What will happen when an ant falls from the Empire State Building | Hacker News Reader

What will happen when an ant falls from the Empire State Building

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Much more fun exploration of the same topic (includes throwing ants from airplanes) by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7KSfjv4Oq0.

Thanks for that! I got carried away and sank an hour watching stuff.

Totally off topic - My favourite was 'Optimistic Nihilism' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14

Yes, excellent video, I love that series.

Can't recommend it enough, explains why size matters and how mass, surface and volume cause these effects.

Whenever I remove ants from the kitchen, I grab them gently between my fingers, to keep them from escaping. Otherwise, they will often jump out of my hands.

I'm sure that 5 feet is long enough to reach ant terminal velocity. So clearly ants know that falling 5 feet, or 1000 feet, is no big deal.

I think they just know that getting away from the monstrous predator is better than getting eaten by it, and so they escape without regard to the size of the leap. If you did the same experiment with your hand held out over the ocean, I'm sure they'd make the same leap, only to drown in the water.

I wish our ants were like yours. If I clean up a bunch of them there are likely to be a few that ran onto my hand keep running around my hand. Easiest way is to wash them off. I've never had an ant choose to jump from me.

You... gently remove ants from your kitchen? Really?

Not OP, but I have a hard time killing any insects. Will capture and place them outside if I find any in my home.

Watching the little guys move around, they just seem to be doing the best with what they got. I kind of see myself and humans the same way, so feel sad and lonely if I kill them.

You're a hero among insects my friend :)

I didnt know that below a certain size, gravity won’t kill you.

The idea a mouse can survive a fall into a thousand foot mineshaft is quite wonderful.

For cats it's better to fall off a higher floor than a lower one because they have more time to turn feet down and increase their air drag thus getting under the terminal velocity and allow them to survive the fall.

For humans a jump from the third floor is where safe ticket to afterlife start, though head first will end it just as fine from the second or even first floor.

> For cats it's better to fall off a higher floor than a lower one because they have more time to turn feet down and increase their air drag thus getting under the terminal velocity and allow them to survive the fall.

True, and there's been at least one, probably many, actual study done that came to that conclusion.

Small nitpick (I'm sorry, I couldn't stop myself!), their action doesn't get them "under the terminal velocity," it lowers what their terminal velocity is. It's just the speed at which the wind resistance is enough to prevent further acceleration by gravity. It's terminal as in the end of something (acceleration), not terminal as in the predicted death of the something.

Thanks for the nitpicking, English isn't my native tongue.

For an adult, a fatal fall is possible from the standing position, it's just most of the time people are able to break the fall in some way when they do fall and not land on their head.

So true. Especially: don't push drunkards.

Also because getting their feet facing down allows them to use their legs as shock absorbers. Watch a cat as it lands on a flat surface from a 1 meter high jump, you will see it in action.

Also because cat legs are very good shock absorbers. The hind legs are impressively springy, which is why cats can leap four or five feet into the air without a run-up.

Human legs aren't as flexible. Beyond bent-knee heights, the choice is between learning how to tuck and roll - which takes practice for most people - or having dislocated hips on landing.

This inspires a high school physics test problem:

You are sitting in an apartment building and your cat sees a mouse on the window sill.

The mouse jumps out the window and lands on the ground unscathed.

The cat, seeing the mouse made the leap safely, and hoping for lunch, makes the same jump and suffers no injury.

You worried about your cat escaping, need to decide if you’ll jump as well.

Based on seeing the tiny mouse make it and even your bigger cat, can you assume you’ll be safe? Why or why not?

If air pressure was a factor then you would see tons of dead ants littering elevator floors.

I'm glad we live in a reality where this isn't the case

I don't think the final paragraph on why it wouldn't pop is a compelling argument. While I don't actually think the ant would explode - saying some ants live on mountains is not an argument against it. The explosion would occur from the change in pressure, not the absolute pressure.

The real reason is that the small size of an ant makes an effective pressure vessel and the differential is simply not very high. Some species of spiders which actually operate their legs pneumatically are known to fly across oceans high in the air with their silk as a sail.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/04/europe/spiders-sail-fly-ballo...

TL;DR – article is just click fodder. Ants have a safe terminal velocity and probably won't pop in the elevator on the way up from pressure changes, but no experiments were performed.

Mu guess would have been that it would have ended up in the water swept away by the winds, on a windy day.

What's the point of adding such a massive cookie bar, supposedly for the GDRP, if there's no way to say no? If they don't need/want to be compliant, why have it at all?

Funny, 5 minutes ago I've made this exact call in our website: remove the reject button.

Unfortunately, and for the time being, we are not able to give users an alternative, no-cookie version of our website. And we didn't have a good place to send them to when Reject was clicked. history.back() appeared to be the best option but unreliable. So we first replaced it with the legalese equivalent of "close the tab/leave if you don't agree" but it looks like even that is assumed to be implicitly understood by the visitor, so TBH I'm not sure what's the best compromise between usability and compliance.

Unfortunately I don't think "accept tracking or don't use the site" is in compliance with GDPR. There's some specific language in there about the site needing to be useable even if users don't give permissions to anything that's not 100% necessary for site functionality.

especially when you load the cookies and trackers before the showing the consent dialog :D

I blocked it. I wonder if that counts as a yes.

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