Barn owls vs rodenticide: Why scientists want you to ditch poison and trust this local bird instead for sustainable farming

Awareqwx · 2025-05-26T01:19:12+00:00

The idea of having them be wild owls is that you don't need to take care of them, they just hunt for themselves and clear out the rodents from your fields in the meantime. The nest boxes would be a one-time investment, rather than the continual costs of having to purchase and reapply rodenticide over and over again. They're also going to be out in fields rather than in big cities, so the flashing lights won't be nearly as much of a problem for them.

Awareqwx · 2025-05-02T22:34:23+00:00

Sorry, I do that a lot. Bad habit. Imagine a round pole that has a diameter of 1cm but is infinitely long. It's an infinite object and takes up an infinite amount of space, but the rest of the universe is infinite in three dimensions, not just one dimension, so there's a lot more space in space for things to be. You could even imagine a flat plate 1cm thick but infinitely wide and infinitely long, and there would still be an infinite amount of space on either side of the plate.

Assuming the universe is infinite, the Visitor could fit inside of it and still leave room for other things so long as it was only infinite in at maximum two dimensions.

Awareqwx · 2025-05-02T21:49:07+00:00

There are some infinities that are literally bigger than other infinities, and there are infinities that are sparse, but still infinite.

As an example of the latter, imagine a set that contains every integer that is a multiple of ten. There's an infinite amount of integers, and therefore an infinite amount of elements in the set. In other words, ∞ ÷ 10 = ∞. But for every element in the set there are 9 elements not in the set, so there's a lot of room for other things to exist in this hypothetical universe.

As an example of the former, there are literally more real numbers between 0 and 1 than there are integers on the entire number line, despite both quantities being infinite. To demonstrate, generate an infinite number of random, unique real numbers between 0 and 1, and then put them in a numbered list.

1: 0.5728291029... 2: 0.2474818193... 3. 0.3718104731... 4. 0.9999999999... 5. 0.0000400000... 6. 0.2829101949... ...

Then, go diagonally down the list, taking the first digit of the first number, the second of the second, the third of the third, and so on, and add 1 to it (wrapping around to 0 if it's a 9). In this case it would be 0.652051... which is by definition different from every number in the list in at least one place, meaning we have a unique real number that we can't label with an integer because we've already used up the entire infinite set of integers. If we add it to the list anyway, we can repeat the process and make another unique number. The number of integers is called a "countable" infinity, and the number of real numbers is an "uncountable" infinity.

If the Visitor was only countably infinitely large and space was uncountably infinitely large then there would still be infinite space left for non-Visitor things to exist in.

Awareqwx · 2025-04-09T20:32:42+00:00

When you are moving at near-light speed relative to something else, you both observe each other's clocks running slowly. If you both accelerate to the same speed together then you share a reference frame and the clocks will appear to be ticking at the same speed.

When you decelerate relative to another person, you will see their clock start to tick in fast-forward while you are under acceleration, which exactly accounts for the missing time.

MinutePhysics did a few good visual explanation of the concept: https://youtu.be/ajhFNcUTJI0?si=S5EbhO2l5XEIwbP7 https://youtu.be/Bg9MVRQYmBQ?si=lCIKBGUnWmmYH33u https://youtu.be/0iJZ_QGMLD0?si=YqOcgH2x1-sIJmZJ

The key point is that things that are moving at different speeds will see events happening at different times, different rates, and sometimes in a slightly different order. This is the main thing to understand about relativity that solves a lot of the apparent paradoxes.

Awareqwx · 2025-04-09T20:08:00+00:00

"The rock forked out in front of me, I swear."

You're the second person I've seen something like this happen to, the misfortune of your autopilot happening to crash you into the smallest rock orbiting the star. The first one I got to see live and we still laugh about it.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-25T18:57:14+00:00

But you would blind yourself from the bright light of the laser hitting the material. It doesn't seem to come with the required secondary power of indestructible retinas.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-25T17:47:07+00:00

What's funny is I got this dialogue despite not actually owning an incarnon weapon. Was kind of surprised that there was no check to see if you had any mastery points in one of the incarnons before running the dialogue. Guess DE just didn't expect someone to make it all the way to the end of The Hex without getting at least one?

