The silence of the owls

https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2020/how-owls-fly-without-making-a-sound

by knowablemag • 6 years ago

57 34 6 years ago

knowablemagazine.org

moneytide19• 6 years ago

"The quieter you are the more you're able to hear."

awaythrower2• 6 years ago

Let's be honest: owls are birb ninja assassins.

moneytide19• 6 years ago

Let's always be honest (a scientist cannot lie out of principle because experiments produce evidence that if not properly observed will destroy any chance of replication and thus the ultimate eventual adoption of new useful technology into society). I've heard some workers in this region (aged 20-30) preface their verbal dialogue with phrases like "seriously, honestly, I'm not gonna lie, for real though, literally".

I know that these are akin to "loading time" phrases that people habitually use to interject into a talkative group or to introduce their vocal tone before the meat content is transmitted to multiple listeners. But it is the nature of the phrases that suggest the existence of lies or an exaggerated reality that fascinates me (you had me thinking of honesty or lying before you had me thinking about the nature's ninja assassin metaphor).

I do not see it as a bad thing - this is only our natural response (clues are in these "harmless" phrases inserted into everyday conversation) to a few decades of concerned tax paying citizens being fed questionable or far-fetched content from their media outlets as a method of attempted economic subjugation?

dang• 6 years ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

akavel• 6 years ago

Ahahah, this reminds me: after I learnt unicycling and started practising it on longer paths, I started hearing a weird regular "tick" sound from somewhere in the uni(cycle). I was wondering if something's broken, but it was hard to "debug":

- the sound obviously stopped when I stopped riding,

- just turning the uni's wheel on the ground didn't seem reproduce the noise,

- you can imagine it's kinda not very easy to look down and esp. reach for various parts of the uni when you're riding.

At some point I finally managed to look down for long enough to discover, that it was the sound of my shoelace flailing around and hitting the shoe with every turn of the wheel... I realized that this sound must be there even on a "normal" bike, but uni is apparently so much quieter...

elijahparker• 6 years ago

Yes, I learned to use a bell well in advance of approaching people on a unicycle after I had a few people scream in response to a gentle “on your left” as they had no idea of my presence.

moneytide19• 6 years ago

I wonder if your shoelace became untangled prior to mounting the Uni - or if the extra pedaling required to sustain balance on a single wheel was the force that undid the lace (single tied means you did not plan for your novel experience of a "longer" path - a tight double keeps mine intact during vigorous activity).

Looking down seems risky, because a Uni implies increased balance difficulty and frequent knowledge update of path ahead, perhaps more effort than a Bi which grants extra available mental real estate at the cost of increased local noise pollution.

I suppose the lesson you are trying to teach us is that the drawback of being silent (via Uni) is that one must spend extra time during the preliminary equipping phase (shoelace).

At first glance I wondered about a flailing shoelace becoming a tangle hazard (gears/chain/rotation within proximity).

silvestrov• 6 years ago

It is the same with one's ego: the less noise your ego makes, the more you are able to see of other people.

http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

moneytide19• 6 years ago

There's a rock band called Third Eye Blind and I imagine that name describes the effect of considering your own pleasure and/or reinforcement of power (power implies subordinates) before the welfare of others (teammates that also build the world you and your children will share).

bcbrown• 6 years ago

Here's one of my favorite passages from a field guide:

Silent flight enables owls in flight to hear the movements of small rodents, while in turn it keeps the sharp-eared prey in the dark over someone coming for dinner. This tempts one to fancy that mice live in utter ignorance of owls except as invisible agents of disappearances from the family.

freepor3• 6 years ago

This is my least favorite thing about Wikipedia -- it's taken all of the whimsy out of general knowledge resources.

ygra• 6 years ago

In the same way as any encyclopedia that's not deliberately whimsical (in which case its general utility of obtaining knowledge may be more limited than, those multi-tome things or, well, Wikipedia).

BiteCode_dev• 6 years ago

Yeah but then, do you want "whimsy" in sensible articles like political/religious/ethical related ones? Then would one expect wikipedia editors to enforce this policy on top of the work they already do? And using what criteria?

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

I'd say Wikipedia is generally less dry than the average technical book.

It's less whimsical than some blog posts, sure, but Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopaedia (roughly speaking).

the_af• 6 years ago

I wouldn't say it's taken all the whimsy, but the community attempts to keep an "encyclopedic" tone.

In same cases it's turned into overcorrection from the good old Wikipedia days when, for example, the article about vampires was mostly not about actual vampire bats, or even about folklore vampires, but about a self-proclaimed "lifestyle" of people who supposedly consider themselves "real vampires". I remember those days! It was fun to see the rampant edit wars between serious and fringe editors.

yogrish• 6 years ago

Watch the exact scene how an owl catches its prey while they are totally ignorant. Watch for pair of lights(owlEyes) to see the onset of owl. https://youtu.be/2Ol4rbYPYQc

Zealotux• 6 years ago

A great quick video from the BBC on the subject: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_FEaFgJyfA

Yizahi• 6 years ago

Short version - very big wings to body ratio, less flap rate, less noise.

KineticLensman• 6 years ago

IANAO but I do voluntary work at a Raptor conservancy.

Owl silent-hunter stealth mode has one significant penalty not mentioned in the article: in some species (e.g. Barn Owls) the feathers are not waterproof because they lack preen oil [0]. Consequently Barn Owl mortality increases in extended periods of wet weather (they get wet and then cold), forcing them to hunt in the day in some cases.

Edit: IANAO = ... Ornithologist, not ...Owl, in case anyone was wondering.

[0] https://ww2.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/bird-and-wildlife...

SAI_Peregrinus• 6 years ago

YOLO (You Obviously Love Owls).

tyingq• 6 years ago

This diagram made it easier for me to see what they meant by "comb structure"...

https://cdn.hswstatic.com/gif/owls-silent-flight.jpg

grawprog• 6 years ago

Standing in a barn full of barn owls gives me kind of an eerie feeling. All you hear is little clicks above you, then you feel a whoosh of air above your head as they fly over and another soft click as they land. It's really cool though.

The silence of the owls

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