My ex had an African gray. He was very smart but a total asshole.
He liked to mimic her parent's voices to call the dogs and then laugh at them when they ran in looking for their human masters.
He also liked making phone ringing noises, door knocking noises, doorbells and water dripping to fool the family and would always do an imitation of her mother's laugh when he got someone.
Our grays were exactly the same. They would call the dogs all the time, and then laugh at them!
Yesterday we received a package addressed to “Henry Walton Jones, Jr.”. We sort-of shrugged it off and put it in our bin of mail for student workers to sort and deliver to the right faculty member— we get the wrong mail a lot.
Little did we know what we were looking at. When our student mail worker snapped out of his finals-tired haze and realized who Dr. Jones was, we were sort of in luck: this package wasn’t meant for a random professor in the Stat department. It is addressed to “Indiana” Jones.
The package contained an incredibly detailed replica of “University of Chicago Professor” Abner Ravenwood’s journal from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Not really cheery facts but I thought maybe someone might know more and be able to fill in the blanks.
During World War One, 10% of all casualties were civilians.
During World War Two, the number of civilian deaths rose to 50%.
During the Vietnam War, 70% of all casualties were civilians.
In the war in Iraq, civilians account for up to 90% of all deaths.
(I am assuming that the person who created the quote is using 'casualties' to refer only to deaths)
This kind of thing is really interesting to look at, because these are all very different wars but it still seems to show a trend. What I'm wondering is if the trend still exists when you include other wars (I assume you'd not include civil wars but you'd have a bit of trouble deciding what is and isn't a civil war). Maybe there is no trend? I'd guess that the trend is real but is possibly not as clear cut as the quote makes it seem.
Or, maybe the statistics are flawed or flat out wrong? The definition of a 'civilian casualty' has changed. Now days we will often take a wider view that considers the knock on effects that cause civilian deaths while in the past. Or maybe the person who created the quote didn't understand the difference between 'casualties' and 'deaths' and have used different statistics as if they track the same thing?
Maybe someone has more info to share?
Never mind, a quick look at the Wikipedia page for Civilian Casualty Ratio has shown that the quote is bullshit. So whatever! More surprising is that there doesn't appear to be any trend, the civilian to combatant death ratio seems to be more based on the location and type of conflict. It'd be really cool if the wikipedia article had some conflicts from before the 20th century but decent statistics for those are probably hard to come by.
Well, you have to take into account that each of those conflicts (aside from maybe the last two) were of very different types
The first was a classic European Land War between Imperial Powers who were fighting for Imperial Power reasons (the last of it's kind, in many ways, due to the unprecedented casualties of the conflict). The second was a war where at least one participant actively engaged in campaigns of civilian extermination, the majority of the WWII casualties were in China or Eastern Europe where the Axis powers engaged in mass executions and exterminations as a matter of official policy for the Germans and in the very least completely acceptable actions for the Imperial Japanese Army.
The last two were asymmetric conflicts fought where one nation intervened in another nation for ideological reasons with vastly superior firepower against a force which used guerilla warfare tactics including human shields.
I think it's more accurate to say the asymmetric warfare results in more civilian casualties. Look at the colonial conflicts of the 18th and 19th century, when the British turned up to colonise wherever they'd often kill far more civilians than they'd take casualties. That's more comparable with Vietnam and Iraq than WWI or WWII (for different reasons, but still).
Yeah, there's no trend and the original quote was bullshit. Which surprised me.
The average civilian to combatant death ratio is about 3:2. But estimates vary. The Vietnam war's ratio is between 3:2 and 1:3. But they can be even more varied with some estimates being 1:1 or 2:1. It all depends on what is and isn't included.
The Vietcong are considered combatants. The issue is that American forces would chalk up nearly all civilian kills as Vietcong, so you've got a problem deciding how truthful the military were. Also some of the ratios don't take into account deaths in Laos or Cambodia which is rubbish.
The Vietcong are considered combatants. The issue is that American forces would chalk up nearly all civilian kills as Vietcong, so you've got a problem deciding how truthful the military were. Also some of the ratios don't take into account deaths in Laos or Cambodia which is rubbish.
good thing we don't do that anymore!
