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Velociraptor Bad At Disemboweling
illtron writes "British scientists at the University of Manchester were apparently bored and decided to find out, once and for all, if the Velociraptor was as mean as Jurassic Park would like everyone to think. They created a robotic Velociraptor leg to simulate the effect that leg would have on pig and crocodile skin. It turns out that disemboweling a dino probably would have been out of the question, since the best that big claw could do was usually just to leave a deep puncture." From the article: "I realized that the sick-claw was not a knife, but was rather more like the claw of a cat. Cats use their claws to pierce and hold prey, not to disembowel. Whereas my work was mostly theoretical, Phil took one step farther as he was given the opportunity to mechanically test the disemboweling hypothesis. His work is very important,"
KSHAAAAAAAAAW!
Aaaaaaaaaaugh!
GNARFGNARF!
Kssssssssssssss!
SPLURT
... from the other two raptors you didnt even know were there. And they DO have disembowling claws, unlike this obvious decoy.
... for next year's IgNobel prize.
Always challenging our deeply cherished beliefs.
Who needs them scientists any how, eh guys? EH?!?
Good thing they originally called them "velociraptors" and not "disembowelraptors".
Taco Bell Burrito deemed best at disemboweling.
Needs more laserbeam
Netcraft confirms it.
It seems possible their methodology and conclusions are flawed. If you saw away at a large chunk of meat with a small but sharp knife you can make a deep wound. Why do they assume the raptor attacks in a short stabbing motion? What about other modes of attack their "robotic arm" doesn't simulate?
The world is everything that is the case
Just how cool is it to be paid to test "stuff" like that?
Fsck! I need a job like that!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
They joyfully toy with their prey before killing it and proudly bringing it back to the master's front door.
Robo-Raptor for President!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
They used a reconstructed claw, let me see a test with a real claw and then get back to me. As much as they'd like to say it couldn't happen, unless they use the real deal, take the results with a grain of salt :)
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Welcome our puncturing clawed velociraptor overlords.
make a robotic "Dino" from the Flintstones, and see if it really just licks Fred Flintstone when he comes home, or really tears out a big chunk of his jugular vein.
Dear God,
Today, I read a story about scientists creating a robotic velociraptor leg to see how well it could gut certain animals. What I don't understand is, why do we not know more about dinosaurs without having to go through such extensive research? My pastor told us that the Bible teaches that the world is only a few thousand years old, which must mean that men and dinosaurs lived alongside one another (perhaps Jesus even rode a triceritops?). If that is the case, then why isn't dinosaur behavior and activity a matter of written record?
Yours Truly,
Johnny Christian.
"Our study shows that the claw was used as a climbing crampon. It allowed the dromaeosaurs to hook themselves on to the flanks of their prey: when the prey turned, so too was the attacker," Manning told Discovery News. He continued in a puzzlingly forced manner, "Yes. We truly have nothing at all to fear from what I am sure are very friendly dinosaurs. We should trust that any dinosaur attacks are certainly not imminent. Nothing to fear whatsoever."
Questioned on the claw marks in his back, Manning replied, "What? Oh that. Yes. Haha. Silly me, I must have walked into a door. Yes. Nothing to fear whatsoever."
"Sure your scientists set up this elaborate demonstration because they could but they never stopped to think if they should!!!"
Also why is it every time a paragraph ends with "This is very important" usually isn't at all?
"I realized that the sick-claw was not a knife, but was rather more like the claw of a cat. Cats use their claws to pierce and hold prey, not to disembowel."
Right now I'm sitting here with a 2 inch long scratch on my tum... uh.. stom.. uh.. crap factory because last night my clutzy-ass-cat took a swipe at the cord to my sweat pants.
"Derp de derp."
I know this is a serious story, but this is easily the most hilarious one that's been posted all week.
"Velociraptor Bad at Disemboweling." I mean come on.
"... unless they use the real deal, take the results with a grain of salt :)"
Salting wounds? Awful harsh aren't we?
[shrug] You either get why pure knowledge is important, or you don't. If you don't, no explanation anyone can give is going to help.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Not gonna lie. "Bored Scientists" isn't quite as interesting as "Bored Sorority Girls" or whatever. Seriously, why would anyone do this? I mean, if I donated to their organization, I'd stop the checks. Go cure cancer or something.
