19 ms·

Please, enough with the dead butterflies (2017)

614 points by andrelaszlo 5y ago

mkl 5y ago
(2017) but important enough to revisit. After seeing this article the first time, I can't help but see dead butterflies everywhere. Previous discussions: 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 164 comments 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 28 comments
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dalbasal 5y ago
One of those "once you see it" articles. It's a good example of art imitating art. On screen depictions of ER doctors zapping patients back to life with a defibrillator. Adrenaline shots to the heart. Gently putting bad guys to sleep with a concussive blow to the head. Artists' dramatic depictions become cliche, and cliche becomes our norm. Good to stop and ponder, on occasion, how much of our worldview is shaped by such fallacies.
- yourenotsmart 5y ago
  This probably disproves the hypothesis that consciousness shapes reality, because if it did, the millions of brainwashed people watching movies would have turned the reality into a set of movie tropes.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
    Why can't they have subtle impacts?
    - yourenotsmart 5y ago
      Subtle impact is always a given as people affecting their own understanding affects their actions, and their actions shape the reality around them.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    Not sure I understand what you're trying to say here. Do you agree people are influenced by movies or not? I think we all immitate and there's very little, if any, truly original... thoughts/behaviours
    - sethammons 5y ago
      I take their meaning as a poke at those who believe that "if you will it, it will be." There were some who believe(d) if you gathered a stadium of people and told them all to think about the candle in the center of the stadium self-igniting that through the power of shared belief it would. If this were true, then, to op's point, a bunch of reality would be changing to match people's mental expectations as influenced through media tropes. And since we don't see that, then people's thoughts likely don't influence reality.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  There's all sorts of interesting and sometimes subtle negative impacts on the real world that inaccurate depictions in fiction have. I think these mainly happen for situations people are likely to only see in fiction rather than reality. A mundane example is people turning up to court and behaving incorrectly because they're used to Hollywood depictions. Another one is people thinking someone using a command-line on a computer must be “hacking”. More troublesome is dramatically unrealistic depictions of minorities.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Sure. Also, porn, romance novels, high school social life, prison, mafia, war, psychotherapy... The world is full of examples where literary cliches have more influence on our biases and expectations than first or second hand experiences. We rarely observe other people falling in love, but we see it in movies and stories all the time. Hence why this article is subtly brilliant. It reminds us how much of our "knowledge" is actually fiction.
    - dmix 5y ago
      A big one is 30+ year olds writing the screenplays and therefore dialogue of kids and teenagers which are always precocious and seem adult like. Which young people think they should be at a similar stage of development or imitate them.
      - ambicapter 5y ago
        Or they think that what they're saying and thinking will come out similar to how it came out on the tv show...
      - bsder 5y ago
        I find the whole 25 year old playing a 15 year old more problematic. Especially for girls, this gives a tremendously powerful incorrect body image signal. However, even for guys, it's starting to get ridiculous--the actors always have their shirt off, are completely cut and have <5% bodyfat. The only boys who look like that at 15 are short, currently miserable as hell and cutting weight for a tournament (and probably on steroids, to boot).
- dTal 5y ago
  I'm slowly coming to the highly unpopular view that all fiction is essentially a lie, and therefore damaging. Your brain does not distinguish meaningfully between truth and fiction, at an emotional level. Yes, you can tell stories that capture some sort of essential truth - but writers don't typically hold themselves terribly closely to that standard, and in any case the time is better spent telling of things that actually happened. Every mutilation applied to actual events - in the service of making them supposedly more entertaining - clouds our understanding of them. And it's done on purpose! Inglourious Basterds is an abomination, a deliberate cognitohazard.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Well... If you also come around to the view that most nonfiction is fiction too... you might find yourself in a pretty nihilistic place. Those depictions of butterflies are intended to be nonfiction.. naturalism. A precise and true representation of butterflies, an artistic culture that people like Darwin were steeped in.
    - pixl97 5y ago
      I was going to reply something similar. We dont have access to much thermodynamic truth and the vast majority of our experience is fictionalised in one way or another when it is later described.
      - eru 5y ago
        That's a good reason why archaeologists are so keen on digging in garbage. Garbage doesn't lie as much as the written word. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden
        dalbasal 5y ago
        The garbage itself may not lie, but the process of turning garbage into history is still storytelling. It's very hard to escape. Most anything meaningful, to us, is a story. A fully empirical/popperian approach to knowledge isn't workable. Or rather, it's extremely sparse. You have to accept that you know almost nothing.
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  I like the phrase "art imitating art", but it's broader than that. For example people with no interest in antique, Greece or Sparta are fans of Spartans. In reality, Sparta was a North Korea of the antique world, AND it had profoundly average combat performance. No matter how you slice it, they were completely average as far as won battles go! https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/ https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... If you filter out naval battles, it doesn't change anything. If you remove battles where they fought in a coalition with other Greeks, their win rate even drops slightly. There is some evidence they may have had a slight advantage in leadership, because they had more leaders and their units were a bit smaller so they could perhaps operate more independently and seize opportunities on a field of battle (a strategy perfected by Romans). But overall, their strategy was bad even by antique standards - check out the Peloponesian War (with Athens). Spartans just had a good PR. Dead butterflies is a meme (in the old meaning of viral idea). Spartan military excellence is a meme too.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    I'd say the spartan meme is also an example of art imitating art. Other greeks, and later Romans started this meme. They admired Sparta's dedication to conservative fanaticism, romanticized it and told stories about them. We still tell the stories, based on older stories based on older stories. Meanwhile, we have very little direct access to "reality." In fact, unmediated reality is pretty elusive.. when you stop to think about it. Win rate statistics and other such "objective" views into reality are a pretty sparse source of information.
  - kleton 5y ago
    Some criticism of Acoup's analysis of their combat performance. All of the defeats listed are either not infantry battles or ones where Sparta was heavily outnumbered. It's hardly surprising that they would lose battles over 500 v 1000, and no contemporary commentators claimed that man for man they were that much better than their peer poleis. If you did a "wins above replacement" analysis for pitched infantry battles, they would come out ahead, at least until the Battle of Tegyra (375), when Boeotians had figured out an effective infantry doctrine after years fighting Sparta. Plutarch on the Theban victory over Sparta at Leuctra (371). >For in all the great wars there had ever been against Greeks or barbarians, the Spartans were never before beaten by a smaller company than their own; nor, indeed, in a set battle, when their number was equal. Hence their courage was thought irresistible, and their high repute before the battle made a conquest already of enemies, who thought themselves no match for the men of Sparta even on equal terms. That battle wiped out the Spartiate class for a generation, killing 400 out of 700. This opened the way for Thebes to liberate Messenia in 370, which was the majority of the Lakonian helots, and it was all downhill for Sparta after that.
- ronenlh 5y ago
  “live butterflies don’t look like butterflies in pictures, you gotta use dead ones” is like in the Simpsons: “Cow's don't look like cows on film. You gotta use horses.”
- Consultant32452 5y ago
  I’m not interested in a 2A debate but I find it really interesting how much public misunderstanding about firearms and firearms law comes from movies. One of the biggest is the concept of the “unregistered firearm” used in a crime. There is no firearm registry in the US, so all firearms are unregistered. However, the fact that this is prolific in crime movies leads many to believe such a registry exists. Another is the “Hollywood silencer.” Guns fired with a suppressor/silencer are still quite loud, but movies have people thinking you can have a shootout in a mall and no one will notice.
