Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Before there were clock faces I guess they don’t really talk about clockwise and anticlockwise? Did people just say spin left/right? I imagine there was rarely any need to talk about rotations on arbitrary axes before modernity. Wheels turned “forward” or “backward” and other rotators direction didn’t matter Spin asymmetry is really a modern notion. Even the earth’s spin on its axis, and the anticlockwise spin of the stars around the pole star or the direction of vortices would not have been of any particular interest. Balancing spins really only became a non-trivial technical concern with helicopter propellers. Screws are referenced to the human body. It’s leftie-loose-rightie-tight ie rather than clockie-tightie. We have right-hand/left-hand type rules. Weird how most situations have a natural up/front/forward, removing the need to talk about spin Rotations and angular momentum are fundamental to spatiality but we think of space primarily in terms of translation
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@airned
I think it’s a little bit surprising that fish stay as upright as they do. Birds seem to corkscrew much more than fish or even octopi. In space sims, there’s a big delineation between 6DOF and arcade shooters like starfox, and it’s a little disappointing that fish don’t seem to have full 6DOF dogfights. They just need one “Fosbury flop” moment and they’ll be rolling before pulling at a 90 offset from where the predator expected. Seems like it’s mostly ambush predation and a little bit of capital ship warfare between whales,
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I think this may have to do with the vertical tail fin, unlike whales Whales roll around, sharks seem to turn entirely in yaw plane. In fact iirc sharks go into a kind of hypnotic trance if flipped.
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@airned
Seems like a shark has the physical hardware to roll and then pull a surprising maneuver in the pitch direction (just as surprising as a whale fluke suddenly providing yaw), but that pre-bone neural system just isn’t up for the task. And I guess dolphins do have 6DOF dogfights with each other, so I’m glad that somebody’s getting full use out of the ocean!
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I think I’ve seen videos of them attacking from below…
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@airned
I think the seal attacks are ambush rather than dogfight. speed >> maneuverability. But they do seem to break the surface at some odd angles, maybe I’m not giving them enough credit for how many DoF they use
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