modeler

@modeler@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon thinks the French are posers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, technically the French did not conquer Britain - they were Normans.

  Who were the Normans? They were Scandinavian vikings who had been raiding France for decades. Eventually the French king decided to offer them lands (now called Normandy) in France if they promised to stop raiding and instead protect the French coast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Colorblindness check!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is true for only red and green loght detecting proteins (opsins) - the blue opsin gene is on chromosome 7.

  The red and green detecting proteins have an interesting history in humans.

  Fish, amphibians, lizards and birds have 4 different opsins: for red, green, yellow and blue colours. And the blue opsin sees up into the ultra-violet. Most animals can see waaaay more colours in the world than we (or any mammal) can. So what happened that makes mammal vision so poor?

  It’s thought that all mammals descend from one or a few species of nocturnal mammal that survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. The colour detecting cells (the cones) need a lot of light compared to ones that see in black-and-white (the rods) and therefore nocturnal animals frequently lose cones in favour of the more sensitive rods for better night vision. The mammals that survived the Cretaceous extinction had also lost the green and yellow opsins while keeping red and blue - basically the two different ends of the light spectrum.

  Consequently today most mammals still have only 2 opsins so your cat or dog is red-green colourblind.

  Why do humans see green? Probably because our monkey forebears, who lived in trees and ate leaves, needed to distinguish red leaves and red fruit (visible to birds) from the green background.

  But how did we bring back the green opsin? A whole section of the X chromosome (where the red opsin is coded) got duplicated in a dna copying mistake and then there were two genes for red opsins. As there are different alleles (versions), they could be selected for independently and so one red opsin drifted up the spectrum to be specific for green. So our green opsin is a completely different gene to the green opsin in fish, birds, etc. This kind of evolution happens a lot which is why, for example, there are many families of similar hormones like testosterone and estrogen. And steroids too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Six people arrested after machete fight in Southend-on-Sea⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Which is difficult to give without that arm

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨jd vance⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is terribly sad - they must live in a world of hurt.

  However so many of these people actively try to hurt LGBTQ+ and trans people by inciting hate and changing laws to harm the non-straight. In particular they have been preaching that being gay/trans equates to being a child molester. This is horrific and needs to stop. Exposing the hypocrisy is essential to reducing the harm they are inflicting to real people right now

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VFX artist explains why CGI in films is worse now⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Two more examples: Dredd and Ex Machina.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculus made easy⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I must not use jargon.

  Jargon is the mind-killer.

  Jargon is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face the jargon. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the jargon has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do genocides happen?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As I was discussing this with my partner we summarised this as:

  Humans have always had the capacity for violence and murder; as populations grew, acts of violence could be larger, both in terms of number of combatants and also length of time of continuous fighting. This is a progression of:

  • Small bands of people skirmishing with neighbours to
  • Towns sending small raiding bands to
  • Cities fielding an army for a summer campaign to
  • Empires furnishing professional armies and sending them on multi-year campaigns, to
  • Nation states using advanced logistics to maintain millions of soldiers in the field for years at a time.

  Somewhere between city-states and full modern nation states, there have been full on campaigns of genocide. But genocide can be thought here definitionally as only possible with some significant number of people.

  Unfortunately there is a deep dark part of the human psyche that has always been with us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do genocides happen?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hear what you’re saying, but there’s a counterpoint to this.

  In prehistoric times, population densities were low. In mesolithic times (hunter gatherers) there were simply no concentration of people large enough to wipe out or to do the killing. Nothing could be called genocide at this time.

  In neolithic times (the first farmers) violence was definitely a part of life. Some early towns do show signs that they were destroyed. But again, population densities are low enough that the scale of violence would not be enough to call ‘genocide’. It’s a town burnt down with everyone murdered, not a ‘people’ - whatever that might mean at this time. This is not about egalitarianism - it’s population density.

  However as we move to the bronze age, there are definitely signs that large scale events occur that might fit into the modern concept of genocide but archeological evidence is severely lacking. The main line I would argue is that the male lines of the neolithic farmers in Europe are hammered and almost completely replaced with the Yamnaya Y chromosomes across a huge expanse - from the east european plains to the Iberian peninsula. Genetic continuity with the neolithic farmers is maintained though indicating that male newcomers were having children with local women, and very few male locals had children. During this event the culture changed hugely - burial patterns, material goods, etc.

  I don’t know if we can call this genocide - at least the full modern concept - because these changes took centuries to roll out across the expanse of Europe, but they speak to local conquests and, at the very least, the newcomers prevented local males from having their own families. At worst you can imagine a constant expansion of this new culture taking control of new areas, killing the men, taking local women as concubines and eradicating their gods, customs and ways of living. Quite a lot of genocidal checklist items ticked off there.

  By the mid to later bronze age, genicide is definitely a widespread thing, recorded in many texts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do genocides happen?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The paradox of tolerance.

  If people are tolerant of intolerance, tolerance dies. So, ironically, people who are otherwise highly tolerant people (especially when they have thought about this deeply) realise they must reject intolerance loudly and intensely, lest their way of life is destroyed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨reviewer 1⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s called a bollock dagger and, yes, it’s really phallic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Quizzle – Can you guess the word in fewer than twenty questions?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Same with me! I was binary searching cladistically and it spoiler >!it was a jawed animal and did not have hard bones!<. My search among the >!cartilaginous fish!< was all negative. Damn