  - nacs 5y ago
    > Guns fired with a suppressor/silencer are still quite loud A great example of this is the scene from John Wick where Wick and a villain are in a crowd firing at each other with noone noticing. There is a video with the gun sounds recreated to be more realistic: https://youtu.be/ws8LAfD_3BA?t=13 https://youtu.be/ws8LAfD_3BA?t=13
  - neolog 5y ago
    TIL > Only those firearms subject to the National Firearms Act (NFA) (e.g., machineguns, short–barreled rifles and shotguns, silencers, destructive devices, and firearms designated as “any other weapons”) must be registered with ATF. > Firearms registration may be required by state or local law. Any person considering acquiring a firearm should contact their State Attorney General’s Office to inquire about the laws and possible state or local restrictions. https://www.atf.gov/questions-and-answers/qa/how-does-person-register-firearm-or-remove-name-firearms-registration https://www.atf.gov/questions-and-answers/qa/how-does-person...
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - Consultant32452 5y ago
      Here's a weird one about the NFA and "silencers." As previously mentioned, it's still pretty loud when you use one. In the US it's very restrictive to own one ($200 tax, 6+ month wait, registration, etc.) but in places like the UK it's the opposite. You're a noise polluter without one and relatively very simple to get even though in UK it's harder to get guns.
- mushbino 5y ago
  I just finished the book Fantasyland by Kurt Anderson. Much of our reality and especially our worldview is constructed and bears no resemblance to reality.
- deleted 5y ago
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- r3trohack3r 5y ago
  I’ve always wondered how much our social interaction is defined by on-screen portrayals of social interactions. Actors are doing their best to portray how humans behave, but some subset of humans observe a large portion of what “normal” behavior is through a screen. At some point, did humans begin imitating the actors to a large degree, while the actors continued imitating the humans? In other words, did art begin imitating art? This thought was brought on by watching old movies. Either actors were much worse back then, or people behaved differently, or both. And to what degree did those actors shape today’s behavior?
  - MikeSchurman 5y ago
    Although I have no evidence to back this up, I believe many try to imitate film (or expect something) in their romantic life, which ends up with them having bad expectations and disappointment.
  - b0rsuk 5y ago
    One of my pet grievances is how love is portrayed. If you were to believe movies, you can get ANY woman if you're persistent enough. Then poor young boys and men set out in the world showering someone else in gifts and attention. Girls with narcissistic tendencies become more, more and more narcissistic and entitled. Another very damaging myth is that kung fu will save you from muggers. Muggers may have no objections to stabbing you, and if they attack they often attack from surprise. Or really, that a fight looks anything like in a martial arts movie. Go watch a fight in a Karate or Judo championship. It's quite boring, contestants are quite evenly matched and move with respect to each other.
    - MagnumOpus 5y ago
      High level karate or judo (or boxing or MMA or Muay Thai) championships are usually only tactical and boring because they are evenly matched. They would all whip a „casual“ experienced martial artist within half a minute in a movie-like fashion, who in turn will be able to do that to the man on the street. (Source: been there, done that, sparred and competed both against world class olympic martial artists as well as complete beginners.)
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  I think this is actually art imitating science, but that's a quibble. As for the rest, I heartily agree. I've been thinking about that here lately, how we watch movie fights and they are typically highly choreographed and often visually beautiful forms of dance that likely have nothing at all to do with what real violence looks like. Not that I want to promote real violence, but I wonder what impact that has on human psychology and how unrealistic it makes some of our expectations when dealing with actual reality when it fails to match up to what we have fed our brains via various forms of media.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Fair point. However... I have an illustrates copy of "Origin of Species," with Darwin's original drawings. It's quite beautiful. Naturalists of the day used a style of drawing. It was utilitarian, good for identification purposes. But, it's almost impossible not to see it as an artistic tradition too. Point taken though. This style originates in science, and they had reasons for their style.
- sneak 5y ago
  In movies, the phone would revert immediately back to a dial tone when the other party hung up. That's not how any phones ever worked even back when they used dial tones.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Hackers typing out ... well, anything. Or the worst of all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    Lolol. I was hoping for NCSI's "we must hack faster... TWO people on the same keyboard"
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      It's a UNIX system! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng
marvin 5y ago
I coincidentally discovered a similar situation yesterday, when attempting to identify a dazed hornet. Comparing it to specimen photos of presumably dead hornets, it was very hard to match them, as they had their wings and body arranged in a different way.
- throwanem 5y ago
  Don't try to use the wings for identification beyond color and opacity; the way they're typically depicted in illustration and mounted specimens is a way in which the living animal only holds them while flying, when you can't see them clearly anyway. They're mounted that way because the venation can be diagnostic, but you won't be close enough for long enough, and a live wasp won't hold still enough - even I never get anything useful there, and I shoot wild wasps in 1:1 macro every chance I get. The only even marginally plausible bare-eye feature of the wing, beyond aforementioned color and infuscation, is the presence or absence of pterostigmata, and that alone isn't terribly useful. In general, for bare-eye identification you want to look at size, general conformation (eg Vespinae have a generally more robust build and a markedly blunt postpropodeal gaster vs Polistinae and solitaries, while sawflies don't have a "wasp waist" abdominal petiole at all), body and leg markings, and in some cases proportions of facial features, although that's often more useful in identifying a family or a genus than a species. With a living, active animal, many features can be hard to spot, so knowledge of locally common species is also useful in guiding identification, as is behavior - the four-toothed mason wasps that build nest cells in my porch stair rails look at a glance a lot like bald-faced yellowjackets, but behave totally differently, which can be enough to distinguish even without a chance at a close look. If you have photos or even just an accurate description and still want a specific (from photos) or at least familial ID, I might be able to give you one from them; I'm only an interested amateur and not as familiar with true hornets since there are few to be found in the Nearctic, but I've been an interested amateur for long enough to be both well supplied with references and reasonably practiced at identification. Feel free to email me at any of the addresses in my profile, or just reply here, and I'll be happy to take a look. Failing that, if you do have photos, BugGuide and iNaturalist are good options for identification, although my experience with the latter suggests difficult IDs aren't likely to find much traction there - that might, as some have argued, be an effect of the platform's gamification, but I think it may be more just that hymenopterologists are likely no more common there than elsewhere.
montenegrohugo 5y ago
This is absolutely hilarious and illuminating at the same time. Don't think I'll be able to look at butterfly pictures without remembering this article. It's also a great example of what I'd consider good HN content. Not necessarily useful or anything, but it certainly tickled my curiosity.
- giantg2 5y ago
  It could be useful for UX/UI folks who have input about content. Or imagine making a pitch (involving nature or tailored to nature) to a conservation agency where someone might have this knowledge and having a picture of a dead butterfly. That might be awkward.
  - eru 5y ago
    Those are plausible, but pretty niche situations.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Yeah, but the niche articles are usually the most interesting. Just look at all the AI/ML/Quantum posts on HN, not to mention the posts that deal with some unusual bug. It's a very low chance that most people will deal with these, yet people still read them for the information.
      - eru 5y ago
        Oh, definitely. But I think how interesting those are doesn't depend on those niches existing, it's an independent quality.
- daveFNbuck 5y ago
  I thought I'd remember this forever when I first read it years ago too. When I saw the headline on HN today, I couldn't remember what was unnatural about how we depict butterflies.
- Graffur 5y ago
steverob 5y ago
The best Sunday content, I'd say.
Hnl1kf 5y ago
Counter-example that I took: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25949441@N02/9377845729/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/25949441@N02/9377845729/ But yeah, I expect I’ll be seeing dead butterflies everywhere now.
- LostJourneyman 5y ago
