If you’re a bat, you can hear another bat shout, and then the echo of that shout, so you do know the interval. I don’t know if that helps them at all. You don’t know how far away the other bat is, for one thing.
Exactly, that is how I understnd it too.
And besides: nobody knows what it is to be a bat! (I would love to, but alas…)
How do bats re-open their ears quickly enough to hear echos from very near things? It doesn’t take sound very long to travel, say, a meter. And they must be able to detect very near things, because they have to get their mouth to intersect with that bug they’re chasing.
But that reminds me of a fun fact about woodpeckers. Banging your head against a tree like that would give most animals a concussion, or at least cumulative damage like CTE. So how do woodpeckers avoid this? Well, they already have that long tongue, anyway, to slurp up insects from deep in those holes they peck… So while they’re hammering, they wrap their tongue around their brain for extra padding.
Nice posts from @Pardel-Lux and @Chronos.
I thought the latter was bullshitting about woodpeckers, but it appears to be a well-regarded theory. This article from about a year ago says they’re still not sure.
https://www.science.org/content/article/contrary-popular-belief-woodpeckers-don-t-protect-their-brains-when-headbanging-trees
A hummingbird’s super-long tongue wraps around its brain in a similar manner. Not for protection, but simply because they need a place to put it when it’s not in use.
Eddie van Halen’s mother (and Alex’s) was a native of Java.
I just love the image that “shouting bat” creates in my head.
The hand and footprints in front of Los Angeles’s Chinese Theater tradition started accidentally when silent film actress, Norma Talmadge stepped on wet cement.
Under the heading of things done while trying to fall back asleep, I was curious about why does 8 times a triangular number yield an integer square minus one. So, I multiplied 8 times the equation for triangular numbers and got: (4N^2) + (4N). After a bit of number fondling I realized that the square root of ((4N^2) + (4N)) is ((2N+1)^2) - 1). Plug any integer into that and you get an integer square minus one. Somewhere in there I pleasantly dozed off, and fortunately remembered it in the morning.
Nice. When I was younger and had a nimbler mind, I was reading one of Arthur C. Clark’s 2001 sequels. Star Baby Dave Bowman was marveling at the fact that the ratio of the lengths of the sides of the monolith (1:4:9) continued into higher dimensions.
While falling asleep, I wondered if the sequence had to be the sequence of squares or if something else started 1,4,9,… I thought of the sums of odd integers and then proved the two sequences were the same.
It’s pretty easy to do algebraically but I did it by induction.
A pleasant and productive method for inducing sleep. Thanks for sharing the recollection.
Rose Byrne, too.
Incredibly, I have no recollection of this momentous event:
Mr. Kelly is the only person in the history of the human race to put on a gorilla suit in space, a true milestone of Evolution.
I, for one, welcome our new simian overlords.
It’s National Gorilla Suit Day … Innnn Spaaaaaaaceee!
percentages can be inverted (yet the result stays the same) …
e.g.
can you do 8% of 25 in your head?
possibly…
but 25% of 8 is way easier to calculate and leads to the same result
check:
20% of 50
or
10% of 100
;o)
Damn! I hoped to be the first person to put on a gorilla suit in space.
You could always be the second.
Or the first in an orang-utan suit.
ETA: damn, I now have that video in mind with people passing a ball while a guy in a gorilla suit walks through you don’t notice because you were told to concentrate on the ball passing. They should have redone that in space.
Orang Utan means Forest Person in the Bhasa, the language of Indonesia and Malaysia.
… and just to make things a little bit more complicated: MEMBRILLO is the spanish word for quinces (the german Quitte)
what you produce is referred to in spanish “dulce de membrillo” (Quittenkäse) …
burn victims