Houk the Namebringer on
+4
Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I think the moment I realized that I was participating in some true vileness in Iraq was when I learned that "military-aged males" (that is, enemy combatants) was anyone who looked to be over 12 out past curfew
At the Battle of the Imjin River during the Chinese Spring Offensive of April 1951, the British 29th Brigade and the Belgian Battalion were forced to retreat under attack by the overwhelmingly superior 19th Army Group. The Belgians and most of the British were able to retire in good order and form a new line to the south, aided by covering counterattacks from US and ROK forces. However, the 700-strong Gloucestershire Regiment was unable to withdraw and was left cut off by Chinese troops on Hill 235.
The US commander, coordinating his forces in support of the British, radioed the Glosters to inquire about their tactical situation. "Things are a bit sticky here," came the reply. Relieved that the encircled troops were not in critical danger, the American ordered the British to hold on Hill 235 and assigned his forces to help stabilize the line further south.
The following day, the Gloucestershire Regiment, outnumbered 30-to-1, ran out of ammunition and was annihilated. The British Army is no longer encouraged to use understatement in inter-allied tactical communications.
And now that I have your attention again, here's a discussion about bird brains.
Typically, the bigger you are, the bigger the brain you have. You need more brain just to control your greater body mass. Birds typically are not very big, so they have small brains, and because humans are often chauvinists people just assumed for the longest time that they were stupid. Alex the parrot was always described as having a brain the size of a walnut.
But then, simple brain size isn't everything. Sperm whales have the largest brains in the world, weighing in at 7.8 kilograms (17 lb) while human brains average about 1.5 kg (3.3 lb), and whales haven't gotten to space.
That we know of, anyway
A better comparison is brain size to expected brain size per mass, due to the general growth of the brain just for controlling the body. A formula called the "encephalization quotient" was created to determine this, with higher numbers being a larger brain than expected and 1 meaning baseline expected size. Humans are above a 7, dolphins are at 4-4.5, chimpanzees are at 2-2.5, and rabbits, being quite stupid, are at 0.4. Birds have lower encephalization quotients than mammals; ipso facto, must be stupid, amirite?
But here's the thing about this EQ - it only works for mammals using mammalian brain architecture. The lineages between mammals and birds split off over 300 million years ago and independently evolved their own different neuroanatomy. Mammals for instance do most of their thinking and processing in the cerebral cortex of their brains, which is the surface area - human brains are wrinkly in order to increase the possible surface area. Because there's only so much wrinkling that can be done, though, brains do have to increase in size quite a bit to increase that surface area.
Birds, meanwhile,
can use pretty much the whole dang volume of the brain. This is important for birds, because any bit of weight they can shed is important because flying is really energetically expensive. If you can do the same behaviors but shed excess bits of brain, then you don't have to eat as much, which is important if you're already having to eat 50% of your body mass or more a day just to stay alive. (Another adaptation was to shed the redundant ovary/teste and just have the one which is all they really need, but that's beyond the scope of this post). Their brain structure, having gone through much harder selection pressure, is just better and more efficient than ours.
Now granted, the smarter ones do have bigger brains proportionate to brain stem and mass,
but they don't need to be as big or scale up nearly as large to get the same effect. So for instance, Alex's walnut sized brain: I looked up cubic centimeter volumes of walnuts to get an idea of their size, and apparently the biggest are around 50 cm3, so let's use that as his brain size. Alex and the New Caledonian crows are said to have intelligence similar to the level of the great apes. Orangutangs and chimpanzees have brain volumes of about 275–500 cm3. Birds can fit the same processing power in about a fifth to a tenth the size of the brain, maybe even smaller fractions since walnuts apparently tend to run even smaller. I've read an estimate that with their brain structure, birds could achieve human-levels of intelligence with the brain the size of an average dog's.
Tl;dr If someone calls you a birdbrain, thank them.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Owl smooches!
Burrowing owls are super-cute anyway but they're even cuter when they're kissing.
