I see pigeons and sparrows dodge cars by inches, too. For that matter I do the same myself! Sparrows hawk insects out of the air, and I believe starlings also. Predicting motion would need to be second nature, I think. Like skillfully catching a ball, but much more so and between your teeth...
Well, there is survivor bias there, of course; you don't see the ones that didn't learn to dodge...
Correct. They would be visibly laminated to the pavement or smashed in the gutter. It does happen, but less often than ospreys drop fish in late summer.
We call that evolution
Nit pick, but it’s natural selection
The cars aren’t evolving the birds, but they are selecting the fittest.
It’s both, no? The fittest birds survive so those traits get passed down to future generations.
But it makes you wonder why they cut it that close. What benefit they get from it. I can think of several plausible reasons but none that is self-evidently true.
Why waste energy giving someone else a free shot at whatever you're finding it worth your time to stand in the street over? It isn't that someone else wants that dropped french fry or whatever. It's that everyone else does.
This is quite common prey animal behavior. Larger predators have a harder time adapting to rapid turns made just as the jaws/claws are about to snap shut.
Not a bird but as a human, it’s fun.
Adrenaline is hell of a drug… and the best one.
When I was in college, I once walked down a sidewalk that had been taken over by geese. Twenty or thirty big geese, sat down on the ground, who didn't even bother to get up on their feet I as I passed by. I wondered how they knew I wouldn't kick them, as I easly could have, and I concluded they had figured out that polite humans would just walk around them. Which I did.
I've seen the similar behavior from the ducks and geese in my neighborhood. Not as extreme, but sometimes I'm out for a walk, and they'll keep a wary eye on me, but will be content with the situation at 6-10 feet away, and won't actually take off unless I try to chase them. I don't think it's so much that they're "cutting it close" as that they're justifiably confident that humans are too slow to catch them at that distance and generally don't even try. But on the other hand, different groups of them seem to have different distances they're comfortable with. It's not like they've all solved the same optimization problem to three decimal places - some are confident and some are wary.
Of course, there are lots of stories of animals who got overly familiar with humans right up until the humans surprised them. As a funny example, I remember one time a cat that had grown up around my not-very-athletic family escaped the house and had to be brought back inside. At one point, it made a break for it along the long side of the house and was visibly shocked when my runner of a fiance ran it down and cut it off. This wasn't its first time running from us, but it had never run from him before, and it clearly didn't think humans could be that fast.
I don't think animals optimize as hard for benefit in everything as biology might lead you to believe. They build experience. They make mistakes. They're very cautious in new situations, but they can also be confident to the point of cocky if they think they know what you can't do. There's lots and lots of videos of cocky animals guessing wrong. It makes sense to me that maybe every individual animal isn't prudently optimizing hard for its own survival so much as that the group of them, with different temperaments, try different things and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't and maybe there's a balance between weeding out dumb ideas and retaining the capacity to try things.
I think the idea that animals are always optimizing for survival and that everything must be for some benefit is misleading anyway. I mean, in an ultimate sense, you could say the same thing about humans, that they must always be optimizing for survival and reproduction, and whether or not that's true, it's definitely not true in a simple and obvious way on the level of day-to-day activities. We do a lot of dangerous and dumb and non-productive stuff. I don't think animals are different.
In fact, it makes sense to me to leave some reserve capacity. If surviving in good times takes all your time and energy, what are you going to do in hard times? Therefore animals typically have a lot of time for goofing off, and that certainly seems to me like what they're doing most of the time. They would similarly have room for trying stupid things and taking unnecessary risks.
A favorite video on the topic: https://youtu.be/UezzQSUwIgo
> "it made a break for it along the long side of the house and was visibly shocked when my runner of a fiance ran it down and cut it off"
I still remember the look on her face when I got to the corner before her. She looked at me like "what is this terrifying new creature?" as she stumbled backwards looking for a way to escape something faster than her. By the time she'd decided on a course of action, someone else (I think your brother) had grabbed her from behind.