**Wild mood swing brought on by caffeine**
"Velociraptor Considered Harmless"
"His work is very important,"
They must know something we don't: such as when they're planning on turning Euro-Disney into Jurrasic Park.
---Joe Ego
Because now we all know that the next time we encounter a velociraptor we do not have to fear disemboweling. You would not believe how many nights this has kept me up...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Bio-CAD is an interesting field. You can use modeling or reconstruction of what you think an organism was like, and you can sometimes come to a conclusion that doesn't support the currently accepted theory of how something worked. The dromaeosaurs (velociraptor and friends) were among the smartest dinosaurs (as determined by the brain cavity's size). So if they were also capable of taking down larger dinosaurs by means of disembowelment (ant waiting for them to die), this means they have less reason to hunt in packs. But if they can't take down a big game as individuals, they may have had reason to work together. Now, I'm not a paleontologist, so I may have the story wrong here. But the basic idea is that you can use modeling and replication as a way to support or contradict other theories (which we can't directly measure).
I don't think Noah would have wanted these guy in his ark!
Boy, silly me, I went to school to be an engineer, and spent countless thousands of dollars and 6 years of my life doing so. These guys get to play with dinosaur bones, fly all over the world looking at rocks, play with synthetic dinosaur claw machines, and don't ever have to make a penny. After doing this for many years, they'll retire on a fat taxpayer funded pension.
I guess I'm the sucker.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I don't know about anyone else but I think I would prefer to be disembowled rather than pinned with a claw. Sure disembowling is visually shocking and likely doesn't feel to pleasent it sounds a damn sight better than benning held pinned with a sharp claw while being eaten.
I mean have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse? It isn't always a quick death. Also if the example of big cats is any guide it doesn't mean it couldn't take down bigger animals either.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I realized that the sick-claw was not a knife, but was rather more like the claw of a cat. Cats use their claws to pierce and hold prey, not to disembowel
Sounds like my ex-wife.
*buh-dum-ching!*
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
it's something to talk about at parties and allows you to rack up lots of points at trivial pursuit.
>> Cats use their claws to pierce and hold prey, not to disembowel.
Yeah, well they also use antigens in their saliva to incapacitate the male of the human species with convulsive sneezing, watery eyes, scratchy throat, and perpetually runny nose. If it weren't for cats there wouldn't be half as many single female homo sapiens as there are now.
Mod up. Funny.
Deinonychus would kick thier ass any day!
shit did i say that out loud..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Has anyone ever been disemboweled by a cat? This thread has several mentions of how a cat scratched the poster, but never of how a cat disemboweled them. My cat has never disemboweled me. If we take this further (anything that can scratch can disebowel), I've had a nasty scratch or two courtesy of a nail (or two), but if you threatened to disembowel me with one, I'd laugh. I may receive a nasty puncture wound or two courtesy of your nail, but I'd laugh.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
So, does that mean that San José, Costa Rica is not a beach after all?
Favorite quote: "
- Velociraptor bad at being snuggly pet.
- Velociraptor bad at Survivor immunity challenges.
- Velociraptor bad at surviving mass extinctions.
- Velociraptor bad at playing the good guy, just for once, in a movie
To summarize: Velociraptor BAD!!!!
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
What about their JAWS?
News as old as dinosaurs? BBC carried this story 10 days ago. I guess that isn't quite as old as dinosaurs. Of course, that supposing that dinosaurs aren't still alive on the bottom of the ocean.
what?
Last time I checked, birds were a lot closer to most dinosaurs than crocs evolutionarily--and gutting a chicken would not have been challenging for that machine.
"... It turns out that disemboweling a dino probably would have been out of the question, since the best that big claw could do was usually just to leave a deep puncture" I knew it!! Haha, who is laughing now?....
you're the taxpayer or student footing the bill for this crap.
and thinking I could kick the shit out of one of those Velociraptors. They're short, they have short little arms and these long ineffectual tails and they can't turn their heads more than 80 degrees to the left or right. Not to mention the fact that they have poor peripherial vision and can't recognise stationary objects. In particular, when the kids ran into the computer room and hid, thinking the raptors couldn't open the door, but they did, the kids could have kept low, circled around, jumped on the raptor's tail and kicked it in the spine.. it'd be snappin' at em but as long as you stay behind it you'll be fine.. then you could do a wind choke on its prehistoric neck or just snap it Bruce Lee style.
