I think we're in the clear; remember, German squirrels are those weird ones with the tufts at the tips of their ears. (Like Satan's horns? Yes!)
Obviously, if you see any Eurosquirrels here in America, call the FBI.
I see the cracksquirrel phenomenon has reached mainland Europe.
I'd defer to Redfoxtail's expertise, but I don't think brazen squirrels is the way to go.
Brazen squirrels are quite heavy. Good doorstops, tho.
They've been evil for quite some time.
I love this: "As for squirrels, he commented: "I have always liked squirrels. But once you've had one land on your head at about 30mph, you can easily go off them."
On the radio today I heard that squirrels have an average lifespan of 25 years. So they can bide their time, you know.
Everyone knows squirrels should be stewed, not braised. Where did you people grow up?
I hope these folks are being tested/treated for rabies, btw.
6: I apologize for blaming the victim, but I have to think that when you wear a tray of nuts on your head, you oughtn't to be surprised when a squirrel takes advantage of the situation.
Similarly, I showed up at RTFS' last week wearing my couscous vest, and before I knew it I was being steamed.
11: You should have gone with the steak tartare chaps.
I would just like to say that I still love squirrels. Testify!
Ah, yes, squirrels -- nature's answer to "what do you have to do to make a rat look cute?"
Now that RFTS has come out pro-squirrel, I'll indulge myself with cuteness about my toddler daughter. We have German & Austrian relatives, and she has some words of German, including, since she was 1 1/2, eichoernchen (I can't do an umlaut on a PC, and I might be short an h or a k). She is aware of the word squirrel, but prefers the German. Once, in class, a teacher held up a picture with a tree and asked the kids to identify objects in the picture. Daughter pipes up "Eichoernchen!" Teacher hesitates, nods, and moves to the next kid.
We live across from a row of great big oaks, and Daughter never ceases her pleasure at the squirrelly antics. One evening we're eating dinner on the porch and hear a crashing through the branches. I turn in time to see a squirrel fall from ~20' up in a tree and hit the street with a whump! Astonishingly, it got up and ran back into the tree. Like the Terminator, as it were.
I'm sorry, but any story that ends with "Then he killed it with his crutch," is just not that scary.
Not even if it's a sawed-off crutch?
You people and your hatred of adorable squirrels. You do realize that you're starting to sound like the LGF crowd.
You know what else is cute? Chipmunks, that's what.
21: The true face of the Left always reveals itself: B thinks of foreigners and minorities as animals.
At my brother's there's a red squirrel which terrorizes the grey squirrels. I have no idea how the grey squirrels are taking over in England.
Squirrels do carry rabies, and they're cuter than bats so they're a bigger threat.
i recommend armsmasher as the leader of the anti-squirrel army. he already proved himself in battle.
You do realize that you're starting to sound like the LGF crowd.
"Little Green Footballs" s/b "Squirrel Nut Zippers"
i recommend armsmasher as the leader of the anti-squirrel army. he already proved himself in battle.
But he is known to harbor agents all to willing to turn on their fellow soldiers.
Erm, too willing. Shouldn't have started drinking already.
18: Small animals are way less prone to being injured from falls. I think it's a low mass issue. Weighing only a fraction of a pound or so means that you have much less energy and inertia and force (and thus pressure on your wittle bones) on your body on impact with the ground. Meanwhile, while your bones are less strong than our big thick bones, I think that that strength scales down much more slowly.
Also, low mass equals low terminal velocity, though I suspect that only really becomes an issue for mouse-sized creatures and smaller.
This is all just to show that short people are evolutionarily advantaged. That's why I (6' tall) maliciously sit in front of them at movie theatres. I won't be extincted without a fight!
Here in Oregon they're just biding their time, waiting, eating nuts, breeding. The UofO campus is already teeming with them and they're only getting more confident as time passes. The answer, however, is not to raise a human anti-squirrel army. That would be so... pre-Cold War. Instead, we need to wage war with a proxy army. My suggestion: nutria. Horrible little fuckers, but if we can raise a suitably large nutria army to crush the squirrels, then we won't have to fight a two front war against both rodent species. Promise the nutria all the riverfront property they want in return for a short, victorious war against the squirrels. Then, after the squirrels are dispatched, we send in the Marines.
29: I knew that about small animals, but after I heard the Whump!, I expected to see some limping.
I read recently that it's physically impossible for a mouse to die from a fall. But surely a typical squirrel weighs several mice's worth?
I propose that we drop a series of animals out a third floor window (just like Galileo!), moving from smaller to larger, until we find the threshhold. I'm guessing weasel.
23: Nice try, but read the actual post. I didn't introduce the comparsion.
Evil Fucker Jr. and III introduced themselves to me a few weeks ago -- this time the aggressive posturing and tail-flicking happened when I was standing in the street unlocking my car door. Maybe they'll want to go home with you after the meetup, B.
As I understand, the reason is geometric. If an animal is twice as tall, twice as wide, and twice as long, it will weigh eight times as much. Also, the lighter an animal is the more air pressure slows it.
In parts of Europe, notably but not exclusively Britain, the Gray Squirrel we know from Eastern NA has been established and dominates the native, reddish squirrel which has tufts as mentioned above. Norba had a before/after violent death picture of a Gray in England on his Flickr page a few months ago.
In much of the US, the similarly–colored but distinct Fox Squirrel is what you'll actually be seeing.
LB has the link for the Haldane explanation of the lighter falls of small animals.
OK, so John has a hypothesis. When do we test it?
This is science, people.
The tree the Evil Fucker family lives in is very tall. You're welcome to use them as test subjects as long as you clean up afterwards.
John's right: (/redundancy) as animals increase in size, mass rises exponentially compared w/ surface area.
The falling advantage goes to the small, but the same factor is why the arctic varieties of animals are always larger than their temperate cousins: less heat loss, if the surface area, which radiates it, is small compared with the mass, which is directly related to how much is produced.
I think 40 implies that global warming is the solution to America's obesity problem.
33: The dog was barking at them. They felt threatened. The next dog will know better.
36: Right. But a friend of mine once worked on the "Turkey Gun" used to fire birds at airplane windshields. I bet that toy could get a squirrel into Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction velocities. Or not. But it would be fun to try.
I really could've sworn that this discussion about dropping small animals had happened here before, but I can't find it, so I'll propagate this quote that I thought I got from here.
"Drop a mouse down a thousand-foot mineshaft and it gets up and walks away. A rat dies, a man breaks, a horse splashes."-- J.B.S. Haldane
I just read in the spectacularly good "Monsters of God" that 40 is not as true as scientists used to think. But it's still a decent rule of thumb, so no worries.
Hey wait, it was here, and it was even about squirrels.
38: You want science? There's lab gear available.
(And yes, we did much of this thread not long ago. But hating on squirrels never gets boring.)
Snarkout and I sometimes do dramatic re-enactments of the blundering, oblivious gray squirrel ("Hum hum hum, what nice acorns! Too bad there's no one here to share these acorns with!") and the gallant, outmatched red squirrel ("Hey! There's plenty of acorns for both of u..." [is elbowed obliviously aside] "Hey!"). It's all very dignified, as you can imagine.
For the love of Zoroaster, could you please stop stealing material from the Guardian? Jon Henley of said paper -- who does not approve of making fun of people's names, by the way -- has been banging on about squirrels for the last month.
Time for some originality, Xogged.
Drop a mouse down a thousand-foot mineshaft and it gets up and walks away
Dunno about this. Poor Micky's had a couple of falls of about 3 feet that have definitely knocked the wind out of her. Which is a hell of a fall for a two-inch animal, but does rather suggest that a much farther fall onto a hard surface could kill 'em.
Drop a mouse down a thousand-foot mineshaft
Are we talking about Jacqueline Pantsy Plussey posts here?
I think 40 implies that global warming is the solution to America's obesity problem.
pdf doesn't know many Samoans. Not necessarily fat, but damn big.
50: Or that a mouse is at or near terminal velocity after a 3-foot fall.
35 - See also Jay Ryan's depiction of the noble last stand against the squirrelpocalypse.
Dunno about mice, but
In a study done by some New York city vets (where apparently it is quite common for cats to be defenestrated) it was found that it takes a cat about 7 floors to hit terminal velocity and that a cat can often survive this with nothing worse than a nosebleed.
Heebie, I encountered a several-day-dead carp the other day. I get your point, but you cannot blame an innocent fish for the way it smells after lying out dead in the hot sun for 3-5 days. You owe the carp community a big apology .
"New York city vets" s/b "vets in New York City".
Although if that study was done on cats who were brought to the vet by owners, it might have sampled survivors more heavily for obvious reasons.
55: Great story from a friend of a girl she knew who, as a 3 yr old, heard that cats *always* land on their feet. A real Newton, this kid, she grabs Fluffy, goes to 3rd floor window, and drops. Lands on feet, yes; feet OK, no. But lived.
While mass wouldn't effect velocity, it would probably impact (ha!) how the legs survive landing.
I know a cat who was killed rather horribly by a 15ish story fall from an apartment in New Jersey.
I once tried that "they always land on their feet" thing with our poor cat Pywacket when I was a girl. He didn't. But I only dropped/threw him from my then-standing height, so he wasn't hurt. It sure made me feel like an asshole, though.
Woe unto the person who first formulated the "they always land on their feet" thing: witness the number of poor cats who've been subjected to testing by 8-year-olds.
What distinguishes humankind from (most of) the other animals: When in doubt, poke it with a stick.
just like Galileo!
Who does not know that a horse falling from a height of three or four cubits will break his bones, while a dog falling from the same height or a cat from a height of eight or ten cubits will suffer no injury? Equally harmless would be the fall of a grasshopper from a tower or the fall of an ant from the distance of the moon. Do not children fall with impunity from heights which would cost their elders a broken leg or perhaps a fractured skull? And just as smaller animals are proportionately stronger and more robust than the larger, so also smaller plants are able to stand up better than larger.
re: 59
When I was about 9 I threw our cat out of the second story window. To test the landing on feet thing. The cat was perfectly fine. It didn't even seem wary of me afterwards. My parents were less amused.
40
"John's right: (/redundancy) as animals increase in size, mass rises exponentially compared w/ surface area."
Actually no. Assuming the same shape (and density) surface area will increase as the square of the linear dimension while mass will increase as the cube of the linear dimension. So mass will increase as the 3/2 power of the surface area which is not "exponentially".
It didn't even seem wary of me afterwards.
OK, cat people: tell me now how "smart" they are.
The cat was perfectly fine, so why worry? Be afraid of what's damaging and let the rest slide.
As I dimly remember, the strength of the bones only increases with the area of cross-section, which is the square, so if you double all dimension the weight will be 8x and the strength of bones only 4x. And then there's air resistance, which gives the smaller critter a slower terminal velocity.
40: arctic varieties ... are always larger than their temperate cousins
Especiallyexcept the Inuit.
Re: the limits of human falling. 2nd WW enemy pilots who'd ejected from their airplanes and whose chutes failed sometimes landed on the tarmac still strapped into their ejection seats. Their corpses looked basically intact but the bones were so totally shattered that the bodies were in effect gelatinized and without structure.
At least one person has fallen without a parachute from 20,000 feet+ and lived. He landed in the branches of a tree.
All the WWII pilots were enemy pilots. Ahem.
69: gelatinzed I've heard that happens to hard-hat (the big old brass helmet) divers when they lose air pressure while way down. They get squeezed like toothpaste out of the suit and into the helmet.
Eskimos are very stocky and minimize surface area per pound. Arctic animals are big but not tall.
At least one person has fallen without a parachute from 20,000 feet+ and lived.
A Yugoslavian flight attendant, Vesna Vulovic, fell 33,000 feet and lived, after the plane she was on was blown up by Croatian terrorists in 1972.
Other stories:
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/wreckage.html
Vulovic was a vocal opponent of Slobodan Milosevic.
How much you think Steve Fossett had to pay to get included on that page?
69: unlikely. There were no ejection seats in WW2 aircraft.
He landed on the drop zone at a hundred miles an hour
They scraped him off the DZ like a blob of strawberry jam
They put him in a jam jar and they sent him home to mum
And he ain't gonna jump no more.
Glory, glory, what a hell of a way to die
Suspended from your braces when you don't know how to fly
Glory, glory, what a hell of a way to die
And he ain't gonna jump no more.
So mass will increase as the 3/2 power of the surface area which is not "exponentially".
The '3/2 power' isn't an exponent? Who knew?