World suddenly seems much smaller
FWIW it's not accidental that I see my wife's HN comments. I joined shortly after her and I have a bookmark for her profile just because I love to see what she writes. But it is fun when occasionally I reply to something she's written and it takes others half of the comment before they figure out that we're connected.
Geese have more than one reason to be confident around humans. Don't cross them.
Oh, I don't know. They seem like a lot more "honk" than "bonk". ;)
I get that they have a lot of aggression and deterrence going for them. But in a fight between a goose and a human, the human is mostly risking bites and bruises while the goose is risking death.
I put them in a similar category of threat as scorpions. Of course I don't want to fight -- getting hurt is inconvenient. But if we do fight, I'm not really concerned about which of us is going to win.
Sure, humans should worry about crazy geese. Geese have a lot more reason to worry about crazy humans!
They have a whole lot of violence going for them too, when they decide they need to use it, and invariably also a considerable predominance in numbers. You're thinking about this like you imagine you'd be able to stay on your feet, I can tell. Maybe you're the kickboxer you'd need to be for that. If not, you are dreaming, and as with losing any fight, once they get you down it is "everything to play for."
There's not a wasp on Earth I need to be afraid of, just friends I've met already and those not yet. I've hosted them in my kitchen, on my porch, been in the midst of a hundred drunk baldfaced yellowjackets and not only had nothing to fear but I knew it, not because they could not hurt me - I'm not so foolish as to imagine myself immune to their weapons! - but because I know how easy it is not to make them decide that they need to use those weapons on me.
I am very careful to walk small around geese and swans at all times, lest I inadvertently give cause to treat me as a threat. You'll do what you like, of course. No business of mine what you think of your chances. I hope the birds keep not taking you too seriously, and that you never frighten a gosling or God forbid a cygnet.
To be sure, I agree that wild animals, even small ones, should be treated with respect and given space. I did not mean to imply that humans should go around picking fights with geese. Anything can happen in a fight, and I certainly agree with you that fighting a goose without a compelling reason would be imprudent. And at any rate, it would be unkind. You can be stronger than something without mistreating it. I don't mean my assessment of the danger humans and geese pose to each other as a sort of challenge -- it's just what I frankly think on the topic. Either way, of course we should respect and be kind to geese.
Where we stand on the respective odds of different humans versus different geese in different arenas, it's actually orthogonal to my original point -- that different groups of geese vary in their courage around humans, and that there are extreme outliers who are doing a lot more than "cutting it close" -- they're betting the humans will give them space. Or perhaps I saw something rare and was simply channelling Snow White that day. ;)
The more general point is that animal behavior need not always be thought of as the solution to an optimization problem. Whether you believe that's true or not in an ultimate sense, in an immediate sense, it is obvious that their personalities and experience come into play too, and that sometimes they make bad decisions.
that said, the respective odds of humans vs geese are not even remotely close. People sometimes get mild injuries from geese, and on rare occasions significant injuries, most often from losing their footing and hitting the ground hard. Whereas a human with even the slightest bit of knowledge and who isn't squeamish could easily end the lives of many geese in rapid succession.
Geese aren't confident because of some sort of rational assessment that they can put up a good fight against a human. Geese are confident because as a general rule, humans don't pick fights with them, and it's therefore safe enough for the group to hang around in places where humans are present at short distances.
Good grief, the two of you are impossible. Enjoy your mutual self-reinforcement.
In Comments
Be kind. Don't be snarky. ... Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I meant just what I said, which was neither snarky, nor a swipe, nor insubstantive, nor unkind. There's no getting a word in edgewise with you two, because you treat disagreement as an opportunity for a style of play which in table tennis is called "cutthroat" - two against one, in other words. Find someone else to play that way with.
I realize I made the point in a way neither disingenuous nor passive aggressive, and that this may be uncomfortable for those unaccustomed to directness in interpersonal criticism, or indeed that anyone should dare critique their behavior. Nevertheless.