That's why I really liked Pitch Black. Instead of pitting blood hungry monsters against helpless little kids, they threw in a bad ass human to take em on and, unlike the useless soldiers in Aliens, he actually put up a fight!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Does this mean that in a fight, the lawyer might win? Noooooooooo!
Give it one of these.
Van Helsing!
From TFA: The Velociraptor dinosaur... was not as vicious as portrayed. On the contrary, it embraced its victims before its razor sharp teeth went to work...
Awww, look. He wants to hug me!
Writerati
For those, or maybe it's just me, that didn't know the definition (for some reason I thought it had to do with digestion)
Disembowelment is evisceration, or the removing of vital organs, usually from the abdomen. The results are invariably fatal. It has historically been used as a form of capital punishment.
So, I'm guessing from that post and the definition, disembowelment is when the velociraptor sliced you in the stomach, so your guts spill out, which they're claiming here is untrue.
HD Trailers
that Hollywood movies don't always get their facts right. It reminds me of the roaring fast-running t-rex which couldn't see stuff when it was standing still. I can understand that Hollywood needs to come up with these things, if something haven't been studied thoroughly. What i don't understand is why we bother reading about whether this uninteresting tidbit of information is true, for the whenever it's been part of a movie.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
So I wont be disembowelled before the beastie eats me. That's reassuring. Not!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by. (Robert Frost, 1916)
"...His work is very important," Uhhh... will someone please explain to me how building robotic dinosaur claws and tearing crap apart is important research?
All we can be sure of now is that in Velociraptor vs MechaVelociraptor, the robot can't disembowel the original. I hope we never learn whether the original destroy the robot.
--
make install -not war
...because i heard people on a *'not very well known' website that google was going to cure cancer. *That's sarcasm for the magical dinosaur bones people. =)
Obviously, this was a joke, and shouldn't be taken seriously, just like my post.
Ladies and Gentlemen... JACK THOMPSON!
Jurrasic Park misrepresented the Velociraptors.
Velociraptor has a skull length of 249 mm (9.80 in), a total length of 2.7 m (8 ft 10 in), a hip height of 0.5 m (1 ft 8 in), and weighs 20 kg (45 lb). The 'raptors portrayed there were modelled after a larger relative, Deinonychus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus
It's plainly obvious. He's at least as smart as batman (invented the web stuff after all) but he's also got super powers. Batman's just rich.
But more generally, I'm not sure exactly why it is useful to build a robot arm to do their demonstration.
Robotics means you get consistent force from trial to trial.
http://www.planetadnd.com/interactive_books/mm0002 9.php
Why the heck is this in Hardware? o.0 'cause they used metal to make the claw? For a second I thought there was some new piece of hardware that people thought could be used to disembowle people.
Well, that does it. Ten years worth of scientific theories based on Hollywood special effects, down the tubes. The paleontology community may never recover. ...At least until JP4 is released.
Pure knowledge comes from the scientific method. Impure knowledge is derived from the Missionary method.
Maybe they used this extra-long claw for some hitherto unsuspected purpose, like picking their nose?
Anyway, bad luck, Phil. I guess it's back to the disembowelling board for you.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
is his work important to? dead dinosaur? or just in case we run into a velociraptor anywhere but a museum
So what makes scientific method pure? Is it pure a priori?
That pretty much leaves lawyers in a league of their own.
Well, it differs. In the animated series, didn't Dr. Connor invent the web stuff? And in the movie the stuff was natural. But no one's denying Spidey is smart. Both Batman and spiderman are exceedingly intelligent, with Spiderman keeping his brain sharp with college studies and Batman frequently combating the Riddler.
Batman has more money (and therefore gadgets), but Spiderman has more supernatural powers (Batman has none AFAIK). It's very close, but Batman is more serious so I'll pick him. I think Batarangs would be pivotal to the battle.
I sitll think it's unfair that Superman could probably outrun the Flash. I mean, c'mon, he only has one power, can't he be better at that one thing?
