• credo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    54·
    2 months ago

    Wait. They eat mosquitos?

    How do I attract more of these flying dragons?

  • drolex@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    461·
    2 months ago

    Predating dinosaurs: as in ‘predators’ or ‘pre-dating’?

    I’m scared.

  • Diddlydee@feddit.ukEnglish
    44·
    2 months ago

    They are also the most successful hunters in the animal kingdom with a ~97% success rate. They don’t know trigonometry, but their brains allow them to calculate where their prey will be and they intercept it.

  • SanndyTheManndy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    2 months ago

    I get a metric fuckton of them during the rainy season. Swarms of dragonflies. Needless to say, I do not have a mosquito problem.

    • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      12·
      2 months ago

      Hey I was gonna say that

      To scrollers: this is a recent video by AlphaPhoenix where he captures slow-motion footage of dragonflies. Some amazing shots in there. Well, one at least.

  • UraniumBlazer@lemm.eeEnglish
    17·
    2 months ago

    Serious question: Has any culture tried breeding these guys to keep mosquitoes at bay? Something like how people kept cats around to reduce the population of mice?

      • hakase@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        Great question! The answer is that, well, you don’t, but that’s not what I’m intending unstained to mean here.

        As it turns out, “unstained” is structurally ambiguous, because English has two different “un-” prefixes, each of which has different functions and different category selection requirements.

        The first attaches to verbs, and means “reverse the action of”, e.g. un-tie, un-do, un-stain, etc. The second attaches to adjectives, and means “not X”, e.g. un-happy, un-satisfied, etc.

        So, if we want to form the word “undoable”, we can either take the verb “do” and attach “-able” first, giving us an adjective “doable” to which we can then add “un-” to give us “undoable”, an adjective meaning “not able to be done” (“Flying by flapping your arms is undoable”)
        OR
        We can take “do” and add the other “un-” first, giving us a verb “undo” meaning “to reverse the action of something” to which we can then add the suffix “-able”, giving us “undoable”, a different adjective meaning “able to be undone” (“Simple knots are easily undoable”)

        So, while both of these look and sound like the same word, they actually have different structures that correspond to the differences in their meanings.

        In my OP, you read “unstained” as “unstain-ed”, with “un-” attaching to “stain” to give a verb “unstain” meaning “to reverse the staining of”, and then added the participle suffix, while my intended structure was to attach “stain” and “-ed” first, giving a participle (adjective) “stained”, to which we can then add the other prefix “un-”, giving “un-stained” “not stained”.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      Well the wing itself isn’t supposed to deform so we’re good! :P

      Seriously funny seeing this after trying repeatedly to retopologize simple objects, but making myself stick to quads to build the skills and “poly-perception”…It’s truly maddening and un-fun lol.

      Thanks for linking that site further down, by the way. :D

    • where_am_i@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Turns out when you optimize something for millennia, the truly optimal solution is not a simple grid. That picture is essentially a proof that engineering will always be needed. Because any final solution is complex. Even if it’s parts are trivial.