Moved this from IMHO to Café Society, lair of television and associated paraphnelia.
- Gukumatz
IMHO Moderator
I think the owl clue was just a bad clue overall. I felt bad for the champ when he wrote relocation. Definitely a wincer. I was kind of surprised the girl in the middle blanked so hard though. She wrote CIA.
Parabolic dish was what I first thought but I couldn’t figure how it fit with the “answer”.
All in all, a very poor showing by whoever does the clues.
Yeah, HBO comes in really snowy on my owl.
ETA: Just got back from a party, and I’m hammered.
I like to watch Mystery TV on my owl.
Lots of whodunnits.
That is how I hear it, too. It clearly answer the “these” part of “one of these receivers.” But I don’t see how that works, but radar doesn’t. If “satellite [receiver]” works as an answer, I would think that “radar receiver” should work, too.
Absolutely. The clue (as posted above) was:
“The great gray owl has acute hearing due in part to its enormous facial disk that acts like one of THESE receivers, trapping and concentrating sounds, allowing it to hear prey that’s a foot beneath the snow.” (emphasis mine)
So essentially it boils down to: “replace the word ‘THESE’ with the correct answer.”
or…
Q: Fill in the blank: The owl’s face, an enormous disk, acts like a _______ receiver
A: Satellite
Couldn’t be much more clear, it seems to me.
(Added after edit window had closed)
Further, there is a fundamental difference between radar and satellite operation.
With radar, a transmitter sends a radio signal outward which reflects (bounces) off one or more targets (e.g. aircraft, precipitation, ships, etc.) then returns to a radar receiver which then determines the direction and distance of the target(s). One signal making a two-way trip.
Satellite ground station signals are one-way only… true, you can both uplink or downlink with a satellite dish but the uplink and downlink are two discrete, unique signals. Two separate operations
In other words, a single radar pulse transmits, bounces off some object, then returns as a weaker version of the very signal it transmitted. Whereas satellite signals must maintain a stronger, tighter signal in order to send an adequate amount of data.
Owls, as far as I know, do not transmit signals in order to bounce them off prey to pick up the return reflections. They use one-way receivers only… like human ears… to pick up on vibrations/sounds from their prey. This is analagous to satellite, not radar or sonar.
Besides–even if owls did use echolocation, like bats do, in still would be more like sonar than radar so the radar answer was doubly incorrect.
Neither do some forms of radar.
So, parabolic echolocation receiver is the correct answer then?
You probably just need to rotate it.
No. They’re are hearing the primary sound, not an echo generated from sound they produce (like a bat does).
I have to agree that radar should have been acceptable since they already included the word “receiver” in the clue.
Wow, that owl question is terrible. There really isn’t any good answer for that, since it doesn’t actually work like most antennas (satellite, RADAR, or other). Dish antennas have a reflecting dish, and then the receiver (the part that’s actually an antenna) stuck out in front of it on some sort of strut.
what is a sound receiver? as in an ear trumpet.
They’ll put him on Wheel of Fortune to make up for it.
“Okay, get ready to spin…”
“I’d like to solve, Pat.”
“You haven’t even guessed a letter yet.”
“Yeah, but it’s 4 words with 27 characters. The answer is: ______”
That’s what you get for using a snow owl.
Wait…there really is a “Witness Relocation Program”? I though it was something the writers of The Simpsons made up so they could use it instead of the real Witness Protection Program. (Back in 1993, there was an episode where the family moved somewhere after Sideshow Bob was paroled (“You have a tattoo that says ‘Die Bart Die’!” “No - that’s German for, ‘The Bart, The’!”) and threatened to kill Bart.)
I agree, lousy clue, and I can’t see how satellite is acceptable but radar is not. Neither use sound, both use electromagnetic waves. Both are a parabolic dish to concentrate the waves. I suppose one could think radar implies echolocation whereas satellite does not, but that is not a given.
Does the show ever offer explanations for this sort of thing?