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I was thinking of a smart a$$ remark as reply when your statement really took hold and made me think. (OK I do think on occasion,)
The real answer is not the that the scientific method is pure or perfect, it is neither. I would proposes that this is clearly true a priori. However, by the nature of science, the 'truth' proposed by science comes closer to perfect/pure each day. This is because of the nature of science to always test that 'truth' against new information. Think of it as repeated washing of a dirty shirt. Sometimes dirt just gets moved from place to place but in general each time the shirt gets run thru the washer it comes out on average cleaner. (I am now thinking of shampoo - lather, rinse, repeat... oh well.)
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
That way it has leverage to disembowel the prey with its hind legs.
I wonder how much these claws were used as a sexual display, both to advertise maturity and to threaten potential rivals. Think about it, most of the time when some animal sports some enlarged, prominent body part, it isn't for hunting, but for mating displays.
Perhaps, way back when, this was merely a giant evolutionary contest to see just who had the biggest claws in the neighborhood...
I took nature's most perfect killing machine, and needlessly turned it into a robot.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
Yes .. we were all so overtaken by the fat kid's response to Dr. Alan Grant's demonstration of the CLAW that we paid no attention to it's clear roundedness and inability to CUT flesh. .
.. MY tax dollars to make these types of discoveries.
class hollywood Lights. . Camera. . (hey fat kid they outlawed cake) ACTION!! deception.
Long pointy rounded things cannot also slice flesh. . this is NEWS?! I surely hope we're not paying these SCIENTISTS
All the things washed, get dirty anew. Dirtiness is a natural state of things, and cleanliness is something people invent. Dirt is closer to reality than cleanliness (but I wouldn't say that reality is dirty...I'm just saying, it's not a very flattering to science comparison that you've used).
Ambiguity is a natural state of things, is it not? If it is, then science is useless. If it is not, then science is redundant. If it is neither, then there should be a way to fundamentally remove even the possibility of ambiguity. While scientists present us with findings that seem more and more precise, there is no finding that the human capacity for error has been fundamentally decreased. If human capacity for error can be decreased to zero, such that, at some point human beings become incapable of error, then the scientific method will produce the truth. However, as long as the capacity for error is not eliminated, there is never a guarantee of truth. Having a group of people cross-check each other merely guarantees a socially safe convention.
To accurately say that we get closer and closer to truth, you must know precisely where the truth is. For this you must be incapable of error. If you don't know the truth, how do you know you're getting closer via a scientific method? Is it just a sentimental feeling?
What's next, tentacle experiments? Distended anus measurement? Human waste trajectory plotting? ...Profit?
It was on the BBC and the theory (and a fossil which backed it up) was that the claw was ment to peirce the throat as the raptor grabbed onto the dinos face. It works in principle but anything which didn't walk on 4 legs may have made this totally useless.
I like muppets.
Knowing that a kangaroo or ostrich can disembowel someone as well, and we know that -- we don't have to guess, they should simulate those to see if they can reproduce the effect with a reproduction of those animals' legs using their model. If they can't, then there's a flaw in their methodology. You have to use a control.
Ambiguity is a natural state of things, is it not?
This is only true to a point. (Think Quantum Mechanics) However, in classical systems there is not that much ambiguity,
While scientists present us with findings that seem more and more precise, there is no finding that the human capacity for error has been fundamentally decreased.
You are wrong again, ok wrong in what you have implied. Yes humans still have the same capacity for error and by this I mean that we can fool ourselves. BUT our tools are more presice - offering better and better data. At some point the data is such that we can no longer fool ourselves and that bit of the truth is found. Happens all of the time.
To accurately say that we get closer and closer to truth, you must know precisely where the truth is.
This is simply not true. Try going thru a maze with hints along the way. It is relatively easy to do. Science is more of a long maze with lots of hints .
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
So what's that? Three Velociraptors having an orgy?
There is a lot of "old news" on slashdot because people read the wrong news sites. If Americans read world news sites instead of (trusting/waiting for) domestic sources they wouldn't be Americans, would they?
