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Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

bbc.com

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Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#81

Post by shawabawa3 »

fnord77 wrote: post #41
hirundo wrote: post #4

Compare the fox's journey of 2,176 miles in 76 days to the average Pacific Crest Trail through hiker's 2,660 miles in 152 days. That's 29 vs 18 miles per day. The PCT record is about 50 miles per day. So an athletic human could have kept up with this canine. Of course the humans don't have to scavenge their meals along the way and the fox doesn't have to carry supplies. Typically dog companions don't do well on such…

> kept up with this canine. Vulpine, actually. (Foxes are canids, but not canines.)

I think canine is a synonym for canid/canidae

Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#82

Post by mlang23 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #61
crispinb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human navigation is cultural. Urban culture (for better or worse) tends to cut people off from physical reality. Spend a few days with a Cape York indigenous person and find out how amazingly good people can get at this. John Huth's The Lost Art of Finding Our Way is a good read for anyone interested in improving their navigation skills.

For those who don't know: The natives of the Cape York area speak a language with no words for front, back, left, or right, they only have words for compass directions. Thus, speaking their language forces you to be aware of compass directions at all times. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.htm...

This would solve an issue I have regularily. Sighted people tend to invert left/right almost more then 50% of the time when telling directions to a blind person, especially if they are not looking in the same direction. In fact, the error is so common that I actually gave up listening to directions from random strangers. The likelihood of them being wrong is so high that it actually is dangerous to listen to sighted people without double-checking if they actually can be right.

Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#83

Post by paganel »

Buttons840 wrote: post #61
crispinb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human navigation is cultural. Urban culture (for better or worse) tends to cut people off from physical reality. Spend a few days with a Cape York indigenous person and find out how amazingly good people can get at this. John Huth's The Lost Art of Finding Our Way is a good read for anyone interested in improving their navigation skills.

For those who don't know: The natives of the Cape York area speak a language with no words for front, back, left, or right, they only have words for compass directions. Thus, speaking their language forces you to be aware of compass directions at all times. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.htm...

> front, back, left, or right, they only have words for compass directions.

I know it's not exactly the same thing by I remember my Eastern-European grandma almost never using the words "right" of "left", she was almost always using what I can roughly translate as "upwards" and "downwards", as in: "paganel, give me that pitchfork that is upwards from you" or "pass me the rake that is downwards from where you are".

My grandparents lived in a mountainous region, and as such one of their main tools for making sense of where things were was to position those things "higher" or "lower" compared to the position of the speaker.

Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#84

Post by lqet »

Related: I recently watched Werner Herzog's "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga" (can highly recommend). At the end of the documentary, a Siberian hunter returns from his cabin to his home village for Christmas. I takes him an entire day by snowmobile in harsh Siberian winter conditions, and at the end he travels for several hours in total darkness. He does not make a single stop.

His dog travels with him, but not on the snowmobile. He runs next to the snow mobile the entire trip.

Finally, the hunter arrives at the village late in the evening. The dog doesn't even seem to be exhausted. He happily greets the hunter's family members, and a woman casually mentions "well, the dog must be hungry". They give him something to eat, and that's that.

Needless to say, it left me deeply impressed.

Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#85

Post by SahAssar »

Aromasin wrote: post #76
jbob2000 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their metrics are for “articles viewed”, not “articles that the reader read and enjoyed”. They don’t care if you get bored halfway through, they probably don’t even care if you read the article. As long as the numbers for the money metrics go up, they’re happy.

The BBC does not run ads, and as far as I'm aware does not use any sort of metric you described. It is tax-payer funded service. What they have been doing is copying "features" from other popular news websites, i.e. Buzzfeed, and been integrating them into their own. I appreciate the fact they copied the "suggested articles" feature. I just don't think they considered it long enough to question as to why other websit…

While I generally agree with what you said, they do track metrics, and that is one part of how the BBC decides how to spend it's money. If their articles online got a 10th of the traffic they would probably get a lot less money to write those articles. Public service is only useful if people consume it even if it should not optimize for that metric alone (or even primarily).

Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#86

Post by lqet »

jacquesm wrote: post #22
jacobush wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most aren't. Some are.

It's scary how inept people are in general at navigation. Telling the time and obtaining a rough compass heading by the position of the sun should be something anybody can do but surprisingly few people can do this.

