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After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

phenomena.nationalgeographic.com

1–10 of 26 posts

Re: After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

#3

For sure this is interesting, but it's curious that articles of this sort are appearing on HN with increasing frequency. There used to be purely tech news, now it seems that anything interesting qualifies for an up vote.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Re: After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

#4

For sure this is interesting, but it's curious that articles of this sort are appearing on HN with increasing frequency. There used to be purely tech news, now it seems that anything interesting qualifies for an up vote.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

HN is for anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. The only time it was purely tech news was when it was called Startup News.

Re: After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

#5

For sure this is interesting, but it's curious that articles of this sort are appearing on HN with increasing frequency. There used to be purely tech news, now it seems that anything interesting qualifies for an up vote.

Two people have posted the guidelines. Here's the guidelines from 2008, which shows that this intellectually curious thing has been there for many years.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Re: After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

#6
> Mouritsen thinks, that the reason those warblers left Tennessee was not because they heard wisps of a distant superstorm but because of changes in atmospheric pressure.

Sound is changes in atmospheric pressure, and we're talking about infrasound which is really low frequency, so there's not exactly a sharp distinction here.

Re: After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

#7

For sure this is interesting, but it's curious that articles of this sort are appearing on HN with increasing frequency. There used to be purely tech news, now it seems that anything interesting qualifies for an up vote.

Check out pg's (the creator of this site) own submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

The first page alone includes articles on the migration of monarch butterflies, boardinghouses, income taxes by US counties, doodles by medieval kids, health benefits of eating nuts, and more.

Re: After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

#8
post #6

> Mouritsen thinks, that the reason those warblers left Tennessee was not because they heard wisps of a distant superstorm but because of changes in atmospheric pressure. Sound is changes in atmospheric pressure, and we're talking about infrasound which is really low frequency, so there's not exactly a sharp distinction here.

There's still a pretty good distinction here. The baseline pressure actually changing vs. the pressure rising and falling every 4 seconds over and over.

Re: After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

#9
post #6

> Mouritsen thinks, that the reason those warblers left Tennessee was not because they heard wisps of a distant superstorm but because of changes in atmospheric pressure. Sound is changes in atmospheric pressure, and we're talking about infrasound which is really low frequency, so there's not exactly a sharp distinction here.

TLDR - the pigeon problem coincided with high-decibel infrasound from sonic booms from the Concorde SST. That suggests they were temporarily deafened in that frequency band. (At 11 octaves below middle C, they're sensitive to anything over 0.1 Hertz.)

Re: After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

#10

For sure this is interesting, but it's curious that articles of this sort are appearing on HN with increasing frequency. There used to be purely tech news, now it seems that anything interesting qualifies for an up vote.

For what it's worth, I love reading HN, compared to other news sites.

It's a refreshing change from say, Reddit's technology subreddits, which are a continuous regurgitation of the same old Comcast, Google, Apple and Microsoft opinions every single day; a thinly-veiled political and astroturfing soapbox at best, where anything remotely interesting in regards to what we're learning about this universe and how our technology applies to it, barely gets above 50 points.

"Tech" is not just computers.

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