And these two are even holding hands talons, though that one seems to be shocked by being caught on camera.
But seriously, if you go online and search for "burrowing owls kissing" or the like you'll find a lot of pictures. They do this all the time.
Burrowing owls, unlike most owls, are rather social; they live together in loose colonies. Also unlike most owls, they like to be up during the day, and they like to live in holes. They can dig their own but prefer to appropriate other species' abandoned burrows (prairie dogs' being a particular favorite).
Grooming is important, and especially so when you live in a group. Being in a group gives you more chances of picking up parasites from others or passing them to others, weakening the group. Mutual grooming (or mutual preening, if you're a bird) makes everybody healthier and promotes group cohesion. That's why monkeys groom, and yes, what looks like owl nuzzling and kissing is them preening.
At least, that's what they claim, but do their beaks really need that much cleaning?
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Uhhh...no, I don't think so. It was just a picture without sound. I wonder if you're thinking of baby barn owls, only they're not cute at all (kinda freaky looking really) and their alarm calls belong in a horror movie.
Uhhh...no, I don't think so. It was just a picture without sound. I wonder if you're thinking of baby barn owls, only they're not cute at all (kinda freaky looking really) and their alarm calls belong in a horror movie.
This XKCD What If doesn't really cover 'what if' but is a look at why micrwaves have uneven heating and what you can do to mitigate this. I thought it worth posting after I reheated my tea and let it stand for a bit instead of grabbing it fresh from the microwave like I usually do.
But tl;dr:
Mircowaves use waves.
The rotating plate helps the waves cover areas that are in dead spots.
Stirring meals at times(s) during the process helps mix the cold and warm areas.
Leaving your meal to stand lets the heat spread throughout the meal, leaving you with a meal that is evenly heated (depending on the materials).
As someone who had Hungarian grandparents, that language tree picture has always made me smile.
I remember when I was a kid, I would watch my grandparents shout Hungarian at one another while they gently helped each other make their bed, and to my ears it sounded like the verbal manifestation of madness.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Here's a pic of a male and female red phalarope. Guess which one is which sex.
If you guess correctly, you either knew the answer already, or you assumed there had to be a trick if I was asking.
In phalaropes (they are a type of shorebird and have three species), the females are the larger, more brightly colored sex, because they are polyandrous. Each female mates with more than one male if she can, though each male only mates with one female. The females fight over nesting territory and protecting their mates from other females. The females lay eggs in the nests of their mate (one at a time), and then fly off to go fight over the next male, eventually laying up to three clutches for three different males (after which they set off on their migration, leaving the males to mind the eggs and chicks). After all, with eggs it doesn't matter who broods them - a warm belly is a warm belly, and they don't need special equipment inside to grow the babies or feed them initially.
Here's a pic of a male and female red phalarope. Guess which one is which sex.
If you guess correctly, you either knew the answer already, or you assumed there had to be a trick if I was asking.
In phalaropes (they are a type of shorebird and have three species), the females are the larger, more brightly colored sex, because they are polyandrous. Each female mates with more than one male if she can, though each male only mates with one female. The females fight over nesting territory and protecting their mates from other females. The females lay eggs in the nests of their mate (one at a time), and then fly off to go fight over the next male, eventually laying up to three clutches for three different males (after which they set off on their migration, leaving the males to mind the eggs and chicks). After all, with eggs it doesn't matter who broods them - a warm belly is a warm belly, and they don't need special equipment inside to grow the babies or feed them initially.
There is a cistern or flood prevention area down the street from me
I walk past it on the way to work. I know that part of the neighborhood is infested with rabbits and they do lame things like hop behind a bush or fence to hide. I sometimes see the body of one that did not figure out that does not work.
But in that cistern which I think a lot of rabbits were coming from I now see Owls at night. It took me a few to figure out I was seeing owls.
But I also see Coyotes whom I make fun of the fact they know who I am and what I am doing as they do that head bob of 'sup and go back to what they are doing.
