Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2022 March 2

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March 2

Parrots picking people's teeth clean?

I just saw a Youtube video on my recommendations today and it reminded me about this. For some reason, pet parrots will sometimes stick their heads into their owners' mouths and pick the food from between their teeth. It seems to happen enough that if you google it, there are warnings about why letting them do this is a bad idea (human mouths are full of bacteria that can kill birds - same as cats, mainly) - and people do let them do it. I used to have a cockatiel that tried to do it with me, FWIW. Just got me thinking - is there some sort of wild behavior here that compels them to do this? Because voluntarily sticking one's head into the mouth of a carnivore seems like a fairly bad idea for anyone or anything. There are also several vids of parrots pulling out childrens' loose teeth (having being allowed to climb into their mouths), believe it or not. --Iloveparrots (talk) 00:01, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Such behavior in parrots is likely a manifestation of their normal social grooming behavior that they exhibit towards members of their own species in the wild. This page here mentions that parrots in the wild groom other parrots. This grooming behavior is called "preening", and parrots will self-preen and also will preen other parrots (called "allopreening"). This page here describes the behavior as a form of bonding behavior, and birds in pair-bonds will preen eachother's beaks, for example. Apparently, parrots will do this with their human companions as well. --Jayron32 00:12, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

That seems reasonable, though consider also this for a not mutually exclusive alternate hypothesis. Food is food, after all. Matt Deres (talk) 03:53, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Are there any non-insane price globes with less relative error than cheap 12" Replogles?

Meridians misaligned by up to ~20 milliradians at the equatorial tape, even the number isn't consistent. The originally flat 30° gores are printed to more precision than can be squished onto a globe, leading to odd things like a line looking like _- at one part of a cut and another line looking like -_ at another part of the same cut. Are the globes that are somehow printed directly on ≥12" plastic balls better? Any other options? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 06:38, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Are we really here to be your personal shopper? Presumably, you have access to things like Google and Amazon and are capable of finding products and reading reviews of them? --Jayron32 11:57, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

I did Google it before asking and it is very hard to find this information. Just loads of pages that say a globe is more accurate than a map. And most globe users wouldn't care if the curvature is visibly irregular (like some globes, especially beach balls, which have crap printing too, the one I had as a kid) or the hemispheres or longitudinal strips don't line up by 2 millimeters on a 12 inch globe so there's always a chance a globe could be like this without one single review of it mentioning. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:39, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps this review https://travelislife.org/who-makes-the-best-world-globes/ will help. Digging in to these, I spotted a misalignment even in one of the more expensive brands. So.. --Modocc (talk) 20:04, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

However there's a perfectionist who makes a living spending hundreds and hundreds of man-hours per globe going back and forth between looking at Google Satellite, Google Maps, geologic maps, elevation maps, air maps, star maps, sea maps, planet maps or anything else you want, painstakingly checking coordinates and painting what you want on a giant coordinates ball by hand. Some of the best globes ever made but costs more than some new cars. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:41, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

See You get what you pay for. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:22, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

I would recommend gemstone globes like this one. They may not be absolutely precise geographically but make up for that by their attractive design. I own several globes like this. Mike Turnbull (talk) 00:13, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

That's obviously a joke/trolling, considering that the OP is after precision. Bumptump (talk) 01:33, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

In principle, it is possible to bypass the gore details being squished and instead print directly on the globe, as on this night light globe. (The globe may even talk back to you.) It should be possible to attain a high precision this way, but I do not know if any globe manufacturers use such methods for making quality globes.  --Lambiam 10:08, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Billed as "The World’s Finest Globes", National Geographic is mid-priced and considered an academic standard (or is at least a common classroom fixture). 2603:6081:1C00:1187:3C7A:9601:8A34:9AA5 (talk) 19:20, 3 March 2022 (UTC) . . . Hmmm, their site states: We can't find products matching the selection.

"Just loads of pages that say a globe is more accurate than a map." A globe IS a map. But yes, it does avoid all of the distortions that all flat maps have some of. Hayttom (talk) 18:12, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

It's a bit analogous to someone at the dawn of quartz watches who knew that watches were more accurate than wrist sundials since a very young age, and wants a not too expensive watch better than the error numbers he's getting from his cheap wind-up so he searches the 1970 equivalent of Google for accurate watches and sees: a new car-price quartz he'd get if he shat gold (in real life a 1970s Google would probably show multiple mid-price watches bragging about accuracy numbers better than what cheap wind-up users get but I found no numbers or mentions of misalignment Googling for globes), ad money whores who write 10 Best Watches For <Current Year>-type articles with no mention of misalignment or error numbers, and sellers who are clearly marketing to idiots cause they're mentioning watches/globes being more accurate than wrist sundials/flat maps and persons who don't mind a meridian jerking 3mm at the equator tape (like —||_)/a watch losing 5 minutes in a week cause they're not mentioning misalignment (watch drift) at all much less any numbers. Those kinds of Google hits aren't helpful. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:22, 6 March 2022 (UTC)