You're arguing a completely different definition of truth here. Whatever philosophical arguments you have against it, science is just guessing at how things work, then trying them out. We do this to gain information. Sometimes that information leads to useful innovations, sometimes it just settles questions scientists have. It also lets me play video games and go out to the movies, so I like it.
Anyway, quit generalizing so much. You can rationalize the point out of any activity that way. Very little ends up getting done based on that train of thought.
Wait, I just noticed the "Please do not feed the trolls" sign posted at the gate. I guess I should leave you alone now.
[insert witty quote here]
I don't know about the mutant 100 kilo pack-hunting raptors in Jurassic Park... but in real life, velociraptors were like 20 kilos. That's a bit bigger than your average house cat, and might be able to do a little damage to an unsuspecting human, but in the land of dinosaurs, this scary predator would most likely need to be scraped off the bottom of the foot of your average large herbivore.
I've played with enough cats to see their tendency to grab hold of you with their teeth, then mercilessly slash you repeatedly with their back claws. I still have pleanty of scars from those play sessions to prove it. I can only imagine what a raptor's claws would do in that situation.
Now just tell me the t-rex had feathers and this will be saddest day ever...
//WR
Can they climb trees?? I rather avoid a fight with one of these things!
You try to make a simple dirty pun, and what do you get...
but a pointy stick
Now I eat the banana...
My 3 year old son has a large velociraptor and those claws are not for disembowelling or for clawing. They're for hitting with, normally some place soft and sensitive, the pain is quite unbelievable. Don't believe everything scientists tell you, ask someone who has been there. Sheesh, how much did that study cost?
I like science because it gives us cool toys to play with. But science is not that important. It doesn't in and of itself make life better. I can define virtue as something that is intrinsically and unconditionally good. Scientific method is not a virtue under such definition. It can be useful and beneficial, but it can easily be as harmful and detrimental as it is helpful.
Now, outside of its purely fun and utilitary functions, science is utterly useless. For example, it is utterly useless for a deep exploration of life. In particular, there is no tool that can tell me how I feel, by definition. You can connect something to my brain and it may tell me I am happy, but if I don't feel happy, I don't care what the tool says. Tools cannot disclose certain things about life, such as how I feel and what I think. And those are the things that are most important, because they are the most immediate things, my feelings, my views, my thoughts -- these guide my decisions, shape my actions, inform my attitude, and bring a certain unique and indescribable flavor to life.
Hey, I'm a programmer and a I love a good computer as much as any other geek. I love a fast net connection and I like "moving pictures" and all that. But I don't fool myself about science. I contemplate, because this gives real results that I can feel right here and right now. Don't take my word for it though.
The whole assumption that cats do not disembowel is not entirely founded in fact. Larger cats such as the tiger do disembowel their prey on occassion.
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If you read Jim Corbett's account of tiger attacks in India during the early 1900's, there are references to how some people came to hospitals after surviving a tiger attack holding the stomach shut with their hands to prevent their intestines from spilling over onto the floor.
On a side note - it amazes me how some people walked > 10 miles after sustaining such injuries.
A link to some information on Jim Corbett and his work in India:
http://www.nwf.org/productions/indiatiger/corbett
In order to say that we know more, you have to be able to quantify information. While you can count the words, you cannot quantify information. For example, blah ttooo sdfsd isdfsd sdoifsdofiu sdfsdf, are some words that have no informational load. Further, some information can be lies, and can take you further away from truth. A presence of information tells us nothing about its quality.
If you can quantify information, you have to be able to come up with a unit of information. But before you can do that, you must know what misinformation is. What is information and what is misinformation? If you want to go to New York and I tell you how to board a plane that really does go to New York, that's information. If you want to go to a village and I tell you how to board a plane to New York, then I am misinforming you. I say the same thing, but whether it is considered information or misinformation depends on your intent -- if you intend to visit a quiet rustic village and I send you to New York instead, clearly you have been deceived. So whether information is true or not depends on the intent of its user.
You can measure how many bytes this post takes, but bits and bytes do not measure the usefulness of this post, therefore they do not quantify the capacity to inform.
You're using science as an axiomatic authority whereas it is the point of debate. That's not allowed. If I am questioning the validity of the scientific method, you cannot use the products and findings of the scientific method to validate it. If you could, it would then be self-validating. If science is allowed to be self-validating, then why not grant the same privilege to religion and others methods?