She is a Laysan albatross, and at least 63 years old, making her the oldest known wild bird in the world. She was banded in 1956 and was rearing a chick at that time, making her at least five years old. Her band has been replaced six times due to wear and tear. Not only that, but she's apparently an extraordinary albatross mother - most Laysans skip years laying eggs, so they raise one chick every two years. In the last nine years though she has raised eight chicks. She laid her most recent egg on December 3 and it's estimated that this is chick 36 for her. The albatrosses face a lot of environmental threats and have had substantial declines in their population, so Wisdom's contributions are important for her species.
+39
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Arctic terns are pretty.
Pretty awesome. (And attractive).
They have the longest migrations in the world. They breed in the Arctic summer, then fly to Antarctica for its summer, then back again for the next year. They spend most of their lives in summer and experience the most daylight of any creatures on this planet. Not only that, but they don't fly straight lines in between - one study with lightweight tracking devices planted on the terns found that ones that breed in Greenland and Iceland travel 70,900 km (44,100 mi) in a year, and ones that breed in Denmark travel an even more ridiculous 81,600 km (50,700 mi) a year - more than twice the circumference of the Earth.
Arctic terns are also long-lived. It was once estimated that their normal lifespan was about twenty years, but it would seem that at least half live past 30. During that time, they will have traveled 2.1-2.4 million km (1.3-1.5 million mi), which means they will have flapped the equivalent of the distance between Earth and the moon - twice - and made it back to the moon and would be on their third return. As a comparison - from all the Apollo missions, only three astronauts went on two lunar missions, and none went on three. They had rockets. The terns are powered entirely by fish.
When this little puffball grows up, it will see the world. The whole world. Every year. Twice.
Posts
Our grays were exactly the same. They would call the dogs all the time, and then laugh at them!
And yes, they were dicks.
http://uchicagoadmissions.tumblr.com/post/37809971913/indiana-jones-mystery-package-we-dont-really
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english
Some of these are a lot cooler than others, and some cover stuff we probably already know
But I'm fond of both maps and language, so this is pretty much my jam
I'm particularly fond of this gorgeous number:
And this thing which I'm sure can't be scientific in the least but is still pretty cool:
This kind of thing is really interesting to look at, because these are all very different wars but it still seems to show a trend. What I'm wondering is if the trend still exists when you include other wars (I assume you'd not include civil wars but you'd have a bit of trouble deciding what is and isn't a civil war). Maybe there is no trend? I'd guess that the trend is real but is possibly not as clear cut as the quote makes it seem.
Or, maybe the statistics are flawed or flat out wrong? The definition of a 'civilian casualty' has changed. Now days we will often take a wider view that considers the knock on effects that cause civilian deaths while in the past. Or maybe the person who created the quote didn't understand the difference between 'casualties' and 'deaths' and have used different statistics as if they track the same thing?
Maybe someone has more info to share?
Never mind, a quick look at the Wikipedia page for Civilian Casualty Ratio has shown that the quote is bullshit. So whatever! More surprising is that there doesn't appear to be any trend, the civilian to combatant death ratio seems to be more based on the location and type of conflict. It'd be really cool if the wikipedia article had some conflicts from before the 20th century but decent statistics for those are probably hard to come by.
The first was a classic European Land War between Imperial Powers who were fighting for Imperial Power reasons (the last of it's kind, in many ways, due to the unprecedented casualties of the conflict). The second was a war where at least one participant actively engaged in campaigns of civilian extermination, the majority of the WWII casualties were in China or Eastern Europe where the Axis powers engaged in mass executions and exterminations as a matter of official policy for the Germans and in the very least completely acceptable actions for the Imperial Japanese Army.
The last two were asymmetric conflicts fought where one nation intervened in another nation for ideological reasons with vastly superior firepower against a force which used guerilla warfare tactics including human shields.
I think it's more accurate to say the asymmetric warfare results in more civilian casualties. Look at the colonial conflicts of the 18th and 19th century, when the British turned up to colonise wherever they'd often kill far more civilians than they'd take casualties. That's more comparable with Vietnam and Iraq than WWI or WWII (for different reasons, but still).