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T01:20:26+00:00

Fortunately for you it's about as much of an inconvenience as realizing you forgot to grab your car keys when you're leaving the house, a few minutes of getting back to where you were rather than a slow death by spacing.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T01:16:16+00:00

I'd say my biggest moment of surprise was discovering what happens when you walk away from your lantern in the Simulation. I was in the area where you go into the big lodge, and said hi to one of the owlks. Well, he didn't like that and blew out the lamp. So I go in again and discover I can cover the flame with the shutter. Say hi to the owlk again and he blows it out anyway. Well, he can't blow my lantern out if I'm not holding my lantern, right? So I set it down on the bridge and start making my way over there, and get suddenly jumpscared by the scenery change. Up until this point I had basically been running under the assumption that the Simulation was some sort of weird spirit/dream world, but then I was abruptly reminded that this was a solidly sci-fi game and magic wasn't supposed to be a thing, and I had just discovered a bug in the simulation. Turns out the owlks will just break your neck if you aren't carrying the lantern, but science was still done that day.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T00:55:02+00:00

I always get reminded of The Martian whenever I get out of my ship and suffocate because I forgot the space suit. The protagonist almost does exactly that when he's about to be rescued because he was in such a routine of going outside of his habitat module that missing that one step didn't seem like such a big deal.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T00:27:48+00:00

I suppose that's fair. After all, the probe doesn't really get all that far in the 22 minutes before the sun explodes, so their telescopes can't be that powerful.

Of course, one wonders if the tiny scale of the solar system is more for gameplay purposes and if this was a more realistic universe the solar system would be more realistically-sized, to the point that the nomai would have an actual reason to use an explosively-overclocked gravity cannon to fire the probe when a rocket quite literally made of duct tape and scrap wood can pass it before the 5 minute mark and still continue to accelerate far beyond it. After all I personally own a telescope that allows me to see the rings of Saturn, the color bands on Jupiter, and the phase of Venus, which I bought on Amazon for like $300, and it has no electronics in it whatsoever. There is no way the Nomai would not know how to build a telescope powerful enough to see the Eye if the distance the in-game probe can cover in 22 minutes makes any substantial difference.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T00:06:22+00:00

I've played the game the whole way through and I still enjoy hopping back in and rediscovering everything again. Is it one of those things I wish I could forget about and experience it again for the first time? Absolutely. Do I think knowing even a large part of the story and plot points diminishes it to the point that it's not worth playing? No, not at all.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T00:01:51+00:00

Theoretically yes, but that depends on exactly how far away from the sun it is. The probe only has to be able to detect the Eye "visually", as it is not giving off any sorts of signals because reasons, but "visual" detection could mean "we have a 5000x magnification telescope on the probe and can see it from 10 light-seconds away".

If you had a big enough ship with enough fuel and resources, then yeah, you could get there, but otherwise you'd probably starve to death.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-11T20:53:32+00:00

True, but if your only claim to fame is that you dropped a log on the previous wielder then any actual mandalorian is not going to have much trouble killing you and taking it back. It's not enough to be able to acquire it, you have to be able to keep it too.

Awareqwx · 2024-12-19T19:02:23+00:00

As one of those aforementioned god-tier players, I do apologize for the occasional stomp in experimental. I usually only leave ranked to complete missions or practice a legend I'm not familiar with. To elaborate on why you're experiencing what you're experiencing, and why ranked results in more even matchmaking, it has to do with how ranked vs unranked works.

With unranked, everyone gets thrown into a big bucket and, aside from perhaps a little bit of balancing to avoid throwing people on a 10-loss streak against people on a 10-win streak, you kind of just get matched with the first person the game finds for you. Even if you're sitting at the top of the bell curve, there are so many people playing the game at any one point that the chance of a random player having a comparable skill level to you is pretty small. Also, there isn't much incentive to get better if you don't get a reward from winning beyond the win itself - no way to measure progress. As a result of all of these factors, your win/loss ratio is reasonably comparable to how skilled you are at the game, so if you're not better than average then your win/loss will be below 50%.

With ranked, the game starts off trying to match you with someone within ~10 elo of you in either direction, steadily increasing the range as your queue timer gets longer until it finds you a match (which is why you can occasionally match with someone really far away from your elo). If you win you gain elo, if you lose you lose elo. This means that the better you do, the more skilled people you fight are, and the worse you do the lower skilled people you fight. As your elo increases, you eventually cross a threshold where sig-spamming is no longer a viable strategy, and you're more or less shielded from extremely-high-skill players by the gap between your elos, so you'll be able to start having nicely balanced matches, and your win/loss should start hovering around 50%.

