"... my whole expanse, I cannot see..."

I just saw... hundreds of ants, swarming around on this block of wood, and at first, it looked like there were two sorts of bugs there -- little ones with long white wings, and ants -- but now I'm pretty sure that this was a colony of ants doing its breeding thing.

I'd never seen that before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant

Ooh. Maybe they were Carpenter Ants. "Carpenter ants usually swarm in the spring and damage the wood in a structure by hollowing it out for nesting."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_ant

more dialogue paraphrases!

oniugnip: Hi, I'm Alex!

jlk: Hi, I'm Janet! In the late 70s, I built the first case-based reasoning systems (and coined the term), but now I mostly work with kids! Tell me about what you've been working on?

oniugnip: I do stuff with computers, y'know. Like computery things. Maybe I could do computery things for you too, and maybe you could have them waive my tuition next year?

jlk: Cool. Well, we're doing research about reasoning and how kids learn to do it, and we've got a bunch of fifth graders doing experiments with cooking. My PhD students were asking me if we could hire a programmer to help develop the next version of the software that'll help the kids share their results from their kitchen experiments (and whatnot). So like, we could probably give you a job for the summer (because we want the next version going by next schoolyear), and I'm going to be vague about whether I want to hire anybody for a graduate assistantship in the fall, but we'll see how things go.

oniugnip: Cool.