Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 311 posts

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#161

Post by williamdclt »

seszett wrote: post #64
Memosyne wrote: post #50

When I was a child, a school teacher showed me this hoax video of flying penguins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4 . Unfortunately, for a brief period of my childhood, I was under the assumption that penguins could indeed fly. By the time I had uncovered my teacher's subterfuge, I had already made a fool of myself by publicly positing that such penguins existed. Admittedly, my teacher was only playing a p…

In French, "pingouin" is the name for a flying bird[0] though very few people know it and most mix up pingouins (auks) with manchots (penguins, literally "armless"). Saying that penguins can fly is technically correct but people will laugh at you unless you are prepared to spend a long time explaining it. I think it's a shame that a teacher would mislead a child the way yours did. Having worked with penguins (the fli…

I wouldn't say that "very few people know it", it's just that people don't think about it. Just tell them "pingouin, not manchot. Pingouin flies but not manchot. Manchot is called penguin in english".

Also, the confusion is greater from the fact that the Grand Pingouin (extinct in the XIX century) did not fly

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#162

Post by flukus »

tzs wrote: post #8

> It's technically illegal to have a wild animal as a pet in Brazil, as officials want to ensure vulnerable creatures don't get separated from their families and that they can be reintroduced into the wild after injury. Same where I am. I've wondered, though. What constitutes a pet? For example, I give peanuts to the wild squirrels around my house. This is not illegal where I live. It is illegal, however, to keep a w…

> Same where I am. I've wondered, though. What constitutes a pet?

I think placing medium/long term restrictions on their movement is probably the most useful demarcation line. Your squirrels are free to leave any time but a dog is typically kept in by a fence, a caged bird is a pet but one free to fly away is a wild animal. Naturally cats a somewhere in between.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#163

Post by sls »

airstrike wrote: post #91
sls wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reduplication[1], in case you find that sort of thing interesting. Almost exact reduplication, bar the ending - is ending in -in or -din allowed in Brazilian Portuguese? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication

Words can't end in "n" in Portuguese (Brazilian or otherwise), so the "n" is replaced with an "m" with very few exceptions like pólen (polen). It's worth noting that in Portuguese we don't pronounce the ending "m" or "n" for that matter. In other words, your lips don't touch at the end of "dindim". Both the "n" and the "m" in that word only serve to turn the short i into a nasal i. Try pronouncing the word "inn" with…

makes sense, so it's really exact reduplication, but represented with the orthographic constraints you describe. thanks :)

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#164

Post by uhtred »

deagle50 wrote: post #139
uhtred wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a brief moment of taste pleasure is worth the suffering and killing of another creature that feels physical and emotional pain?

What if someone else is doing the killing and I'm doing the eating? Not being facetious, I struggle with this and I don't fully buy into the "guilt by association" angle. If I stopped eating meat today, animals would still be killed at exactly the same scale as before. So what would have I accomplished besides depriving myself of nutrients? If we could all do it together I'd be on board. Maybe we can start with "meat…

If you stopped eating meat and replaced it with a balanced vegan diet you wouldn't be depriving yourself of anything other than heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes etc. You'd be the winner. Also, you'd be doing your part in reducing the demand for all those animals to be raised and slaughtered. If everyone had the opinion of "well what's the point unless everyone does it" no good change would ever happen.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#166

Post by lapnitnelav »

kkhire wrote: post #49
pmarreck wrote: post #13

To forgive the tautology, intelligent creatures are intelligent. Which also means that love is possible. I mean... every person who's ever had a pet (of any sort) understands this (as I stare at the photo of my recently-deceased and very-charismatic cat). It may not fit into any naturalistic model that clearly separates humans from these other intelligent creatures (and ascribes all perception of humanlike feeling to…

it took me like 6-7 months to go vegan, it was hard for me to give up omelettes and cheese. but one day, I woke up and just didn't want to eat it anymore. Start to have vegan meals once a day. then 3x a week. slowly your taste buds change and then you don't want it anymore

I could forgo meat although not easily, but cheese -as a French, that's a really tall order.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#167

Post by uhtred »

pmarreck wrote: post #122
uhtred wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you continue to eat other animals if you feel the way you do about other animals?

Thank you for calling me out on this (admitted) bit of bullshit in me. ;) I guess I am comfortable with my cognitive dissonance in this area. FOR NOW. (But seemingly no other areas. I memorized just about all the informal fallacies mostly so I can Correct People's Bad Thinking On The Internet, sigh...) I'm also waiting for companies like https://impossiblefoods.com/ to do their thing. I tried their impossible burger,…

Humane painless animal death after living a full life? How can you humanely kill something which does not want to die? No matter how painless, if you killed me and I had not asked you to, it would not be humane.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#168

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #74
vvanders wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get a bit pedantic you're on the path to domesticating those squirrels, most wildlife professionals wouldn't consider them wild any more. My father worked for WI DNR for many years and it always irked him that people feeding the wildlife didn't think they were doing any harm when they were making the animals co-dependent on that food source.

> To get a bit pedantic you're on the path to domesticating those squirrels... To be even more pedantic: No, they're not. > Domestication should not be confused with taming. Taming is the conditioned behavioral modification of an animal to reduce its natural avoidance of humans, and to accept the presence of humans. Domestication is the permanent genetic modification of a bred lineage that leads to an inherited predi…

It shouldn't be difficult to imagine how taming could lead to domestication.

That said, I personally don't believe there to be anything wrong with having a fully domesticated line of squirrels and other animals. My personal favourite would be a domesticated line of Tasmanian Devils.

I'll even go as far as to say that if habitat loss continues unabated then domestication of more and more species may become necessary.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#169

Post by rurp »

grimgrin wrote: post #137
rurp wrote: post #116

When I was a kid my family raised three young kestrels (small birds of prey that look like a hawk) who had lost their mother. They had an outdoor enclosure and we did not handle them much, but they understandably got attached. Once we released them, they stayed in the area and would often swoop out of the sky and land on my head. It gave visiting neighbors and friends quite a surprise! We gradually saw less of the bi…

what'd it feel like to have the bird land on your head? were you wearing a hat?

I didn't wear a hat and could feel their talons gripping/pulling my hair. It was only slightly uncomfortable, they seemed pretty concious of not causing any harm. I did have the sense that it would really suck if they did clamp down hard.
Post reply on HN