Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Apart from fireflies and mantises, cicadas are one of my favorite insects.

The sound of cicadas is a hallmark of summer. Whether you're inside or outside, it envelops the senses and recalls the nostalgia of endless childhood summers and adventure.

I'm looking forward to Brood XIX [1] hatching next year in Atlanta. It should me amazing.

I'm hoping to see the synchronous fireflies [2] next year. Together with the total solar eclipse, there's a lot of good nature and science to take in.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_XIX

[2] https://www.firefly.org/synchronous-fireflies.html

[3] https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/future-eclipses/eclipse-20...

Definitely relate to this - quintessential summer sound and almost relaxing at this point. They’re some dumb insects though, run into anything and everything.

How do their noise compare to crickets?

Subjectively: cicadas are louder but far less annoying.

I enjoy the sound of crickets and cicadas (which are much louder) except for the one particular kind of cicadas we get occasionally in Texas that make a singular unwavering high pitched ambient buzzing sound, like the whine of an old tv cranked to 11, coming from everywhere. It's a horribly unpleasant sound, but thankfully they don't stick around long. The other cicada sounds are nice.

Crickets chirp (mostly a single kind of chirp) while Cicadas grind. The grinding lasts for half a minute or so, and they rhythmically pulsate the frequency, ending in a descending slowing of the grinding. Like a long WEEEEhoooWEEEEhoooWEEEEEeeee...

Cicadas sound like a defective transformer.

For clarification, are you meaning an electrical transformer or a Transformer robot? Because I can imagine both being possible lol

Or a multi-attention head with skip connections

Something like comparing a whisper to a jet engine, at least when there is a big brood.

https://housegrail.com/how-loud-is-cicada-in-decibels/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com