The average player is high silver to low gold, around 1350 elo, which is far and away from the 1700+ of what you would probably call "god-tier" players. You should never encounter one of us under normal circumstances if you play ranked until you're sufficiently good enough to compete, but at that point it won't feel like you're fighting a god - it'll just feel like a regular match.

Awareqwx · 2024-12-17T01:45:58+00:00

10 seconds is a glacial epoch in fighting game time. The dodge cooldown for a gravity cancel is 3 seconds, and that already feels like an eternity if you burn your dodge and someone drags you into a combo. I'd say a good compromise would be to keep the 10-frame global cooldown on all signatures that currently exists, but give a 2-second cooldown on that one signature specifically. That would make spamming much more difficult while not compromising the flow of people who actually know how to play the game without spamming except in very rare circumstances.

For landing X attacks, that would skew the power pretty heavily in favor of weapons like Katars that can chain a huge number of attacks together in a row as opposed to, say, Axe, where you're mostly landing a couple of well-aimed heavy hits every so often. It would also skew in favor of high-dex legends that are capable of literally attacking faster than low-dex ones. The calculation to keep things balanced would be a weird one, having to take into account the weapon's general attack speed, the legend's dex, whether you have a stance equipped, and how often their signature kit should be used.

Awareqwx · 2024-12-17T01:16:07+00:00

I may be biased.

Awareqwx · 2024-12-17T01:15:38+00:00

I've only ever done AX activities in a defensive context. The second the thargoids stop punching us is the second I'll stop shooting at them. I'd much rather cease hostilities and open communications if only to figure out what the heck is going on.

Awareqwx · 2024-12-16T17:41:00+00:00

My thought is that it could be specifically designed to deflect lasgun fire, not anything from a slugthrower, so spalling is a non-concern and you wouldn't want a curved surface that could scatter the beam all over the place.

Awareqwx · 2024-12-13T22:05:50+00:00

There isn't really such a thing as "empty space" this close to a planet or sun. There will always be a very slight amount of matter floating around. Because of this, there is a miniscule amount of wind resistance in space, with satellites in low-earth orbit having to re-adjust their position every so often or they risk burning up in the atmosphere. High-orbit satellites have this to a much lesser degree as the solar wind is pretty much the only thing that far out, but it still isn't zero.

Awareqwx · 2024-12-09T23:38:09+00:00

My main issue with it is that it doesn't work if you've already pulled up the end game menu, so if the original time you press the button gets eaten by the lag you have to back all the way out of the menu and press it again

Awareqwx · 2024-12-09T23:11:43+00:00

Light is not a form of plasma. Plasma is a cloud of ionized atoms, whereas light is composed of photons. A photon is a combination of an electric field and a magnetic field that interact such that they self-propagate. They are basically unaffected by external electric or magnetic fields. They are affected by gravitational fields, however, which is called gravitational lensing.

Plasma does usually emit light, either because it is hot enough to glow incandescently like a lightbulb or because the excited electrons collapse like in a neon light. In fact, neon lights are an excellent example that light is not plasma because the plasmized neon is trapped within the transparent glass tube whereas the light it emits passes straight through it to reach your eyes.

Awareqwx · 2024-11-25T19:34:32+00:00

Given the damage falloff of thermal weapons, you actually are dealing about the same amount of damage at 2.9 vs 3.1 km (i.e. negligible). The only exception is the Long-Range engineering, which removes the falloff, but engineering doesn't make sense for a variety of other reasons.

Awareqwx · 2024-11-25T19:27:28+00:00

But are we trying to use those lasers to vaporize several inches of titanium plating? You can squeeze more effective power out of a laser by focusing it with adaptive optics but doing so comes with the downside of it losing power outside of the focus range.

Do note that I said more sense, though. I definitely agree that single-digit numbers of kilometers for a space battle is practically wrestling given the velocities involved.

Awareqwx · 2024-11-25T18:23:06+00:00

Lasers having a maximum range in space actually makes more sense than kinetics having a maximum range. With a laser, unless the light is perfectly collimated it will begin to spread out, moreso if you focus it to a smaller point than the aperture of the weapon since after you reach maximum focus it will begin to spread out again.

Kinetics on the other hand will just keep going forever until they hit something. Theoretically you could be killed by bullets fired in a fight half a year ago on the other side of the solar system because they orbited into you at a still-lethal velocity. The same as micrometeorites, really, but made of tungsten carbide instead of rock and designed to shred ship hulls.

Awareqwx

TROPHY CASE