Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/01/skrillex-song-messes-up-mosqui.html
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/listens to Skrillex.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s just mosquitoes. I doubt many humans have mating success to that.
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If you see a cloud of midges hum a slowly ascending tone and watch what happens.
Eventually you’ll hit their wingbeat frequency and the cloud will lose coordination and sort of explode.
You can hum that tone over and over to keep the dumb bugs stunned and less likely to bite.
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I’m on my guard for April Fools shenanigans today. Will check back on this story later.
Edited to remove video, posted elsewhere
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Acta Trop. 2019 Mar 25
Hmm.
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I’m not saying it’s not legit. Just that today my skepticism is heightened.
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(Update: Very interesting! I did not not know that; now I want to try for myself. Who ya gonna call? Midge Busters!)
I am reminded of this passage from Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver; the year is 1665-1666:
Below him, a strange plucking sound, like a man endlessly tuning a lute. He went down stairs and found Hooke sitting there with a few inches of quill sticking out of his ear, plucking a string stretched over a wooden box. It was far from the strangest thing Hooke had ever done, so Daniel went to work for a time, trying to dissolve Wilkins’s bladder-gravel in various potions. Hooke continued plucking and humming. Finally Daniel went over to investigate.
A housefly was perched on the end of the quill that was stuck in Hooke’s ear. Daniel tried to shoo it away. Its wings blurred, but it didn’t move. Looking more closely Daniel saw that it had been glued down.
“Do that again, it gives me a different pitch,” Hooke demanded.
“You can hear the fly’s wings?”
“They drone at a certain fixed pitch. If I tune this string”- pluck, pluck -“to the same pitch, I know that the string, and the fly’s wings, are vibrating at the same frequency. I already know how to reckon the frequency of a string’s vibration-hence, I know how many times in a second a fly’s wings beat. Useful data if we are ever to build a flying-machine.”
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The “especially bass” was what did it for me.
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This morning my kids’ summer camp sent out an email update that the kids will all be issued uniforms this summer, with outrageous prices for the uniforms (warm weather uniform: $169.99 EACH), and inspired by old-school English boarding school outfits. The warm weather uniform is a black gown, for instance. Anyhoo, I gradually realized this was April Fools, luckily before I cancelled camp for the year.
All that to say, my guard is up when I see things like this. Although it has the ring of truthiness, which makes it especially good.
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You need to factor in the effects of MDMA and alcohol into your model…
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Skrillex song messes up mosquitos’ attacks and mating
Same.
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Barry White on the other hand…
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I want to go to that summer camp.
Possibly explains the lack of mosquitoes in general in BRC
It’s a really good camp. My kids had a lot of fun there last year.
I guess the fact that today is april 1 makes a lot of people think a bit harder about the legitimacy of a story, right?
So, would that mean that less fake news is being spread today as people are more sceptical?
Just wondering…
Well, I don’t know about mosquitoes but when I clicked the link to listen to it, the dog freaked out and ran over from the other end of the house to bark at me until I turned it off.
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Aedes aegypti is a scary sprite.
My skepticism is switched on 24/7.
(FYI: I was so close to using Skeptic-owl as my handle. So close.)
Great. Encouragement to all the jabonies who hike with their phones blaring music.