I would address the remarkably mealy-mouthed, motte-and-bailey version of human chauvinism here on display, but what would be the point? Oh, one of you alone I'm quite confident of being able to pin down; neither of you argues very well in isolation. (No relation to Clarence, one assumes.) This back-and-forth, tag team crap, though, that's not worth the trouble. Go get yourselves an ass kicking from a tribe of pissed-off geese. As I said before, you're welcome.
Your comment was in fact snarky, a swipe, insubstantive, and unkind. I am quite used to directness in interpersonal criticism (I am after all autistic), and I understand the difference between direct and being mean, cheap, mocking, etc. Your latest response is full of pretty much all of that.
For example: the allegation of not getting a word in edgewise, two against one, "tag team crap" -- I made one comment in this subthread about geese (my other comments were in another subthread about chasing down the cat), and it was in reply to my wife's comment in which she had stopped arguing that point. And then I responded to your unjustified insults by pointing out they are a violation of HN's rules. This is hardly an unbalanced conversation in which you have been unfairly targeted and not been given space to argue your position.
And of course declaring that "neither of you argues very well in isolation" is just a gratuitous insult. So is "remarkably mealy-mouthed". And, for that matter, suggesting I must have no relation to my rhetorically-gifted first cousin some number of times removed.
This is the sort of hostile trolling I expect on reddit, not on Hacker News. I kindly request you not reply to me again.
Perhaps for the same reason that people skydive or engage in other risky behavior.
If your engine is hot enough - just scrape them off the grill while at your destination and sauce them.
At the main bus port of my city, you can see heaps and heaps of pigeons casually strolling right in front and even below the buses while they are still driving. There definitely has to be learned behavior for the pigeons to be so completely devoid of fear in that situation.
I once threw a tennis ball straight up, just as a bird happened to be flying past, it rolled right and dodged it by a cm.
I don't really know what it's like to be a bird, of course, but I have to imagine their subjective experience of duration differs greatly from ours.
Search for "flicker fusion rate" to learn a lot more about this.
That talks about the mechanics of visual perception. I'm discussing qualia, which I am far more confident crows share with me than does the particular subtype of Hacker News commenter who will with tiresome predictability and total lack of novelty turn up to press the footless insistence that crows could never.
Mine is 42 Hz according to a recent examination. Are high refresh rate monitors are wasted on this pair of eyes?
Our flicker fusion rate is different for the fovea and nearby central vision vs the peripheral vision.
The central vision is slower-response, higher-resolution, and of course color vision.
The peripheral vision is monochrome and has a much faster flicker-fusion, tuned to picking up motion in the periphery.
So, the same flicker rate that you never notice on a small monitor may flicker annoyingly on a large monitor. To check that a setup will not flicker for you, set it up in a darkish room, focus around 70°-100° to one side of the monitor so it is in your peripheral vision, and both look at one place and notice your periphery, and also move your focus quickly from one place to another and notice if the screen blurs like bright stationary objects or looks like a discontinuous blur (really easy to get that effect with fluorescent lights). Do it both left & right and towards the ceiling. If flicker shows up in these tests, it will still eventually bug you when looking directly at the screen, even if it isn't as noticeable because your focus is in the center of your vision.
No. Flicker fusion only happens when the same image is shown at the same position.
Something like a moving mouse cursor shows the same image at different positions. As an experiment, create a fullscreen image with the opposite color of your mouse cursor. Look at a fixed spot of this image, then rapidly move your mouse cursor across it. Rather than a moving image, you will see a bunch of copies of the cursor at fixed positions.
Similarly, track a rapidly moving cursor with your eyes. It will appear blurry, even though your eyes have no trouble sharply seeing an object moving at that speed in the natural world.
You can also try flashing an image for a very short amount of time. You'll be able to see and remember its content, even when it is being displayed for a period far shorter than flicker fusion would suggest you'd be able to see.
I don't know. Have you tried one? That's neither the rhetorical nor the dismissive response it may seem...
The mouse is very snappy compared to a 60 Hz display.
Just do a basic double blind test. get someone else to switch the hz a couple of times for you, and see if you can tell the difference. i would be surprised if you got anything less than a 100% success rate.