You still need a human to interpret the results. Where the phenomena originate makes no differense as long as the agent interpreting the results has not reduced its capacity for error down to zero.
What if you follow all the hints, but can never exit the maze? Are we assuming that you will exit the maze? What if the maze has no exit? Are we assuming it has an exit? See, if I enter the maze, it means initially I was outside the maze. If the exit out of the maze represents truth, then your example is useless because it is an example of self-validation -- initially I am outside the maze, abiding in truth, and then I enter the maze by volunterily departing from truth, and then I can find the truth again by following the hints inside the maze.
Wth is a "sick-claw" anyway?
This experiment was shown on British TV a few weeks ago as part of a documentary about dinosaurs hosted by Bill Oddie.
The crazy thing about the experiment is that they separated the very powerful thrusting motion of the velociraptor arm from the slashing motion of the claw.
When they showed it in action the arm would go forward towards the target (in this case a bit of pork) very fast then stop an inch short, they then engaged the claw action which slowly pieced the flesh but did not slash it.
Surely if the two actions were combined it would have had more chance of disemboweling!
It's My Tea and I'll Drink it if I Want To!
A paleontologist I knew had found an upper horn in a badlands gully. He spent quite a bit of time looking for the rest of the animal, but this sort of thing happens all the time -- bits of fossils get moved around by geologic processes and you end up with bits an no chance of finding the rest. So he decided to mount it on a skull that was on display, that happened to be missing a horn. It turned out to be an excellent fit.
As I was helping him, mainly by standing around and being scared shitless that I'd break something, he pointed out the geometry of the horns and skull.
"They always show triceratops charging to attack with its three horns. But if this guy put his upper horns into position to attack, he'd end up breaking his upper jaw."
I looked, and sure enough the angle and length of the horns were such that if the animal charged anything, the horns wouldn't even come close before his jaw hit. If the animal managed to drop its head so its lower horn hit furst, the upper horns would be pointing down -- provided the animal wasn't tripping over its own face.
"So, what're the horns for?"
"Beats me."
He then went on to show me the soft, honeycombed texture of the frill, and the rich network of veins supplying it.
"Not much use as a shield. Probably a heat exchanger."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I have this image in my head of a small flock of these dinosaurs doing essentially the same thing, using the claws on their hind feet to gain purchase on the back of some lumbering beast.
It's quite as fearsome an image as the disembowelling scenario, with the added bonus that it can last an agonizingly long time for a large prey animal.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I'm sick of the pathological misspelling of Jurassic Park.
Talking about sick things, what the hell is a "sick-claw"? No wonder those Velociraptors couldn't disembowel anything, if your claw was sick you couldn't either!
The point of the robot arm is to get the same range of motion as the actual Dinosaur would have had. They can then give each joint a strength proportional to the size of the muscle that would have been attached to it (some guess work here I would assume). Then they can play around with it and see what different movements and would kind of attacks would have been possible and how much damage they would do. Animals use their claws in different ways, and the appendage the claw is attached to gives you just as much information as the size and shape of the claw itself. The expirement isn't what damage can WE do with a velociraptor claw it's what damage the velociraptor could have done.
And it is a commendable effort. It is amazing how many obviously dumb theories are repeated in both paleontological and archeological literature simply because nobody bothered to go out to the machine shop, set up a test rig and experiment. An example from archeology is the legend that has grown up around the British Longbow stating that these weapons were able to pierce the armor of even the best eqiuipped knights at long ranges. If you go out and test the Longbow it acutally turns out it was not terribly successful at penetrating medieval armor although it was still a valuable weapon. Fire an armor piercing arrow (bodkin arrrow) at somebody wearing a chain mail shirt (although I pesonally prefer to use a test rig to simulate a human and not just because chain mail wearing humans are getting rather rare nowadays) and it will penitrate but if the mail is of reasonably good quality (as in rivited or even double) and worn over padded armor the damage will often be surprisingly small. Repeat the experiment on plate armor and not the usual experiment of suspending a 3x3 foot flat plate of sheet iron in mid air by the corners (Where the bodkin will penetrate at short ranges with a powerful bow) but on an actual breastplate backed by padded armor and some test rig to approximate the wearer and a even an armor piercing Longbow arrow will bounce off due to deflection or fail to penetrate most of the time and especially at longer ranges. Similar stories can be told about a variety of scientific debates like for example, to cite an example from paleontology, whether or not the Marsupial lion was able to actively hunt or whether it was a pure carrion eater. People spend years debating and even mud slinging in some cases when a couple of weeks of experimenting can probably do alot more good.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
That way it has leverage to disembowel the prey with its hind legs.