I am always impressed and a little bit worried that some people I know completely rely on Google Maps (or competitors), even for basic navigation tasks like driving to some nearby village or getting to some tourist attraction in a foreign town they are visiting. With some of them, it is obvious that they don't have the mental representation of a city you normally would have after living/staying there for only a few days. I don't know whether this is sad / dangerous or even unhealthy for their brains, but it worries me enough that I make a conscious effort every day to only use route planning software to get an understanding what the optimal route would be. After that, I always rely on printed maps, general handwritten waypoints or just wandering around a foreign town in roughly the right direction.

Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#87

Post by todd8 »

BRAlNlAC wrote: post #10
hirundo wrote: post #4

Compare the fox's journey of 2,176 miles in 76 days to the average Pacific Crest Trail through hiker's 2,660 miles in 152 days. That's 29 vs 18 miles per day. The PCT record is about 50 miles per day. So an athletic human could have kept up with this canine. Of course the humans don't have to scavenge their meals along the way and the fox doesn't have to carry supplies. Typically dog companions don't do well on such…

Walking a trail isn’t the same as walking cross country. Humans aren’t very good at off trail navigation.

It’s hard to walk on a straight heading for most people. A simple trick helps. Pick a landmark on the horizon, walk toward it checking for it periodically, and once you reach it pick a new distant land mark in the direction you’d like to travel and repeat.

Of course this requires knowing which direction is which. That’s a separate skill using gps, compass, sun, moon, stars, moss, or whatever.

Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#88

Post by KineticLensman »

bigiain wrote: post #48
jacquesm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's scary how inept people are in general at navigation. Telling the time and obtaining a rough compass heading by the position of the sun should be something anybody can do but surprisingly few people can do this.

I'm pretty good at this at home in the southern hemisphere, but I'm much worse when visiting the northern hemisphere and the sun "goes the wrong way"... My instinctive sense of direction doesn't work with "the sun in the south midday" thing, and I need to pull that up into the intellectual part of my brain all the time. "Ummm, I'm in SF, if the sun's over _there_ and it's mid morning that much be, ummm, south east-is…

Yes. I live at 50° North so can assume that the Sun is always in the southern half of the sky and always goes from left to right across the sky (as you look at it). So if it's sunny I can make a good guess at the compass directions, especially if I know the time. I can reverse this process, e.g. in South Africa, with a bit of thought. The Sun still seems 'wrong' though.

Where I get confused is the equator, where my simple rules don't work.

Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#89

Post by KineticLensman »

dmitriid wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nothing to do with manliness, but just common sense. If you don't know the sun sets in the West and is at its highest point roughly at noon in your local timezone what else is there that you don't know? Basic practical knowledge comes in handy all the time. There isn't a skill that I have that I have not used (and not just to use it when some better alternative was available) and there are still plenty that I'd…

> If you don't know the sun sets in the West and is at its highest point roughly at noon in your local timezone what else is there that you don't know? And how many more things I do know > Basic practical knowledge comes in handy all the time. It doesn’t. The ability to strike a tent, roast a grizzly bear, read weather from moss and bird patterns comes in handy about 0% of the time. Even knowing that the sun sets in…

> Even knowing that the sun sets in the West has zero practical applications in urban settings.

I use it to decide where to sit when eating outside - will the table be more in the sun or the shade after an hour or so?

Re: Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

#90

Post by mirceal »

nradov wrote: post #37
thaumasiotes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good luck finding your way out of the national park with your empty phone. That's why the national park is full of clearly marked trails. If you're backpacking through unmarked wilderness, you need a navigation system, and you know you need it. That's 0% of people to several significant figures.

I assume you haven't gone hiking in many places. In national parks and similar areas the trails are often vague, poorly marked, and easily confused with animal paths. Get just a few steps off the path and it's easy to become completely disoriented, especially in dense forest where you can't see anything but trees. https://www.foxnews.com/us/hawaii-hiker-amanda-eller-apologi...

as someone who has gone hiking in most of the national parks in the west of the US I can tell you that trails are marked pretty well and whenever you’re in doubt you should just go back. most people that get in trouble are a little too adventurous for their own sake (or just plain stupid in their decision process)
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