The average civilian to combatant death ratio is about 3:2. But estimates vary. The Vietnam war's ratio is between 3:2 and 1:3. But they can be even more varied with some estimates being 1:1 or 2:1. It all depends on what is and isn't included.
Are the Vietcong considered civilians? Depends who you ask?
good thing we don't do that anymore!
we
are going
to die
I've always heard about that movie and wanted to see it.
http://rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
and the updated version with the poster
http://mfdaniels.tumblr.com/post/93313634355/updated-rappers-sorted-by-size-of-vocabulary-20
The US commander, coordinating his forces in support of the British, radioed the Glosters to inquire about their tactical situation. "Things are a bit sticky here," came the reply. Relieved that the encircled troops were not in critical danger, the American ordered the British to hold on Hill 235 and assigned his forces to help stabilize the line further south.
The following day, the Gloucestershire Regiment, outnumbered 30-to-1, ran out of ammunition and was annihilated. The British Army is no longer encouraged to use understatement in inter-allied tactical communications.
And now that I have your attention again, here's a discussion about bird brains.
Typically, the bigger you are, the bigger the brain you have. You need more brain just to control your greater body mass. Birds typically are not very big, so they have small brains, and because humans are often chauvinists people just assumed for the longest time that they were stupid. Alex the parrot was always described as having a brain the size of a walnut.
But then, simple brain size isn't everything. Sperm whales have the largest brains in the world, weighing in at 7.8 kilograms (17 lb) while human brains average about 1.5 kg (3.3 lb), and whales haven't gotten to space.
That we know of, anyway
A better comparison is brain size to expected brain size per mass, due to the general growth of the brain just for controlling the body. A formula called the "encephalization quotient" was created to determine this, with higher numbers being a larger brain than expected and 1 meaning baseline expected size. Humans are above a 7, dolphins are at 4-4.5, chimpanzees are at 2-2.5, and rabbits, being quite stupid, are at 0.4. Birds have lower encephalization quotients than mammals; ipso facto, must be stupid, amirite?
But here's the thing about this EQ - it only works for mammals using mammalian brain architecture. The lineages between mammals and birds split off over 300 million years ago and independently evolved their own different neuroanatomy. Mammals for instance do most of their thinking and processing in the cerebral cortex of their brains, which is the surface area - human brains are wrinkly in order to increase the possible surface area. Because there's only so much wrinkling that can be done, though, brains do have to increase in size quite a bit to increase that surface area.
Birds, meanwhile,
can use pretty much the whole dang volume of the brain. This is important for birds, because any bit of weight they can shed is important because flying is really energetically expensive. If you can do the same behaviors but shed excess bits of brain, then you don't have to eat as much, which is important if you're already having to eat 50% of your body mass or more a day just to stay alive. (Another adaptation was to shed the redundant ovary/teste and just have the one which is all they really need, but that's beyond the scope of this post). Their brain structure, having gone through much harder selection pressure, is just better and more efficient than ours.
Now granted, the smarter ones do have bigger brains proportionate to brain stem and mass,
but they don't need to be as big or scale up nearly as large to get the same effect. So for instance, Alex's walnut sized brain: I looked up cubic centimeter volumes of walnuts to get an idea of their size, and apparently the biggest are around 50 cm3, so let's use that as his brain size. Alex and the New Caledonian crows are said to have intelligence similar to the level of the great apes. Orangutangs and chimpanzees have brain volumes of about 275–500 cm3. Birds can fit the same processing power in about a fifth to a tenth the size of the brain, maybe even smaller fractions since walnuts apparently tend to run even smaller. I've read an estimate that with their brain structure, birds could achieve human-levels of intelligence with the brain the size of an average dog's.
Tl;dr If someone calls you a birdbrain, thank them.
Give us all the bird posts.
Owl smooches!
Burrowing owls are super-cute anyway but they're even cuter when they're kissing.
And these two are even holding hands talons, though that one seems to be shocked by being caught on camera.
But seriously, if you go online and search for "burrowing owls kissing" or the like you'll find a lot of pictures. They do this all the time.
