May at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2010 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web

"Leafcutter ants have agriculture, which we don't think of in the animal world.

The fungus is their food. It has their complete diet. These ants started growing their fungus 50 million years ago. Twelve million years ago, they domesticated that fungus so that it could no longer grow in the wild, much as we domesticated wheat and rice. And 8 million years ago, they figured out how to use leaves as a way to grow the fungus in huge monocultures. They even invented pesticides. These are produced either by glands on the ants or by a relative of the penicillin fungus that they grow in their nests."

Excellent dissection of why the Wired/Conde Naste iPad app is just so wrong. XML rendering engine and thousands and thousand of full-screen images of pages? WRONG. He does actually recommend the correct way of doing it, too — custom JavaScript/HTML5 rendering engine, using real text, inside WebKit.

OMG. Design your own toy, build it using Mac/PC Lego software, design a box and order the whole thing, along with an instruction booklet, to be delivered to you!

I can't use Netflix, because I'm in the UK. But I love well written film blogs, and I might be able to find some of these on Lovefilm's "watch now" feature.

A complement to The Big Picture?

Astonishing! In this 70s Lois Lane comic, Superman turns her into a black woman for 24 hrs.

"The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect." Utterly mental.

"I’ve been annoyed with the plethora of articles lately showing off HTML5 vs. Flash and building actually worse solutions using open technology. Therefore I thought I’ll have a go at it myself, too.

Instant rimshot is a fun site that has a button that plays a rimshot (the “babumm-tish” after a bad gag at a comedy club) when you press a large red button. I thought this is a good target to convert to CSS and HTML5 and I give you HTML5 instant rimshot."

"Yep, in the eyes of Inter­net Explorer our uni­verse is flat and boring."

A list of the Wired App's innovative features

"A lot of people are unaware that almost all browsers (Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+, and Chrome) presently support cross-domain Ajax via a protocol called Cross-Origin Resource Sharing."

"The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography."

I loved Synecdoche, New York, but feel that I only scratched the surface of what's in there. I really want to watch it again very soon.

"Paul is a member of The Print Club in Dalston, a collective of artists for screenprinting. As part of Pick Me Up, the graphic art fair at Somerset House where I visited Rob Ryan, Paul was invited to design a print to be printed live at the event. He picked “Orange & Lemons,” reflecting his interest in London history and because St Clement Danes is next to Somerset House in the Strand. He chose to illustrate an earlier, more idiosyncratic, version than the one everybody knows. Suiting his purpose, this variant of 1830 has more arcane poetry, more verses – allowing more scope for pictures – and includes more East End churches too."

NYTimes.com introduces its new series for contemporary philosophers, The Stone. "Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly."

"The following list of Software Downloads is for English North-American versions of Software for Macintosh, Apple II and Newton released prior to Mac OS 8.1 in January 1998."

"Your daily dose of stunning."