Which is, in fact, what a cat does with prey larger
than a mouse. My cat, for example, did a 'show and tell' for her kittens using a very large rat which
she had opened - with surgical precision - from neck to rectum. She had it splayed out on its back, with all the internal organs on display (rats have a very large liver, did you know that?).
Unfortunately, after the anatomy lesson, she left the remains for me to clean up.
Oh, ok. That means it must be important. Clarification of WHY it's important isn't needed I guess.
These scientists and the person posting the article obviously never saw a cat do its thing on a mouse.
Sure, the front claws are for holding prey. But the back claws are for gutting/disemboweling prey.
That's what I love about felix domesticus. They're perfect little predators.
Im not sure this proves anything, since you could still pierce skin with these claws given enough force to do so, and then you could start "cutting" and do some disemboweling. Am I the only one to see this or am I wrong?
If you want to go to New York and I tell you how to board a plane that really does go to New York, that's information. If you want to go to a village and I tell you how to board a plane to New York, then I am misinforming you.
So I take the plane that you suggest. If you told me the truth, I now know the way to NYC. If you lied to me I have learned that you are a liar. Either way I have more knowledge. This is true in general and is the way the scientific method works and it does work. It is not perfect and it is messy. (and the maze probably goes on forever.) but it does work.
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So what you're saying, is that Michael Chrichton doesn't know science.
Could of told you that before.
I agree that it works, because if you think about it, the goals of the orthodox scientific method are very modest. The issue I have is when scientists forget about the modesty of their goals and start to imagine how important they are. Actually, it's fun and no big deal to imagine that you're important, as long as you know it's just imagination. Should a person forget, even for a second, that self-importance is just a self-flattering imagination, a zealot is born. A science zealot is not preferrable to any other zealot, as far as I can see.
:)
Now, regarding the hole, yes, I take your point. If NYC was THE END, all would be well, but life goes on after you reach NYC. So the fact that you know I'm a liar doesn't help you. In fact, it can even hinder you because you may become prejudiced against me, and at some point I may change my mind and decide to tell you some truth that would be very important and beneficial for you, but due to your previous prejudice against me, you may not want to hear it. So knowing that someone is a liar is not necessarily a gain in information, because the person who has lied in the past is not necessarily committed to being a liar forever.
The dromaeosaur group also included Velociraptor, made famous by Steven Spielberg in "Jurassic Park". For the film, Velociraptor was made twice its actual size, which seemed to be very speculative at the time. However, within a year of the release of the film, a giant dromaeosaur had been found, namely Utahraptor. So life can be stranger than fiction!.
a hraptor.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/dinosaurs/fact_files/sky/ut
There's a prize awarded for this kind of research.
So you know some of the other faculty in my university... ;-). Some are real BHs.
So knowing that someone is a liar is not necessarily a gain in information
yes and no. If I know that you are a liar then I will not trust infomation from you in the future but instead look for other sources of information. This in itself is a gain in information. (It is known as 'game theory') Yes, you can argue that there are a limited sources of info and that I will eventually run out of sources. However if you have a set of sources with which you know are at best unreliable results from each source, you'd test as many sources as possible and look at the average result. In fact this is what is commonly done. (OK what I do.) Does it make you always right - no. But your batting average will be above 0.500 (Sorry, I don't know if you are from the US - that is 50%.) It is the 'on average 'that works in science's favor. This is the same thing that gambling place do to make money. Just tilt the odds slightly in your favor and you win over time.
By the way - this was a nice conversation and you make interesting points. Have fun
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Engineering MIGHT be subsidized, depending on the field, and might HAVE BEEN subsidized, depending on the field, but paleontology ALWAYS is.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.