21–30 of 80 posts
I have perfected this. I can even stop them mid-flight. Spray at it with any liquid (e.g. water, household cleaner). It may take a couple of squirts but it's easy as it doesn't need to be exact. The fly will fall to the ground where you can just squash it with a tissue.
I have perfected this. I can even stop them mid-flight. Spray at it with any liquid (e.g. water, household cleaner). It may take a couple of squirts but it's easy as it doesn't need to be exact. The fly will fall to the ground where you can just squash it with a tissue.
If you want to catch a stationary fly, it's pretty easy to do so with your bare hands. The key thing to know is that they jump backward before taking flight. Aim for a spot about 1-2" behind the fly, and about 1-2" above the fly. Try to catch it there , and your success percentage will be high.
The perspective of cathing a fly that walked on crap five minutes ago disgusts me. I know they cleanse their paws more often than I do mine, but faugh.
2) see the fly walk over your food, your face, your kids food...
Do you want to touch a "dirty" fly, or eat what the fly has walked on?
I'll take #1 any day.
As someone who works in visual neuroscience, this article's a tough read. Lots of statements that are semi-accurate at best. 1) Eyes don't work like cameras; there's no real "exposure" phase as such (even though there's lots of thresholds). So it's misleading to talk about discrete images that we sample at some fixed frequency. Instead, it's much more helpful to think of photoreceptors and subsequent processing stage…
I have perfected this. I can even stop them mid-flight. Spray at it with any liquid (e.g. water, household cleaner). It may take a couple of squirts but it's easy as it doesn't need to be exact. The fly will fall to the ground where you can just squash it with a tissue.
As someone who works in visual neuroscience, this article's a tough read. Lots of statements that are semi-accurate at best. 1) Eyes don't work like cameras; there's no real "exposure" phase as such (even though there's lots of thresholds). So it's misleading to talk about discrete images that we sample at some fixed frequency. Instead, it's much more helpful to think of photoreceptors and subsequent processing stage…
Thanks for the informed opinion. I know way less about animal vision than machine vision but the statement that eyes have a "frame rate" and "send images to the brain a fixed number of times a second" smelled really bad. A maybe-dumb question about point (3) - I've noticed that when I get a blink/flinch response from something (usually some sand or a bug hitting my face when I'm on the bike), it feels like I blink ju…
We know very little about conscious perception or even the locus at which sensory signals are integrated to generate a conscious percept. But it's perfectly possible that delays differ across modalities and that the proprioceptive signal about lid-closing reaches whatever-relevant-area before your visual system catches up.
> I read something once about our perception of audio being > delayed by ~100ms so that it synchs up with our perception > of vision
Not an expert on audition, but the brain is really good at generating coherent representations of the physical world across modalities. I wouldn't be surprised if such cross-sensory synchronisation happened in some form.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The perspective of cathing a fly that walked on crap five minutes ago disgusts me. I know they cleanse their paws more often than I do mine, but faugh.
1) catch a fly and wash your hands 2) see the fly walk over your food, your face, your kids food... Do you want to touch a "dirty" fly, or eat what the fly has walked on? I'll take #1 any day.
Seriously, we have become irrational animals afraid of everything. (I would wash my hand after splashing a fly if there was a rotten corpse around, though, and would have done even without the fly because my nose would have alerted me of a chemical danger.)
When swatting, I've found they can only fly forward and had good success anticipating that movement. Apparently others in this thread can catch them on the fly's initial backwards jump, which I had never noticed.