For centuries, it was thought that male songbirds alone used song as they used fancy plumage and elaborate tails, to attract females and compete with rival males. The female role was to listen and choose and, in so doing, exert influence through sexual selection, driving the evolution of elaborate singing by preferring males with ever more melodious and complex songs. This was considered a classic example of the power of sexual selection to generate extreme sex differences in brain and behavior. Instances of female song were largely dismissed as atypical—rare exceptions or the outcome of hormonal abnormalities.
All that changed when the international team of researchers led by Karan Odom surveyed the occurrence of female song in 1,141 species from all over the world. The team suspected that male-only song was not the whole story by any stretch. Most songbird species live in tropical regions, which have been less studied. And female song is more common in Australia and surrounding areas, where songbirds originated. There, it’s a much more egalitarian setup. Sure enough, the results of the study, published in 2014, showed that female song occurs in more than two-thirds of surveyed songbird species and families—and that it’s structurally similar to male songs (long and complex) and used for similar purposes. In the songs of male and female superb starlings of eastern Africa, for instance, there’s no difference in the structure or the number of motifs that each sex sings. Both sexes in this highly social species sing all year long and may do so to signal identity and establish rank within their groups. The study made it clear: Birdsong is not just a male thing. And elaborate song did not evolve just through sexual selection—females choosing males for their vocal prowess—but through the broader process of social selection: both sexes competing for food, nest sites, territories, and mates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf9GVLuFo1Y
whipbird 叫起来好有意思啊,真的像甩鞭子
MEPHISTOPHELES:
[…]
Es scheint, die Frau ist nicht zu Hause?
DIE TIERE:
Beim Schmause,
Aus dem Haus
Zum Schornstein hinaus!
MEPHISTOPHELES:
Wie lange pflegt sie wohl zu schwärmen?
DIE TIERE:
So lange wir uns die Pfoten wärmen.
Pfoten wärmen 可爱死了!
今天学到的词:
Katzenwäsche:猫洗指的是用水很少的、不仔细的清洁。
Er beugte sich vor und streckte ihr langsam Zunge entgegen. Er ließ sie auf- und abflappen wie einen gefangenen Schmetterling
Sie kann sich so viel Zeit mit dem Abschied lassen wie die Bäume, die sich dem Jahr entziehen, jeder mit seiner eigenen Geschwindigkeit. Den Ahorn hat die Kälte schon erfasst, während in den Linden noch der Sommer steckt.
我折腾毛象的时候复习了好多 regex,不然真是看不懂,什么 /(?:^|[^\/\)\w])#/
/\\vec\s*{[^\}]+}/
什么的
https://m.cmx.im/@pattypoem/107225794710592652
It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as it ‘It’s a nice day,“ or ”You’re very tall,“ or ”So this is it, we’re going to die.”
这个现象我也惊奇很久了
之前说到我遇见生词都不是在浏览器上,都是读书的时候。为了使用这个 Burning Vocabulary,我把 epub 转成 txt,然后在静态博客的本地 repo 里建了个文档,把内容都复制过去,然后在浏览器里预览。。折腾死我了
但是它 40 个词以上要交钱啊好烦!我感觉我都可以写一个!(还是算了