• hperrin@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    You can’t fact check something that doesn’t provide any of its work. Where did they get those numbers from? What equations did they use, and do they actually apply to this situation? Is the owl flying through a vacuum, through air, through honey? In reality, it would be flying through air, but we have no idea what the equation says it’s flying through, or even if it is flying. Maybe the equation is for cars traveling on a road.

    Since it’s non-falsifiable, you can just disregard it. Claims require evidence, not assertions.

    • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 days ago

      The problem is not just that the numbers are made up, they are in the wrong units. Watts is not a unit of energy.

      It’s like saying; a cow wants to eat an apple. Each apple weighs five liters. Therefore the cow would need a mouth 2 kg across. It would take the cow seven metres to eat the apple.

    • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      For starters, the average owl doesn’t weigh 16 pounds, that’s immediately proven false with a simple Google search. The smallest is an ounce, the largest just over 9 pounds.

      On top of that, I can’t find any species that migrates from Europe to America…

      So false from the jump.

    • snowe@programming.dev
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      3 days ago

      It is falsifiable, just from a basic bird standpoint. Energy usage and flight speed is listed on allaboutbirds.org and you can calculate the rest just from knowing how birds work (for one, owls don’t really migrate at all, though there are of course exceptions with everything in bird world).

      • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        3 days ago

        But you don’t know if the equation they used was for if the owl is swimming through the deep ocean. That would take a lot of calories.