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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

#91

Post by jbob2000 »

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…

So the people who fund them are happy to just have the money go into a hole and... then what? They definitely have metrics. How do they know which journalists are writing good articles? How do they know which topics to write about?

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

#92

Post by daveslash »

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...

I agree. There are some trails that are poorly marked. Other times, spring snow-melt will create what looks like a trail, misleading people. Flash floods can wipe away whole sections of trail. I've had fallen trees, yet to be cleared by trail maintenance, obscure the actual trail and I end up following an animal path or an otherwise deprecated path. Hiking in snow presents yet another problem. There are several places I've hiked above the timberline that are wide-open scree fields with no discernible markings. There are plenty of "unmaintained" trails -- they're on maps, but not the beneficiary of any upkeep. Even with a flashlight, hiking at night in thick cover can be a real challenge at times. Many trails are well marked, but there are many instances in which they're not.

>> 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 semi-regularly backpack through unmarked wilderness with no navigation and no map, and I have friends who do as well. But as you said, perhaps I'm in the 0% to several significant figures.

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

#93

Post by daveslash »

Scaevolus wrote: post #16
daniel_iversen wrote: post #14

Wow, I assumed that there was so much water surrounding Greenland that it would be impossible for a fox to swim or get there by themselves. Any idea how much of the path to Greenland from the poles and Canada is covered by ice and how far is pure water?

Here's the sea ice extent this year: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2019/04/Figure1.png

I wonder if there are any walking-creatures (as opposed to bird) that cross between northern Russia and northern Canada.

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

#94

Post by bencoder »

crispinb wrote: post #25
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.

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.

I grew up on a southern coast where north was almost always with a slight upwards incline.

When I'm in a hilly place my automatic sense of direction gives me downhill = south, with about 25% accuracy

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

#95

Post by la_barba »

debatem1 wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason that you should be able to set up a tent, cook a meal, write some software and repair some piece of kit that you need. It's the kind of thing that comes in handy all the time. Of course you could rely on all kinds of technical gizmos to cover you but that stuff can break, run out of battery power, be lost and so on. Good luck finding your way out of the national park with your empty phone.

Hah, tents. Those can be broken or lost, utterly unreliable. Best just cover yourself in leaves when the rains come. Sarcasm, of course. But this manly-man "gotta be self sufficient" thing always strikes me as so peculiarly limited. Why assume that this piece of gear will be lost but not that one? Why should we believe that, when all the restaurants have gone and civilization has collapsed, the grocery stores will st…

> but let's not delude ourselves about how prepared any of us really are for The End Of The World.

What does that even mean? Is there an upcoming mass extinction event that comes with a detailed list of skills required to survive it? All the parent was talking about was basic practical skills that lets you solve day to day problems. You can chose to solve them differently, or avoid those problems altogether.

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

#96

Post by BRAlNlAC »

todd8 wrote: post #87
BRAlNlAC wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not the sense of direction or ability to find our way that I was referencing, but simply that we are large, bipedal, ground dwelling animals. Picking through the brush is much faster for a Fox. Inclines that would have to be carefully negotiated by a person can be simply scampered up by an agile quadruped.

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

#97

Post by crispinb »

goodcanadian wrote: post #78
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.

Urban culture . . . tends to cut people off from physical reality. No, it simply puts them in a different physical environment. People who grow up in a city learn to navigate in a city. People who grow up in the bush learn to navigate in the bush. We adapt to the physical environment in which we find ourselves. Studies have shown that even pigeons follow roads to the extent that if they take a wrong turn, they will b…

You are confusing culture and physical environment. People don't only spontaneously 'learn' about how to get around a space they happen to be dumped into. They are inculcated into a culture. There is a depth of accumulated knowledge and engagement with physical reality in rural cultures (especially, but not only, indigenous ones) that is largely absent from urban cultures. There are good reasons for this (relative differences in cultural longevity, role specialisation, population mobility, navigational complexity of environment etc).

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

#98

Post by thaumasiotes »

daveslash wrote: post #92
nradov wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I agree. There are some trails that are poorly marked. Other times, spring snow-melt will create what looks like a trail, misleading people. Flash floods can wipe away whole sections of trail. I've had fallen trees, yet to be cleared by trail maintenance, obscure the actual trail and I end up following an animal path or an otherwise deprecated path. Hiking in snow presents yet another problem. There are several place…

> I semi-regularly backpack through unmarked wilderness with no navigation

If this were true, you'd be lost. I'm including things like "keep the mountains on your left" in the category of "navigation".

The people complaining about forests are correct in that regard -- in a forest, you can't see the mountains, the sun, or the stars, and getting lost, unless you have very good training in forest navigation, is pretty much inevitable. (If there's a river, you _can_ still see that.)

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