than it would otherwise be. I'm not that good at structuring my thoughts yet because I'm so new at writing (the post I linked isn't even finished).
Really interested to see others who are clearly much farther along in their writing journey experimenting with asides and popovers. Your underline animation is very cute. I am trying out a click-to-expand-acronym typing animation that I thought was kind of whimsical.
If you're interested in popups/popovers and sidenotes (https://gwern.net/sidenotes), be sure to check out my website. Did you notice OP also does inflation adjustments (https://gwern.net/static/build/Inflation.hs)? I do them inline, because I think that requiring effort like OP does just leads to the same pervasive lack of numerosity that providing no adjustments at all does, because no one is going to bother to hover over most of them.
Your website is wild. I am going to explore it a lot more later because there are a few more concepts that have overlap with what I am working on (like a personal kind-of wiki that I use to organize information I come across). I wanted to have a thing that grows alongside me over time and it seems very much like your website is that, but in your clearly unique way.
Are your about personal and about website pages the best place to get introduced to (what feels like) your Gwerniverse?
I also agree that the adjusted value should be displayed and if you wanted to you could popover the original value.
I frequently visit your website to get design inspiration for my own. Thanks for being so detail-oriented and all your writing in general!
Edit: Actually, while I have you here: do you think that the modal popups for links (the ones that pop up when you hover on a link) should be a standard browser feature? I'd be curious to see if a web extension could replicate it more generally for all sites.
OP here! I love your website and didn't realize you also had an inflation adjustment component - I like the idea of providing them inline but my general philosophy here (which seems different from yours in my mind) was to create a single flow very similar to a regular article one would see in any print media but with as many opportunities for proactive additional engagement as possible. I absolutely love your website and the style and voice it has, though it more leans towards the encyclopedic, mind map, interconnected side of things. That's a distinctly different vision than what I was going for here. Thanks for reading!
> All of these triggers cause a release of serotonin. This serotonin release triggers the physical transformation
Locusts are just grasshoppers on prozac?
Prozac is a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. It is not serotonin, and it does not cause the release of serotonin.
The uptake inhibition means it leaves serotonin in a place where it can be active. So, it increases the amount of serotonin available in the brain.
Nice Easter egg
I almost jumped. Nice touch to the article
For a split second I thought there was an actual bug on my phone. It was an excellent article too!
> a phenomenon where a single genotype produces distinct phenotypes
Ah, so like how Wurmple may evolve into Silcoon or Cascoon and thence Beautifly or Dustox. Cool.
Really interesting article! I knew about the phase polyphenism but the forced cannibalistic march theory was new to me.
THIS WAS SO GOOD!!!!!! I really identified with the cannibalistic locust lines
Wow! Very pleasantly surprised to see how popular this got! A few short disclaimers and the like answering general comments:
1: The article is a draft but a mostly complete one - I wrote it in two sittings mostly linearly after doing a bunch of research. I intend to revise it to meet my personal standards sometime soon ish
2: About half of the point of this article for me was to present an article in as pleasing, interesting, and useful way as possible, here are the major features of the site to play around with:
- Hover over the title
- Table of contents is animated, thanks to https://kld.dev/toc-animation/ for the tutorial for thsi
- Squiggle line tooltips: inspired from Codrops but then I procedurally generate the squiggles per line and draw them - I see tooltips as a way to answer questions, and the hovercards as a way to inspire curiousity
- Hovercards on the side of the article: Meant to encourage people to enjoy what they're reading - Skim! Pause! Skip! I don't care - reading things like this should be fun and I wanted to encapsulate that, the hover cards are very pleasing in that sense to me
- Background images on hover: There are many times I wanted to include visual aids but said visual aids weren't quite important enough to break the reading flow, that's what those are for! This effect I had created several years ago for my portfolio: ( https://explosion-scratch.github.io/portfolio ) and got to reuse it here
- Money conversions: A fun component idea that I had, converting old monetary values to present ones accounting for inflation (and back again), turned out nicely I think
- Side timelines: I really wish I had these when I would read articles, it helps me skim and brings clarity to what's going on. I put a lot of work into making these work bidirectionally
- The spanner (grasshopper banner across the page): I really like having this banner and can repurpose it with any other images later =) - Try clicking them
- The jumping locusts: This was the most fun part of the site but it seems people either very much like it or very much don't! I intend to make it more subtle in the future, but double clicking spawns a locust, on which you can click to make it jump lol
- All the jokes and cheesy bits of the article: I am not writing a textbook, I'm writing something I personally would want to read
Also some people commenting about AI usage: I didn't use AI for any of the article content itself (the article was entirely written by me, after tons of research, outlining, etc). The article was essentially written linearly after I made a detailed enough outline to go from there. Someone said that the article was created with AI based on the human outline, this is tickling but no– humans write based on prior outlines too! I'm sure the process is different for everyone! The code _was_ aided by AI though I had a very very heavy hand over it and wrote / repurposed (my own work) much code personally. The site itself represents a UI I personally am very proud of, put countless hours of work into, and take responsibility for! This was a case study for me personally to find a productive usage of AI - not for the content of the article, nor the ideas, nor the creativity, but simply as a tool to guide me towards that.
Thanks for reading everyone, and star on GitHub if you get the chance =)
https://github.com/Explosion-Scratch/locusts
The locust jump scare got me. Great article though - super fascinating. I had no idea an organism could effectively become a different species based on its environment.
I couldn’t finish the article as the “jump scare” locusts showing up randomly was just too disturbing.
Why would you write a formal, historical article intended for a long read and then add jump scare animated locusts to scare people?
The two things aren’t compatible.
ANDDD THE ANIMATIONS WERE SO GOOD!!!!!!!!
There is a locust jumpscare on this page and it made me scream. Well done. Someone might drop their phone though so I don‘t support it.
Where?
I believe it happens randomly, either by timer or scroll.
If you don‘t see it you probably did not read the article…