1. I had this feeling when I was a kid: That numbers have a personality!
2. How silently does an owl fly?
3. And speaking of birds: Imitating a parrot.
4. Tones a voice actor can use in a corporate training video.
5. Steve Coogan demonstrates the difference between young Al Pacino and old Al Pacino.
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13 comments:
I had the wrong link on #2 for a couple minutes. If you get the wrong video (something with a rabbit) try again.
The corporate tones thing is wrong. Corporate tones are clear statements of what you should believe, and then they give you a test you have to get 80% on.
If you can see at night and fly so quietly nothing man made can pick up the sound of your flight, you may not have to sing nor dance nor get splendidly dressed to get laid.
numbers DO have a personality!
6 is scared*
1.41421.. is irrational!
sq rt(-1) isn't even Real! it's imaginary!
scared* because 789 (duh!!)
1) Owl. Superb predators.
2) Imitating the parrot.
3) Voice over woman. She's truly got the voice(s).
4) Pacino voices.
5) Numbers with personalities. Too much time spent working on that routine.
Pacino was a Somebody after the Godfather films. A real Somebody.
Then, what happened?
The roles he took just ruined all that goodwill.
Had he been more judicious in his choices he could still be a Somebody today.
Re: Number 2
This is obviously a clip from a nature documentary, probably a BBC/WGBH co-production, cropped to resemble the standard smartphone video format. Could this be copyright infringement? I think so, but Chinese enterprises rarely pay any attention to intellectual property rights.
This reminds me of an experience I had as a 17-year-old apprentice falconer. Through the grapevine, I started receiving inquiries regarding raptors, occasionally from wildlife officials seeking advice about handling injured birds, and sometimes from regular people spinning inadvertent tall tales like this one.
A rural couple who operated a working cattle and dairy farm contacted me to report an eagle living in an oak tree just 20 yards behind their house. I told them that to my knowledge native eagles prefer much more solitude than that. The husband said, "Come out and see, my wife is scared for our cats and puppies."
When I arrived at the farm I was told the eagle had only been seen very early in the morning, around sunrise (dairy operators are early risers). It was at least three feet tall and its wingspan was 7 or eight feet. Then I was shown a large reddish-brown feather, evidently a left-wing primary. (No, not a Democrat fake election, but a very stiff feather with an airfoil shape. Every feather on a bird has a unique shape, and is the mirror-image of its counterpart on the opposite side of the animal.) I knew immediately no eagle was nesting anywhere near that oak. The feather had the characteristic trailing edge of an owl's flight feather.
It's like a fine fringe that acts to create destructive interference. Bird wings produce shock waves as they stoke, which are often audible to us as sound. However, because of their fringed edges, owl wings produce secondary shockwaves that are out of phase with the primary shockwaves, yielding a near-silence as they fly.
After examing the feather I asked to be shown the tree. There was no visible nest of any size as far as I could see, but they said the eagle lived inside the hollow trunk. At the base, there were dozens of fuzzy-looking objects about the size and shape of pecans. I pick one apart with my knife. Inside were a few tiny bones, including a mandible with teeth - the remains of a small cotton rat or a baby opossum.
Sir, said I, I've seen no evidence of any kind of eagle or hawk anywhere near your home, but this oak tree is definitely the roost of a barn owl.
But the bird we've seen is tremendous... three-foot-high with seven-foot wings, said the farmer.
It's very hard to judge the size of an unfamiliar bird, I replied. Your owl is about 14 inches from beak to tail with a three-foot wingspan. Don't worry, your pets and livestock are safe. They're safer for having this owl nearby to hold down the rodent population than otherwise. Each one of these fuzzy things is an owl pellet, the regurgitated hair, and bones of an animal caught and eaten by the owl. There are dozens here, and each one represents a dead rat or mouse. The presence of the owl also discourages eagles. A breeding pair of eagles will avoid nesting near an owl's roost because owls are known to snatch and devour newly hatched eaglets.
Well, maybe there is an owl, but we've got an eagle, too, said the farmer. I saw it this morning at sunrise.
(I was pedant even then and couldn't resist showing off.) Sir, I'm quite certain you didn't see an eagle this morning. You saw an owl. Perhaps this one, or a great horned owl, which are slightly bigger than barn owls. Eagles are soaring hunters, they spot their prey from a high attitude and pounce on it by surprise. They hunt when the sunlight is bright and thermal currents can help them gain height. You asked me here for my opinion. That's it.
I was politely asked to leave. Later, I learned from a wildlife officer that the dairy farmer shot the owl and paid a civil fine.
Numbers girl is trying to hard to be clever.
The problem with the "number have personality" vid is the glaringly high school sort of personalities presented. Numbers do grow up, you know, unlike many Americans.
Tones for corporate use?
I, for one, had (and still have) a crush on the MCI phone service operator voice from back in the late 1990s. I can still hear her melodious "Hello!" after all these years. She said it with a near-laughing smile, and was a brunette, for me.
I had always just assumed that was the way corporations sounded. When a corporation speaks, it sounds like someone wearing an "I am lying" button.
From BBC Earth:
Owls are able to fly so silently for a combination of reasons, says Scott Weidensaul, an owl expert and contributing editor at Audubon. Owl feathers have a leading edge shaped like a comb and a trailing edge with a fringe; these funnel air smoothly over the wing and dampen the sound. An owl’s enormous wings, relative to its body size, also provide greater lift and enable it to fly slowly—as few as two miles per hour. “They’re buoyant in flight and moth-like,” Weidensaul says, further enhancing their ability to sneak up on small mammals.
Imitating a parrot made me laugh.
Generally liked the others; the woman in No. 4 made me wonder if she can talk without using her hands.
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