  That's a counter example in the same way that someone responding to "Stop depicting all humans as spread eagle with their hands over their head, they don't naturally stand like that!" with a picture of a basketball player's arms straight up would be a counter-example. Most lepidopterans are capable of that pose especially in active flight, but it's still unnatural.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    I wouldn't call it unnatural; a landing butterfly may well flap for extra lift, the same way a bird does, in order to make a precise and controlled landing. (Hence incidentally the name "flaps" for the trailing-edge extra lift devices that serve the same purpose, in the same regimes of flight, for a rigid-winged aircraft.) The larger point still stands that butterflies don't hold their wings this way at rest, and it's true of hymenopterans as well; you often see specimen wasps mounted with all four wings fully spread, where the living animal at rest invariably holds the rear wings against the front such that only the latter are really visible. The only time this isn't the case is in flight or when the wings are otherwise in use (eg nest fanning on a hot day), but you need a very fast shutter to freeze that motion, and all you'll see with your bare eye is a blur.
- vidarh 5y ago
  This is addressed in the comments to the article. Basically: Some might get their wings into unusual position mid-flight, but the angle of the photo also plays in a great deal - the depicting addressed in the article is from directly above.
  - Graffur 5y ago
    So what is wrong with drawing butterflies with this wing position? Nothing! It's possible and looks good.
sqqqqrly 5y ago
What would Buffalo Bill think?
- optimalsolver 5y ago
  More lotion.
peanut_worm 5y ago
Great now I am going to be checking every picture of butterflies that I see
hkopp 5y ago
A nice example of Baudrillard's hyperreality. Reality and its representation blend together, so it is unclear where one ends and the other begins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
- chillingeffect 5y ago
  this has been popping up a lot in the last 5-10 years (mass media creation ) and especially since Covid - fewer people are outside experiencing reality. Also recent political campaigns have been evidence of it. It would really be beneficial for everyone to at least try to grasp some of Baudrillard's concepts in order to make sense of next 10 or more years.
giantg2 5y ago
I thought this was going to be about the decline in the numbers and diversity of butterflies. Good article though.
Cybotron5000 5y ago
I tried last year to model/animate a butterfly for something I was working on/to learn how to use Blender - found this video as a reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7a7ZAqWBIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7a7ZAqWBIs …also this previous HN post about butterfly flight is very interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928796 …+ quite a few previous articles on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=butterfly+wings https://hn.algolia.com/?q=butterfly+wings …awesome bugs that they are! :)
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eplanit 5y ago
There was a similar article regarding ants a couple or more years ago, also featured on HN. Same author, I wonder?
oliwarner 5y ago
Yeah, fair enough. One of those posts where you see an argumentative title, get ready to fight it with your lifetime of experience, before realising that maybe the butterfly expert knows best. Quite interesting how so many people have got it wrong all this time.
empiricus 5y ago
Let's not forget about how butterfly flight is represented in almost all animation movies or games. So fake. Spend so much computation budget for realistic materials and lighting, and then fail so hard on this. For comparison check some real butterflies if you can, or some slow motion movies on youtube to see how it should look.
mattmaroon 5y ago
I thought this was going to be something like "please stop killing them just because they're pretty" and was disappointed.
- Mary-Jane 5y ago
  I was expecting the same, so I was surprised when it wasn't. Why would you be disappointed?
  - mattmaroon 5y ago
    Because I would hope people would not think it's ok to kill an animal because it's pretty. This article is totally fine with that, just wants you to shape the wings like it's alive when you draw them.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Do people still do that in any significant number?
franze 5y ago
"" <- Butterfly Emoji (stripped by HN comment system) is dead, too. Time to file a change request, where?
- enkid 5y ago
  Seems to be a common problem. [0] (Skype's is even actively flapping it's wings) You can put in a request for a new emoji, but I don't see a way to update an existing emoji.[1] Each platform has it own emoji implementation, therefore should have a way to request changes through customer support. [0] https://emojipedia.org/butterfly/ https://emojipedia.org/butterfly/ [1] https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html
  - ant6n 5y ago
    I think the request would be to HN to not filter this emoji out. Maybe they could at least allow the text version?
alisonkisk 5y ago
Dead butterflies look better. Live butterflies look like moths.
- eru 5y ago
  There's not much difference between the two, is there?
  - throwanem 5y ago
    I don't know what characters even a Linnaean taxonomist would use to distinguish the two; my specialization is in hymenopterans, and I'm just an autodidact amateur anyway. Intuitively, though, I would assume a butterfly to be strikingly colored and a moth to be strikingly pubescent.
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      You get very colourful moths too, [poplar] hawk moths (UK) are large and well coloured; some butterflies and fritillaries are dull hues. I've never noticed moths to be particularly downy though? Wing position and form is how I'd differentiate them. Moths have a delta form at rest and don't close their wings together vertically?
      - throwanem 5y ago
        Well, that's the thing about morphological taxonomy, yeah - it's possible to construct any number of axes of distinction, none of which is really guaranteed to correspond to anything in terms of descent or relatedness. That said, wing posture is imo a better intuition than mine, not least in that you actually can most easily tell dragonflies from damselflies by eye this way - the former hold their wings spread laterally at rest, while the latter fold them along their abdomen. I'm sure there are exceptions in both families, but as a general field rule it does work. Looking at sources, the current state of play appears to be that butterflies are (mostly) (sorta) monophyletic in Papilionoidea, and moths are paraphyletic in "Lepidoptera except Papilionoidea", but it's all rather messy and nobody's all that sure. This isn't as unusual as it might sound, actually. You see much the same in Hymenoptera, for example - large insect families just aren't all that comprehensively studied in the first place, not least because many of their members can be quite hard to find, and what prior taxonomic work there was has been undergoing pretty radical revision since the advent of (relatively) inexpensive genomics and the consequent feasibility of molecular taxonomy.
executesorder66 5y ago
> There are exceptions, of course. It seems that some of the smaller butterflies may exhibit wing positions fairly close to that of a dead, pinned specimen I've actually seen some really large butterflies that look pretty much like the "pinned wings dead butterfly" when it flies. I tried to film it, but couldn't get a good shot. I found this article interesting when it came out, but after seeing living butterflies that look exactly like it says they shouldn't, I'm not going to spread the idea that all these butterfly images are wrong. I have seen thousands of butterflies in my life, and yes, most of them have their forewings much further back. Not that I ever paid too close attention, even after reading this article for the first time. It was just a striking image when I saw these huge butterflies on holiday in December 2019, and they looked like a stereotypical animated movie aesthetic butterflies with the "wrong" wings, and I thought it was amusing.
- BadOakOx 5y ago
  I was just thinking about this. All the photos the author uses are of butterflies resting. Thanks for confirming my intuition that while butterflies fly they spread their wings.
  - kadoban 5y ago
    They do spread their wings in flight, but the few photos/vids I bothered to find it's still quite distinct from the classical pinned position (in terms of the angles fore/aft more than anything). I'm sure it's a _possible_ position in which to find many species, but it seems like at best a rare one.
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      Part of it is that mostly I've seen, in person, butterflies in flight - they rarely alight on a plant close enough to inspect in detail and in flight they do appear to flap like a book opening and closing; one doesn't really see the pitch changes of the wing, it looks like a simple motion. I've got some pictures of red admirals (it painted ladies, not sure) resting in "dead" pose on brambles somewhere that I took only because I'd seen this article.
earlyriser 5y ago
This is an example of non-dead butterflies (even if the painting is about death) https://www.carolinegaudreault.com/fr/oeuvres/sanctuaire/ https://www.carolinegaudreault.com/fr/oeuvres/sanctuaire/ Disclaimer: my partner painted it.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Hugged to death. I look forward to reading it, once it comes up for air.
- netsec_burn 5y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20210725100120/https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210725100120/https://www.emily...
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Igelau 5y ago
It's one thing if the butterflies are depicted in contexts suggesting they're supposed to be alive. For some of these (like the pillow) its obviously just a decorative motif. Dead butterflies are pretty. So are cut flowers, mounted antlers, wood, and scrimshaw.
djmips 5y ago
How many people knew this already and just assumed it was common knowledge that butterflies are draw cartoon like. I mean a lot of illustrated bugs and animals and plants are stylized and look very little like the real thing. Look at cartoon bears for example.
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crazydoggers 5y ago
Hmmmm… you mean exactly like this very much non-dead butterfly? I have a feeling the author hasn’t actually spent that much time observing butterflies. https://ibb.co/YQxprkg https://ibb.co/YQxprkg https://ibb.co/S33vvYs https://ibb.co/S33vvYs https://ibb.co/6gJDxTR https://ibb.co/6gJDxTR Edit: To be more specific. Most butterflies hold their wings in this position at rest. Illustrated in 2D it looks “dead” Moths do happen to hold their wings flat and if you look at field guides are usually illustrated this way. People who actually spend time observing butterflies would directly contradict the author’s assertion.
- crazydoggers 5y ago
  And… immediately downvoted for sharing direct evidence that contradicts the narrative here. The reason field guides show butterflies this way is because that’s how you usually see them. Butterflies hold their wings up most of the time, not flat as the author suggests. So when illustrated in 2D you see the wings looking “dead”. Or you know… all the scientists and naturalists are just wrong and this artist is right. Edit: The reason this article is troublesome is because it’s another case of spreading misinformation. If I were going to post a long article about butterfly physiology (which is basically what this purports to be) I would first do research. I’d take the hypotheses “butterflies are illustrated wrong” and see where the current data stands. If I found the data wanting, I’d at least couch the argument along the lines of “the current data is u unconvincing, so here’s my theory” Instead the author cherry picked images that support her narrative, and failed to do any research on the subject, going so far as to say “In field guides and other butterfly reference materials, one frequently sees images of such pinned butterflies because, I presume, it is easy to photograph a dead butterfly” when actually the images have been drawn from live butterflies. She then states this whole thing as fact rather than what it is, her conjecture (which when put to scrutiny can be shown false) Now this is a simple article about butterflies, so isn’t really a big deal. The problem lies when this same behavior and thinking deals with subjects that are especially important like climate change, vaccines, etc. This is where misinformation starts. In this case Facebook, Twitter, etc could amplify “butterflies are illustrated wrong” just like they amplify “vaccines are bad” and “climate change isn’t real”.
- Graffur 5y ago
Graffur 5y ago
I don't get it - the Eastern Tailed blue butterfly looks like the "dead" butterfly but it's not dead. This invalidates the authors argument completely.
- lyaa 5y ago
  No, the author mentions that there are exception and the argument stands. The most commonly illustrated butterflies, such as the viceroy definitely look dead in illustrations.
  - Graffur 5y ago
    I don't see how it stands. You're like "HA HA pictures of butterflies are actually DEAD butterflies" but all I have to do is point to a real live butterfly that looks like the picture.
kbutler 5y ago
It's the equivalent of T-posing humans everywhere. Not a relaxed posture reflective of nature, but does allow more visibility and analysis. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man
brobeanz 5y ago
I agree. Butterflies are pests that must go
dstanko 5y ago
Interesting... I have seen (more precisely noticed) maybe 2-3 butterflies in last couple of years. I am pretty sure that none of those times I had a hi res slow motion camera. Certainly, those butterflies looked different than preserved dead ones I saw in illustrations. Point is that a non-butterfly expert that does not spend their life researching would only relate to depictions of butterflies, not their true form. I also find this very similar to old photos where people looked stiff and lifeless. As photography became more mobile and accessible, photos became more lifelike.
efitz 5y ago
I used to race sailboats. It annoys the heck out of me when drawn depictions of sailboats have the sails on backwards (such as the spinnaker on the rear) or have the wind filling the sails from an impossible direction. It’s clear that artists often don’t understand their subjects.
soheil 5y ago
But what difference does it make? It seems to me the cross sectional area in the photo is larger if the wings are more spread out as in the case with dead butterflies so you end up seeing more of the beautiful wing patterns. What's the point of hiding a portion of that? After all we kill flowers all the time so that our dining tables look slightly more beautiful. There is something morbid about dead butterflies looking better than alive ones, but I don't think you should put all that on "artists" as much as it being a rather unfortunate artifact of the way nature designed it.
robbrown451 5y ago
I am very happy that the children's hobby of collecting butterflies seems to have nearly disappeared. When I was a kid, other kids had butterfly collection kits that included a "killing jar." It struck me as a bit morbid at the time, but it was common so no big deal. Even if the species isn't endangered or anything, isn't that kind of messed up? Not a great way for a kid to learn empathy. My seven year old enjoyed taking close up photos of butterflies a couple days ago using my phone. All the while saying sweet things to them, treating them as friends that she didn't want to frighten. She'd be offended with the idea of catching them to kill them and stick a pin in them to then admire their beauty in all its deadness.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Kids don’t collect butterflies so much anymore because (a) most people live in more urbanized places than 50+ years ago and kids spend more time indoors or in structured activities, and (b) there are a lot fewer butterflies around, as they die to insecticides, habitat loss, and climate change. Edit: A web search turns up that butterfly populations have declined by more than 30% in Europe/USA in the past 25 years or so, and were in decline for long before that. One estimate is that they have declined by more than 80% in Western Europe since the late 19th century, with many species disappearing entirely.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Easily capturing images of butterflies (or just downloading them) probably is a factor, that wasn't really possible with cameras children had access to 30y ago. Raising butterflies is quite a common class project in UK primary schools.
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    We live in the middle of a city (San Francisco) and there are lots of butterflies around. There may be less, but I stand by my theory that the main difference is that killing bugs as a hobby is not seen the same way as it used to be.
- slumdev 5y ago
darekkay 5y ago
Related posts, where experts rate the accuracy of emojis: - Entomologist rates ant emojis: https://www.boredpanda.com/entomologist-rates-ant-emojis/ https://www.boredpanda.com/entomologist-rates-ant-emojis/ - Which emoji scissors close: https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html - A thread of rating every horse emoji: https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832 https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832 - Ranking the "Ringed Planet" emojis: https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817 https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817 - Reviewing Steam Loco Emojis: https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790 https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790 - Talk about Telescope emojis: https://mobile.twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607819267 https://mobile.twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607... - Would you survive a skydive with an emoji parachute? (my own post): https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/ https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/
ufo 5y ago
One funny example of this is that thyroids are described as being butterfly shaped. Maybe endrocrinologists need to talk more with the entomologists. :)
pvaldes 5y ago
Scientific illustration is different than abstract art or cubism or expressionism and has its own rules people. Deal with it. And by the way, yes, some people like it. But the biggest problem with the article is that even when lots of people blindly assume that is right, the main idea is wrong. It happens often when people try to use their philosophical ideas to explain nature. Yes, butterflies can spread their wings. If you try to force the wing opened in a impossible position it just will break. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NguiKUyP9r4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NguiKUyP9r4
JasonFruit 5y ago
I'd file this article under, "You're enjoying this wrong!" It's just saying that we should stop enjoying a particular representation of butterflies that is less generally lifelike than what the author would prefer. There's nothing wrong with saying that sort of thing, but it's not a particularly interesting assertion, and it's not a very important problem. (And if you liked the article, you're probably enjoying articles wrong.)

614 points by andrelaszlo 5y ago

mkl 5y ago

(2017) but important enough to revisit. After seeing this article the first time, I can't help but see dead butterflies everywhere. Previous discussions: 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 164 comments 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 28 comments

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dalbasal 5y ago

One of those "once you see it" articles. It's a good example of art imitating art. On screen depictions of ER doctors zapping patients back to life with a defibrillator. Adrenaline shots to the heart. Gently putting bad guys to sleep with a concussive blow to the head. Artists' dramatic depictions become cliche, and cliche becomes our norm. Good to stop and ponder, on occasion, how much of our worldview is shaped by such fallacies.

yourenotsmart 5y ago
This probably disproves the hypothesis that consciousness shapes reality, because if it did, the millions of brainwashed people watching movies would have turned the reality into a set of movie tropes.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  Why can't they have subtle impacts?
  - yourenotsmart 5y ago
    Subtle impact is always a given as people affecting their own understanding affects their actions, and their actions shape the reality around them.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Not sure I understand what you're trying to say here. Do you agree people are influenced by movies or not? I think we all immitate and there's very little, if any, truly original... thoughts/behaviours
  - sethammons 5y ago
    I take their meaning as a poke at those who believe that "if you will it, it will be." There were some who believe(d) if you gathered a stadium of people and told them all to think about the candle in the center of the stadium self-igniting that through the power of shared belief it would. If this were true, then, to op's point, a bunch of reality would be changing to match people's mental expectations as influenced through media tropes. And since we don't see that, then people's thoughts likely don't influence reality.
- deleted 5y ago
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TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
There's all sorts of interesting and sometimes subtle negative impacts on the real world that inaccurate depictions in fiction have. I think these mainly happen for situations people are likely to only see in fiction rather than reality. A mundane example is people turning up to court and behaving incorrectly because they're used to Hollywood depictions. Another one is people thinking someone using a command-line on a computer must be “hacking”. More troublesome is dramatically unrealistic depictions of minorities.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Sure. Also, porn, romance novels, high school social life, prison, mafia, war, psychotherapy... The world is full of examples where literary cliches have more influence on our biases and expectations than first or second hand experiences. We rarely observe other people falling in love, but we see it in movies and stories all the time. Hence why this article is subtly brilliant. It reminds us how much of our "knowledge" is actually fiction.
  - dmix 5y ago
    A big one is 30+ year olds writing the screenplays and therefore dialogue of kids and teenagers which are always precocious and seem adult like. Which young people think they should be at a similar stage of development or imitate them.
    - ambicapter 5y ago
      Or they think that what they're saying and thinking will come out similar to how it came out on the tv show...
    - bsder 5y ago
      I find the whole 25 year old playing a 15 year old more problematic. Especially for girls, this gives a tremendously powerful incorrect body image signal. However, even for guys, it's starting to get ridiculous--the actors always have their shirt off, are completely cut and have <5% bodyfat. The only boys who look like that at 15 are short, currently miserable as hell and cutting weight for a tournament (and probably on steroids, to boot).
dTal 5y ago
I'm slowly coming to the highly unpopular view that all fiction is essentially a lie, and therefore damaging. Your brain does not distinguish meaningfully between truth and fiction, at an emotional level. Yes, you can tell stories that capture some sort of essential truth - but writers don't typically hold themselves terribly closely to that standard, and in any case the time is better spent telling of things that actually happened. Every mutilation applied to actual events - in the service of making them supposedly more entertaining - clouds our understanding of them. And it's done on purpose! Inglourious Basterds is an abomination, a deliberate cognitohazard.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Well... If you also come around to the view that most nonfiction is fiction too... you might find yourself in a pretty nihilistic place. Those depictions of butterflies are intended to be nonfiction.. naturalism. A precise and true representation of butterflies, an artistic culture that people like Darwin were steeped in.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    I was going to reply something similar. We dont have access to much thermodynamic truth and the vast majority of our experience is fictionalised in one way or another when it is later described.
    - eru 5y ago
      That's a good reason why archaeologists are so keen on digging in garbage. Garbage doesn't lie as much as the written word. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden
      - dalbasal 5y ago
        The garbage itself may not lie, but the process of turning garbage into history is still storytelling. It's very hard to escape. Most anything meaningful, to us, is a story. A fully empirical/popperian approach to knowledge isn't workable. Or rather, it's extremely sparse. You have to accept that you know almost nothing.
b0rsuk 5y ago
I like the phrase "art imitating art", but it's broader than that. For example people with no interest in antique, Greece or Sparta are fans of Spartans. In reality, Sparta was a North Korea of the antique world, AND it had profoundly average combat performance. No matter how you slice it, they were completely average as far as won battles go! https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/ https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... If you filter out naval battles, it doesn't change anything. If you remove battles where they fought in a coalition with other Greeks, their win rate even drops slightly. There is some evidence they may have had a slight advantage in leadership, because they had more leaders and their units were a bit smaller so they could perhaps operate more independently and seize opportunities on a field of battle (a strategy perfected by Romans). But overall, their strategy was bad even by antique standards - check out the Peloponesian War (with Athens). Spartans just had a good PR. Dead butterflies is a meme (in the old meaning of viral idea). Spartan military excellence is a meme too.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  I'd say the spartan meme is also an example of art imitating art. Other greeks, and later Romans started this meme. They admired Sparta's dedication to conservative fanaticism, romanticized it and told stories about them. We still tell the stories, based on older stories based on older stories. Meanwhile, we have very little direct access to "reality." In fact, unmediated reality is pretty elusive.. when you stop to think about it. Win rate statistics and other such "objective" views into reality are a pretty sparse source of information.
- kleton 5y ago
  Some criticism of Acoup's analysis of their combat performance. All of the defeats listed are either not infantry battles or ones where Sparta was heavily outnumbered. It's hardly surprising that they would lose battles over 500 v 1000, and no contemporary commentators claimed that man for man they were that much better than their peer poleis. If you did a "wins above replacement" analysis for pitched infantry battles, they would come out ahead, at least until the Battle of Tegyra (375), when Boeotians had figured out an effective infantry doctrine after years fighting Sparta. Plutarch on the Theban victory over Sparta at Leuctra (371). >For in all the great wars there had ever been against Greeks or barbarians, the Spartans were never before beaten by a smaller company than their own; nor, indeed, in a set battle, when their number was equal. Hence their courage was thought irresistible, and their high repute before the battle made a conquest already of enemies, who thought themselves no match for the men of Sparta even on equal terms. That battle wiped out the Spartiate class for a generation, killing 400 out of 700. This opened the way for Thebes to liberate Messenia in 370, which was the majority of the Lakonian helots, and it was all downhill for Sparta after that.
ronenlh 5y ago
“live butterflies don’t look like butterflies in pictures, you gotta use dead ones” is like in the Simpsons: “Cow's don't look like cows on film. You gotta use horses.”
Consultant32452 5y ago
I’m not interested in a 2A debate but I find it really interesting how much public misunderstanding about firearms and firearms law comes from movies. One of the biggest is the concept of the “unregistered firearm” used in a crime. There is no firearm registry in the US, so all firearms are unregistered. However, the fact that this is prolific in crime movies leads many to believe such a registry exists. Another is the “Hollywood silencer.” Guns fired with a suppressor/silencer are still quite loud, but movies have people thinking you can have a shootout in a mall and no one will notice.
- nacs 5y ago
  > Guns fired with a suppressor/silencer are still quite loud A great example of this is the scene from John Wick where Wick and a villain are in a crowd firing at each other with noone noticing. There is a video with the gun sounds recreated to be more realistic: https://youtu.be/ws8LAfD_3BA?t=13 https://youtu.be/ws8LAfD_3BA?t=13
- neolog 5y ago
  TIL > Only those firearms subject to the National Firearms Act (NFA) (e.g., machineguns, short–barreled rifles and shotguns, silencers, destructive devices, and firearms designated as “any other weapons”) must be registered with ATF. > Firearms registration may be required by state or local law. Any person considering acquiring a firearm should contact their State Attorney General’s Office to inquire about the laws and possible state or local restrictions. https://www.atf.gov/questions-and-answers/qa/how-does-person-register-firearm-or-remove-name-firearms-registration https://www.atf.gov/questions-and-answers/qa/how-does-person...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Consultant32452 5y ago
    Here's a weird one about the NFA and "silencers." As previously mentioned, it's still pretty loud when you use one. In the US it's very restrictive to own one ($200 tax, 6+ month wait, registration, etc.) but in places like the UK it's the opposite. You're a noise polluter without one and relatively very simple to get even though in UK it's harder to get guns.
mushbino 5y ago
I just finished the book Fantasyland by Kurt Anderson. Much of our reality and especially our worldview is constructed and bears no resemblance to reality.
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r3trohack3r 5y ago
I’ve always wondered how much our social interaction is defined by on-screen portrayals of social interactions. Actors are doing their best to portray how humans behave, but some subset of humans observe a large portion of what “normal” behavior is through a screen. At some point, did humans begin imitating the actors to a large degree, while the actors continued imitating the humans? In other words, did art begin imitating art? This thought was brought on by watching old movies. Either actors were much worse back then, or people behaved differently, or both. And to what degree did those actors shape today’s behavior?
- MikeSchurman 5y ago
  Although I have no evidence to back this up, I believe many try to imitate film (or expect something) in their romantic life, which ends up with them having bad expectations and disappointment.
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  One of my pet grievances is how love is portrayed. If you were to believe movies, you can get ANY woman if you're persistent enough. Then poor young boys and men set out in the world showering someone else in gifts and attention. Girls with narcissistic tendencies become more, more and more narcissistic and entitled. Another very damaging myth is that kung fu will save you from muggers. Muggers may have no objections to stabbing you, and if they attack they often attack from surprise. Or really, that a fight looks anything like in a martial arts movie. Go watch a fight in a Karate or Judo championship. It's quite boring, contestants are quite evenly matched and move with respect to each other.
  - MagnumOpus 5y ago
    High level karate or judo (or boxing or MMA or Muay Thai) championships are usually only tactical and boring because they are evenly matched. They would all whip a „casual“ experienced martial artist within half a minute in a movie-like fashion, who in turn will be able to do that to the man on the street. (Source: been there, done that, sparred and competed both against world class olympic martial artists as well as complete beginners.)
DoreenMichele 5y ago
I think this is actually art imitating science, but that's a quibble. As for the rest, I heartily agree. I've been thinking about that here lately, how we watch movie fights and they are typically highly choreographed and often visually beautiful forms of dance that likely have nothing at all to do with what real violence looks like. Not that I want to promote real violence, but I wonder what impact that has on human psychology and how unrealistic it makes some of our expectations when dealing with actual reality when it fails to match up to what we have fed our brains via various forms of media.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Fair point. However... I have an illustrates copy of "Origin of Species," with Darwin's original drawings. It's quite beautiful. Naturalists of the day used a style of drawing. It was utilitarian, good for identification purposes. But, it's almost impossible not to see it as an artistic tradition too. Point taken though. This style originates in science, and they had reasons for their style.
sneak 5y ago
In movies, the phone would revert immediately back to a dial tone when the other party hung up. That's not how any phones ever worked even back when they used dial tones.
cratermoon 5y ago
Hackers typing out ... well, anything. Or the worst of all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
- geoduck14 5y ago
  Lolol. I was hoping for NCSI's "we must hack faster... TWO people on the same keyboard"
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    It's a UNIX system! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng

marvin 5y ago

I coincidentally discovered a similar situation yesterday, when attempting to identify a dazed hornet. Comparing it to specimen photos of presumably dead hornets, it was very hard to match them, as they had their wings and body arranged in a different way.

throwanem 5y ago
Don't try to use the wings for identification beyond color and opacity; the way they're typically depicted in illustration and mounted specimens is a way in which the living animal only holds them while flying, when you can't see them clearly anyway. They're mounted that way because the venation can be diagnostic, but you won't be close enough for long enough, and a live wasp won't hold still enough - even I never get anything useful there, and I shoot wild wasps in 1:1 macro every chance I get. The only even marginally plausible bare-eye feature of the wing, beyond aforementioned color and infuscation, is the presence or absence of pterostigmata, and that alone isn't terribly useful. In general, for bare-eye identification you want to look at size, general conformation (eg Vespinae have a generally more robust build and a markedly blunt postpropodeal gaster vs Polistinae and solitaries, while sawflies don't have a "wasp waist" abdominal petiole at all), body and leg markings, and in some cases proportions of facial features, although that's often more useful in identifying a family or a genus than a species. With a living, active animal, many features can be hard to spot, so knowledge of locally common species is also useful in guiding identification, as is behavior - the four-toothed mason wasps that build nest cells in my porch stair rails look at a glance a lot like bald-faced yellowjackets, but behave totally differently, which can be enough to distinguish even without a chance at a close look. If you have photos or even just an accurate description and still want a specific (from photos) or at least familial ID, I might be able to give you one from them; I'm only an interested amateur and not as familiar with true hornets since there are few to be found in the Nearctic, but I've been an interested amateur for long enough to be both well supplied with references and reasonably practiced at identification. Feel free to email me at any of the addresses in my profile, or just reply here, and I'll be happy to take a look. Failing that, if you do have photos, BugGuide and iNaturalist are good options for identification, although my experience with the latter suggests difficult IDs aren't likely to find much traction there - that might, as some have argued, be an effect of the platform's gamification, but I think it may be more just that hymenopterologists are likely no more common there than elsewhere.

montenegrohugo 5y ago

This is absolutely hilarious and illuminating at the same time. Don't think I'll be able to look at butterfly pictures without remembering this article. It's also a great example of what I'd consider good HN content. Not necessarily useful or anything, but it certainly tickled my curiosity.

giantg2 5y ago
It could be useful for UX/UI folks who have input about content. Or imagine making a pitch (involving nature or tailored to nature) to a conservation agency where someone might have this knowledge and having a picture of a dead butterfly. That might be awkward.
- eru 5y ago
  Those are plausible, but pretty niche situations.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Yeah, but the niche articles are usually the most interesting. Just look at all the AI/ML/Quantum posts on HN, not to mention the posts that deal with some unusual bug. It's a very low chance that most people will deal with these, yet people still read them for the information.
    - eru 5y ago
      Oh, definitely. But I think how interesting those are doesn't depend on those niches existing, it's an independent quality.
daveFNbuck 5y ago
I thought I'd remember this forever when I first read it years ago too. When I saw the headline on HN today, I couldn't remember what was unnatural about how we depict butterflies.
Graffur 5y ago

steverob 5y ago

The best Sunday content, I'd say.

Hnl1kf 5y ago

Counter-example that I took: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25949441@N02/9377845729/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/25949441@N02/9377845729/ But yeah, I expect I’ll be seeing dead butterflies everywhere now.

LostJourneyman 5y ago
That's a counter example in the same way that someone responding to "Stop depicting all humans as spread eagle with their hands over their head, they don't naturally stand like that!" with a picture of a basketball player's arms straight up would be a counter-example. Most lepidopterans are capable of that pose especially in active flight, but it's still unnatural.
- throwanem 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it unnatural; a landing butterfly may well flap for extra lift, the same way a bird does, in order to make a precise and controlled landing. (Hence incidentally the name "flaps" for the trailing-edge extra lift devices that serve the same purpose, in the same regimes of flight, for a rigid-winged aircraft.) The larger point still stands that butterflies don't hold their wings this way at rest, and it's true of hymenopterans as well; you often see specimen wasps mounted with all four wings fully spread, where the living animal at rest invariably holds the rear wings against the front such that only the latter are really visible. The only time this isn't the case is in flight or when the wings are otherwise in use (eg nest fanning on a hot day), but you need a very fast shutter to freeze that motion, and all you'll see with your bare eye is a blur.
vidarh 5y ago
This is addressed in the comments to the article. Basically: Some might get their wings into unusual position mid-flight, but the angle of the photo also plays in a great deal - the depicting addressed in the article is from directly above.
- Graffur 5y ago
  So what is wrong with drawing butterflies with this wing position? Nothing! It's possible and looks good.

sqqqqrly 5y ago

What would Buffalo Bill think?

optimalsolver 5y ago
More lotion.

peanut_worm 5y ago

Great now I am going to be checking every picture of butterflies that I see

hkopp 5y ago

A nice example of Baudrillard's hyperreality. Reality and its representation blend together, so it is unclear where one ends and the other begins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

chillingeffect 5y ago
this has been popping up a lot in the last 5-10 years (mass media creation ) and especially since Covid - fewer people are outside experiencing reality. Also recent political campaigns have been evidence of it. It would really be beneficial for everyone to at least try to grasp some of Baudrillard's concepts in order to make sense of next 10 or more years.

giantg2 5y ago

I thought this was going to be about the decline in the numbers and diversity of butterflies. Good article though.

Cybotron5000 5y ago

I tried last year to model/animate a butterfly for something I was working on/to learn how to use Blender - found this video as a reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7a7ZAqWBIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7a7ZAqWBIs …also this previous HN post about butterfly flight is very interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928796 …+ quite a few previous articles on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=butterfly+wings https://hn.algolia.com/?q=butterfly+wings …awesome bugs that they are! :)

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eplanit 5y ago

There was a similar article regarding ants a couple or more years ago, also featured on HN. Same author, I wonder?

oliwarner 5y ago

Yeah, fair enough. One of those posts where you see an argumentative title, get ready to fight it with your lifetime of experience, before realising that maybe the butterfly expert knows best. Quite interesting how so many people have got it wrong all this time.

empiricus 5y ago

Let's not forget about how butterfly flight is represented in almost all animation movies or games. So fake. Spend so much computation budget for realistic materials and lighting, and then fail so hard on this. For comparison check some real butterflies if you can, or some slow motion movies on youtube to see how it should look.

mattmaroon 5y ago

I thought this was going to be something like "please stop killing them just because they're pretty" and was disappointed.

Mary-Jane 5y ago
I was expecting the same, so I was surprised when it wasn't. Why would you be disappointed?
- mattmaroon 5y ago
  Because I would hope people would not think it's ok to kill an animal because it's pretty. This article is totally fine with that, just wants you to shape the wings like it's alive when you draw them.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
Do people still do that in any significant number?

franze 5y ago

"" <- Butterfly Emoji (stripped by HN comment system) is dead, too. Time to file a change request, where?

enkid 5y ago
Seems to be a common problem. [0] (Skype's is even actively flapping it's wings) You can put in a request for a new emoji, but I don't see a way to update an existing emoji.[1] Each platform has it own emoji implementation, therefore should have a way to request changes through customer support. [0] https://emojipedia.org/butterfly/ https://emojipedia.org/butterfly/ [1] https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html
- ant6n 5y ago
  I think the request would be to HN to not filter this emoji out. Maybe they could at least allow the text version?

alisonkisk 5y ago

Dead butterflies look better. Live butterflies look like moths.

eru 5y ago
There's not much difference between the two, is there?
- throwanem 5y ago
  I don't know what characters even a Linnaean taxonomist would use to distinguish the two; my specialization is in hymenopterans, and I'm just an autodidact amateur anyway. Intuitively, though, I would assume a butterfly to be strikingly colored and a moth to be strikingly pubescent.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    You get very colourful moths too, [poplar] hawk moths (UK) are large and well coloured; some butterflies and fritillaries are dull hues. I've never noticed moths to be particularly downy though? Wing position and form is how I'd differentiate them. Moths have a delta form at rest and don't close their wings together vertically?
    - throwanem 5y ago
      Well, that's the thing about morphological taxonomy, yeah - it's possible to construct any number of axes of distinction, none of which is really guaranteed to correspond to anything in terms of descent or relatedness. That said, wing posture is imo a better intuition than mine, not least in that you actually can most easily tell dragonflies from damselflies by eye this way - the former hold their wings spread laterally at rest, while the latter fold them along their abdomen. I'm sure there are exceptions in both families, but as a general field rule it does work. Looking at sources, the current state of play appears to be that butterflies are (mostly) (sorta) monophyletic in Papilionoidea, and moths are paraphyletic in "Lepidoptera except Papilionoidea", but it's all rather messy and nobody's all that sure. This isn't as unusual as it might sound, actually. You see much the same in Hymenoptera, for example - large insect families just aren't all that comprehensively studied in the first place, not least because many of their members can be quite hard to find, and what prior taxonomic work there was has been undergoing pretty radical revision since the advent of (relatively) inexpensive genomics and the consequent feasibility of molecular taxonomy.

executesorder66 5y ago

> There are exceptions, of course. It seems that some of the smaller butterflies may exhibit wing positions fairly close to that of a dead, pinned specimen I've actually seen some really large butterflies that look pretty much like the "pinned wings dead butterfly" when it flies. I tried to film it, but couldn't get a good shot. I found this article interesting when it came out, but after seeing living butterflies that look exactly like it says they shouldn't, I'm not going to spread the idea that all these butterfly images are wrong. I have seen thousands of butterflies in my life, and yes, most of them have their forewings much further back. Not that I ever paid too close attention, even after reading this article for the first time. It was just a striking image when I saw these huge butterflies on holiday in December 2019, and they looked like a stereotypical animated movie aesthetic butterflies with the "wrong" wings, and I thought it was amusing.

BadOakOx 5y ago
I was just thinking about this. All the photos the author uses are of butterflies resting. Thanks for confirming my intuition that while butterflies fly they spread their wings.
- kadoban 5y ago
  They do spread their wings in flight, but the few photos/vids I bothered to find it's still quite distinct from the classical pinned position (in terms of the angles fore/aft more than anything). I'm sure it's a _possible_ position in which to find many species, but it seems like at best a rare one.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Part of it is that mostly I've seen, in person, butterflies in flight - they rarely alight on a plant close enough to inspect in detail and in flight they do appear to flap like a book opening and closing; one doesn't really see the pitch changes of the wing, it looks like a simple motion. I've got some pictures of red admirals (it painted ladies, not sure) resting in "dead" pose on brambles somewhere that I took only because I'd seen this article.

earlyriser 5y ago

This is an example of non-dead butterflies (even if the painting is about death) https://www.carolinegaudreault.com/fr/oeuvres/sanctuaire/ https://www.carolinegaudreault.com/fr/oeuvres/sanctuaire/ Disclaimer: my partner painted it.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Hugged to death. I look forward to reading it, once it comes up for air.

netsec_burn 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20210725100120/https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210725100120/https://www.emily...

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Igelau 5y ago

It's one thing if the butterflies are depicted in contexts suggesting they're supposed to be alive. For some of these (like the pillow) its obviously just a decorative motif. Dead butterflies are pretty. So are cut flowers, mounted antlers, wood, and scrimshaw.

djmips 5y ago

How many people knew this already and just assumed it was common knowledge that butterflies are draw cartoon like. I mean a lot of illustrated bugs and animals and plants are stylized and look very little like the real thing. Look at cartoon bears for example.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

crazydoggers 5y ago

Hmmmm… you mean exactly like this very much non-dead butterfly? I have a feeling the author hasn’t actually spent that much time observing butterflies. https://ibb.co/YQxprkg https://ibb.co/YQxprkg https://ibb.co/S33vvYs https://ibb.co/S33vvYs https://ibb.co/6gJDxTR https://ibb.co/6gJDxTR Edit: To be more specific. Most butterflies hold their wings in this position at rest. Illustrated in 2D it looks “dead” Moths do happen to hold their wings flat and if you look at field guides are usually illustrated this way. People who actually spend time observing butterflies would directly contradict the author’s assertion.

crazydoggers 5y ago
And… immediately downvoted for sharing direct evidence that contradicts the narrative here. The reason field guides show butterflies this way is because that’s how you usually see them. Butterflies hold their wings up most of the time, not flat as the author suggests. So when illustrated in 2D you see the wings looking “dead”. Or you know… all the scientists and naturalists are just wrong and this artist is right. Edit: The reason this article is troublesome is because it’s another case of spreading misinformation. If I were going to post a long article about butterfly physiology (which is basically what this purports to be) I would first do research. I’d take the hypotheses “butterflies are illustrated wrong” and see where the current data stands. If I found the data wanting, I’d at least couch the argument along the lines of “the current data is u unconvincing, so here’s my theory” Instead the author cherry picked images that support her narrative, and failed to do any research on the subject, going so far as to say “In field guides and other butterfly reference materials, one frequently sees images of such pinned butterflies because, I presume, it is easy to photograph a dead butterfly” when actually the images have been drawn from live butterflies. She then states this whole thing as fact rather than what it is, her conjecture (which when put to scrutiny can be shown false) Now this is a simple article about butterflies, so isn’t really a big deal. The problem lies when this same behavior and thinking deals with subjects that are especially important like climate change, vaccines, etc. This is where misinformation starts. In this case Facebook, Twitter, etc could amplify “butterflies are illustrated wrong” just like they amplify “vaccines are bad” and “climate change isn’t real”.
Graffur 5y ago

Graffur 5y ago

I don't get it - the Eastern Tailed blue butterfly looks like the "dead" butterfly but it's not dead. This invalidates the authors argument completely.

lyaa 5y ago
No, the author mentions that there are exception and the argument stands. The most commonly illustrated butterflies, such as the viceroy definitely look dead in illustrations.
- Graffur 5y ago
  I don't see how it stands. You're like "HA HA pictures of butterflies are actually DEAD butterflies" but all I have to do is point to a real live butterfly that looks like the picture.

kbutler 5y ago

It's the equivalent of T-posing humans everywhere. Not a relaxed posture reflective of nature, but does allow more visibility and analysis. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man

brobeanz 5y ago

I agree. Butterflies are pests that must go

dstanko 5y ago

Interesting... I have seen (more precisely noticed) maybe 2-3 butterflies in last couple of years. I am pretty sure that none of those times I had a hi res slow motion camera. Certainly, those butterflies looked different than preserved dead ones I saw in illustrations. Point is that a non-butterfly expert that does not spend their life researching would only relate to depictions of butterflies, not their true form. I also find this very similar to old photos where people looked stiff and lifeless. As photography became more mobile and accessible, photos became more lifelike.

efitz 5y ago

I used to race sailboats. It annoys the heck out of me when drawn depictions of sailboats have the sails on backwards (such as the spinnaker on the rear) or have the wind filling the sails from an impossible direction. It’s clear that artists often don’t understand their subjects.

soheil 5y ago

But what difference does it make? It seems to me the cross sectional area in the photo is larger if the wings are more spread out as in the case with dead butterflies so you end up seeing more of the beautiful wing patterns. What's the point of hiding a portion of that? After all we kill flowers all the time so that our dining tables look slightly more beautiful. There is something morbid about dead butterflies looking better than alive ones, but I don't think you should put all that on "artists" as much as it being a rather unfortunate artifact of the way nature designed it.

robbrown451 5y ago

I am very happy that the children's hobby of collecting butterflies seems to have nearly disappeared. When I was a kid, other kids had butterfly collection kits that included a "killing jar." It struck me as a bit morbid at the time, but it was common so no big deal. Even if the species isn't endangered or anything, isn't that kind of messed up? Not a great way for a kid to learn empathy. My seven year old enjoyed taking close up photos of butterflies a couple days ago using my phone. All the while saying sweet things to them, treating them as friends that she didn't want to frighten. She'd be offended with the idea of catching them to kill them and stick a pin in them to then admire their beauty in all its deadness.

jacobolus 5y ago
Kids don’t collect butterflies so much anymore because (a) most people live in more urbanized places than 50+ years ago and kids spend more time indoors or in structured activities, and (b) there are a lot fewer butterflies around, as they die to insecticides, habitat loss, and climate change. Edit: A web search turns up that butterfly populations have declined by more than 30% in Europe/USA in the past 25 years or so, and were in decline for long before that. One estimate is that they have declined by more than 80% in Western Europe since the late 19th century, with many species disappearing entirely.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Easily capturing images of butterflies (or just downloading them) probably is a factor, that wasn't really possible with cameras children had access to 30y ago. Raising butterflies is quite a common class project in UK primary schools.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  We live in the middle of a city (San Francisco) and there are lots of butterflies around. There may be less, but I stand by my theory that the main difference is that killing bugs as a hobby is not seen the same way as it used to be.
slumdev 5y ago

darekkay 5y ago

Related posts, where experts rate the accuracy of emojis: - Entomologist rates ant emojis: https://www.boredpanda.com/entomologist-rates-ant-emojis/ https://www.boredpanda.com/entomologist-rates-ant-emojis/ - Which emoji scissors close: https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html - A thread of rating every horse emoji: https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832 https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832 - Ranking the "Ringed Planet" emojis: https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817 https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817 - Reviewing Steam Loco Emojis: https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790 https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790 - Talk about Telescope emojis: https://mobile.twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607819267 https://mobile.twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607... - Would you survive a skydive with an emoji parachute? (my own post): https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/ https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/

ufo 5y ago

One funny example of this is that thyroids are described as being butterfly shaped. Maybe endrocrinologists need to talk more with the entomologists. :)

pvaldes 5y ago

Scientific illustration is different than abstract art or cubism or expressionism and has its own rules people. Deal with it. And by the way, yes, some people like it. But the biggest problem with the article is that even when lots of people blindly assume that is right, the main idea is wrong. It happens often when people try to use their philosophical ideas to explain nature. Yes, butterflies can spread their wings. If you try to force the wing opened in a impossible position it just will break. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NguiKUyP9r4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NguiKUyP9r4

JasonFruit 5y ago

I'd file this article under, "You're enjoying this wrong!" It's just saying that we should stop enjoying a particular representation of butterflies that is less generally lifelike than what the author would prefer. There's nothing wrong with saying that sort of thing, but it's not a particularly interesting assertion, and it's not a very important problem. (And if you liked the article, you're probably enjoying articles wrong.)