Drone captures narwhals using their tusks to explore, forage and play | Hacker News Reader

Drone captures narwhals using their tusks to explore, forage and play

phys.org

86 pointsdnetesn17 comments

That's cute. Also just reading the first part "Drone captures narwhals using their tusks..." my mind jumped to a more sinister interpretation, poachers using drones to spot and hunt narwhals by recognizing tusks with AI... I've clearly been reading too many AI headlines recently.

The word "captures" also caused my brains parser to exit trying to grok that title. Perhaps "records" would have avoided the negative connotation of the word capture given the conversational status of many whale species. Also, the recent drone headlines didn't help the situation either.

"films" world also work. or "narwhal's shown to use tusks... in the wild via drone footage". or any number of other ways.

I recently watched "Karate Kid" with my 8 year old son. I was trying to explain that the reason it looked so good because it was shot on film instead of digital. And we still call making movies "Filming" even though the film is long gone.

Explaining film to a kid that only knows digital cameras was not so easy. "You edit it by cutting long strips apart and taping it back together." "You have to go into a dark room and wash the film in chemical baths." Sounds like some sort of magic ritual.

Now I am wondering if I just think the look of film is better because that is what I watched when I was a kid. Maybe todays kids will think digital looks better.

I thought it was drones grabbing them by the tusks.

'The tusk, especially the tip of the tusk, was used to interrogate and manipulate the target by brief contact, which typically elicited a response from the fish.' Well, yes, if you were poked by one of those tusks you'd react!

Off topic question, but can someone help me with the word interrogate?

In my native language it carries the context of semi-forcibly extracting information from someone, and English dictionaries seem to suggest the same meaning, but I see it used in literature and academic contexts in many ways that don't fit that definition. What am I missing?

I think in this context it means the same thing as the verb “probe”.

As far as I am aware, this is not a common usage, and you could go a very long time before you encounter it again. Next time you encounter it will probably be on Hacker News.

Edit: After thinking about it some more, I believe probe and interrogate are closely related. Essentially, an interrogation consists of a number of probes for the purpose of discovery. Normally, we think of an interrogation as being verbal, but in this case the interrogation is physical and consisting of a series of probing movements.

In a typical verbal interrogation, the investigator or detective will ask probing questions.

In language “interrogatives” are words related to asking questions. Who, what, where, when, why are all called interrogatives.

It’s definitely a less common usage but as you say it has the sense of questing or probing or feeling out. For me it belongs to a higher register of language, it’s a word I might use in that sense when writing a report or a formal email or something of that nature.

In English it can be used to describe fact-finding, sometimes casually.

In Vienna you can see a narwhal tusk that was sold to the emperor as a unicorn’s horn. I’d love to know the story - probably a dead narwhal washed up in a beach, someone took the horn, then how many hands it passed through before making it to the Austrian empire, and who actually believed it was from a unicorn?

Without knowing what a narwhal is, such a horn might make a compelling case for the existence of unicorns in the first place. The other tusks and horns I can think of aren't nearly as straight and it's easy to imagine emanating from the symmetry line of an animal.

IIRC though the knowledge of the existence of a narwhal would likely have penetrated to vienna by then, so I bet some people correctly identified it.

I'm getting an image in my head of young narwhals fencing like Errol Flynn, and it makes me realize why they were such a 2010s meme animal.

Great post. Thanks for sharing!

Did it catch them baconing? If so, at what time?

(ง ͠° ͜ʖ ͡°)ง

Context:

> "The Narwhal Bacons at Midnight" is a catchphrase that was created for Redditors to identify themselves in public places. It is used in fanart, rage comics, and is often referenced as an inside joke in Reddit threads.

Source: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-narwhal-bacons-at-midnigh... (mildly not safe for work, like all knowyourmeme articles).

We know the time, but not the time zone.

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