Clumps and Chumps
OR…
Why Bumble Bees Can’t Fly
Written By Michael Reichmann, Luminous Landscape
One of the favourite debates on web discussion forums is – “why film is or is not sharper then digital”. Experienced photographers know through the evidence of their own eyes that, other things being equal – same lens, similar ISO, etc; in real-world photographs digital is incontrovertibly sharper than film. Yet the debates continue.
This is reminiscent of the urban myth that bumble bees can’t fly. Their wings are far too small to generate enough lift given their weight. A lift to weight ratio thing. (Sound familiar?)
And for those that are interested, this apparently this has something to do with the way bees use their wings and the lift generated by vortices that swirl behind the moving wing edges. According to those knowledgeable about insect flight aerodynamics the complexities include “continuously changing angles of attack, interactions of opposite wings at the top of the stroke, issues of how many chord lengths of travel are needed for full lift to be developed, vortex shedding and reformation (with opposite sign) at the bottom of the stroke, spanwise flow…”
Make sense to you?
No, nor to me either. And that’s the problem. A narrow-minded aircraft designer would look at the lift to weight ratio of the bumble bee and state that it can’t fly, even though if you asked any bee it would say “Bzzzzzz” – which freely translates as, “get a life!”
Which brings us to the matter of film vs. digital resolution.
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