Burrowing owls, unlike most owls, are rather social; they live together in loose colonies. Also unlike most owls, they like to be up during the day, and they like to live in holes. They can dig their own but prefer to appropriate other species' abandoned burrows (prairie dogs' being a particular favorite).
Grooming is important, and especially so when you live in a group. Being in a group gives you more chances of picking up parasites from others or passing them to others, weakening the group. Mutual grooming (or mutual preening, if you're a bird) makes everybody healthier and promotes group cohesion. That's why monkeys groom, and yes, what looks like owl nuzzling and kissing is them preening.
At least, that's what they claim, but do their beaks really need that much cleaning?
Is this that picture that gets a lot less cute with sound?
Watch and listen at your own risk.
Ya that was the nightmare call of horror I was thinking of
But tl;dr:
Well, I was gonna make a joke about lactose free cows, but well I guess science beat me to that
Google ruins jokes!
psfk.com/2012/10/lactose-intolerant-drinkable-milk-cows.html
I remember when I was a kid, I would watch my grandparents shout Hungarian at one another while they gently helped each other make their bed, and to my ears it sounded like the verbal manifestation of madness.
Seaweed.
If you guess correctly, you either knew the answer already, or you assumed there had to be a trick if I was asking.
In phalaropes (they are a type of shorebird and have three species), the females are the larger, more brightly colored sex, because they are polyandrous. Each female mates with more than one male if she can, though each male only mates with one female. The females fight over nesting territory and protecting their mates from other females. The females lay eggs in the nests of their mate (one at a time), and then fly off to go fight over the next male, eventually laying up to three clutches for three different males (after which they set off on their migration, leaving the males to mind the eggs and chicks). After all, with eggs it doesn't matter who broods them - a warm belly is a warm belly, and they don't need special equipment inside to grow the babies or feed them initially.
Looks normal, right?
Wrong!
If it were a normal frustrum, you could extend the vertical edges and they'd meet at a point, but if we try that with this shape:
It's called Huffman's Pyramid, after David Huffman.
All about that bass
I walk past it on the way to work. I know that part of the neighborhood is infested with rabbits and they do lame things like hop behind a bush or fence to hide. I sometimes see the body of one that did not figure out that does not work.
But in that cistern which I think a lot of rabbits were coming from I now see Owls at night. It took me a few to figure out I was seeing owls.
But I also see Coyotes whom I make fun of the fact they know who I am and what I am doing as they do that head bob of 'sup and go back to what they are doing.
She is a Laysan albatross, and at least 63 years old, making her the oldest known wild bird in the world. She was banded in 1956 and was rearing a chick at that time, making her at least five years old. Her band has been replaced six times due to wear and tear. Not only that, but she's apparently an extraordinary albatross mother - most Laysans skip years laying eggs, so they raise one chick every two years. In the last nine years though she has raised eight chicks. She laid her most recent egg on December 3 and it's estimated that this is chick 36 for her. The albatrosses face a lot of environmental threats and have had substantial declines in their population, so Wisdom's contributions are important for her species.
Pretty awesome. (And attractive).
They have the longest migrations in the world. They breed in the Arctic summer, then fly to Antarctica for its summer, then back again for the next year. They spend most of their lives in summer and experience the most daylight of any creatures on this planet. Not only that, but they don't fly straight lines in between - one study with lightweight tracking devices planted on the terns found that ones that breed in Greenland and Iceland travel 70,900 km (44,100 mi) in a year, and ones that breed in Denmark travel an even more ridiculous 81,600 km (50,700 mi) a year - more than twice the circumference of the Earth.
Arctic terns are also long-lived. It was once estimated that their normal lifespan was about twenty years, but it would seem that at least half live past 30. During that time, they will have traveled 2.1-2.4 million km (1.3-1.5 million mi), which means they will have flapped the equivalent of the distance between Earth and the moon - twice - and made it back to the moon and would be on their third return. As a comparison - from all the Apollo missions, only three astronauts went on two lunar missions, and none went on three. They had rockets. The terns are powered entirely by fish.
When this little puffball grows up, it will see the world. The whole world. Every year. Twice.
Gamertag: PrimusD | Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar