What isn't mentioned is that owl feathers are generally less oily than many other birds. This makes them softer and thus quieter, but the penalty is that that they get water-logged faster. As a result, owls find it harder to hunt in wet weather, and extended rainy periods can cause real problems, especially in the breeding season, when youngsters need continual feeding.
(source: I used to volunteer at a Raptor conservancy).
Birds have all sorts of optimizations that improve efficiency, some of which make them very different from mammals. Their lungs are different from ours in two respects. Firstly, they are relatively rigid and the pumping is done primarily by separate air sacs. Secondly, they have an outlet pipe so can take in new air while also expelling the old. The result is continuous oxygen exchange rather than a breathing-in/breathing-out cycle like mammals.
You can see the effect in how prey is eaten after a hunt. A mammalian sprint-predator like a cheetah has to catch its breath before eating what it has just caught. Its avian equivalent, like a Peregrine falcon, can immediately start eating.
> If someone calls you a "bird brain", perhaps that could be taken as a complement! Trying to do more with less!
(source - worked at a raptor conservancy). It depends on which bird. Some are really smart and can learn tricks (e.g. retrieving specific objects) for food rewards. They can work out simple puzzles, such as finding food hidden under sliding blocks. Crested Caracaras are examples in my experience.
Others are much less intelligent, in particular owls, who aren't particularly wise. They have great instinctive behaviours but can't solve puzzles. This is partly because, for their vision, a lot of their skull is filled with eye rather than brain - owl eyes are tubular rather than eyeballs and can't move in their sockets, hence the 270 degree neck turning.
I've had two complete blackouts due to Ventricular Fibrillation, and one near blackout where the VF stopped after nine seconds (as reported by my ICD). In my experience, vision and thinking seem to stop at the same time, with increased dizziness being the first functional effect (after perhaps 7-8 seconds). My ICD is set to fire at 14 seconds, by which time I'm guaranteed unconscious and won't feel the painful shock. It takes 2-3 seconds to recognise the warning signs (painless fluttering sensation in my chest), so there are 4-5 seconds of normal consciousness when I can try to make sure I fail safe. Like sitting down.
> That is one hell of a confession for someone who's trying to write fiction.
Indeed. A significant part of gaining skills in creative writing is learning to 'read as a writer'. How to examine classic texts to understand how to develop scenes, characters, narrative styles, etc.
> the play are written in iambic pentameter and the spoken text is far from natural (yet incredibly precise)
(Iambic pentameters are 10-syllable lines with alternate syllables unstressed and stressed, like "if MUSic BE the FOOD of LOVE ...", the so-called heartbeat rhythm)
Shakespeare actually used a variety of different styles to demarcate different characters, moods, etc. As a very rough rule-of-thumb in Shakespeare, posh characters speak in iambic pentameters, commoners and clowns speak in prose. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the Athenians speak in iambic pentameters and the clowns speak in prose. When the clowns put on a play for the Athenians, the clowns and the Athenians swap speaking styles, so the Athenians make snarky comments in prose (just like a badly behaved audience) on the badly rhymed acting of the clowns. The fairies, meanwhile, speak in trochaic verse, so their king and queen sound stylistically different from their Athenian equivalents, almost like Shakespeare has given them a foreign accent. When two characters are arguing, the ten syllables of a normal line are sometimes split between them to emphasize the back and forth nature. If a character is flustered or annoyed, their lines may be obviously different from the 10 syllable norm, again to emphasize their mood.
For actors learning their lines, the syllable counts almost act as stage direction hints: if they aren't 10 syllables, then some mood or other needs to be taken into account.
> As I understand it, a big part of produced clothing just goes straight to waste to begin with.
My niece runs a business that relies on the way we discard clothes. She buys clothes from suppliers in India who source them from the bales of discarded clothes sent to them from Europe. Her suppliers have in effect sorted through the mountain of discards to find the ones that have sufficient value to sell back to us. She specifically buys clothes that have 'vintage' appeal (think tailored jackets rather than hoodies) and sells them primarily to students in a northern English city. Her business has done well enough to move from market stalls to a dedicated high street store and she is just branching out into 'vintage' kids clothes.
In the UK, if a homeowner (customer) pays a company to clear domestic rubbish, and the company illegally fly-tips it, it's the homeowner who gets chased. The law requires them to check that the company is legit.
See 'genetic programming' for techniques that are sort of based on this idea. Typical approach is to have a problem representation (gene analogues) that can be used to create a population of different individual solutions. Test them all against a fitness function and retain those that are 'best' according to some metric. Then create (breed) some new individuals who have some of the characteristics of the winners, perhaps mutated somewhat, insert these into the population. Repeat until you have solved the problem or have a good enough solution.
Challenges (apart from the time taken) are coming up with a good enough gene representation that captures the essence of the problem, building an efficient fitness function, and avoiding local maxima - i.e. a solution that is almost but not quite good enough, but from where you can't breed a better solution.,