markovs_gun
@markovs_gun@lemmy.world
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 1 day ago:
It probably wouldn’t work though. Say you wash your hands. Okay that helps some against certain diseases but not against respiratory disease, many types of foodborne illness, the plague, etc. You’d still get all of those just as easily as everyone else without also having a backdrop of the germ theory of disease to explain other ways to prevent disease and antibiotics to cure bacterial infections.
This is the state of biology in the middle ages. This is a medieval Scottish bestiary, a book of animals, which contains many interesting facts about animals such as beavers biting their testicles off to throw away pursuers, several animals spontaneously generating from nothing, and many animals that don’t exist (my favorite is the Bonnacon, a bull that spews firey shit as a defense mechanism). Medieval scholars also didn’t accept experimentation as a valid means of gaining knowledge - they were stuck on Plato’s ideas about matter being flawed and untrustworthy and true knowledge only being able to come from Reason (and in the case of the medieval era, Divine revelation). Obviously you could show them bacteria (if you could somehow fashion a powerful enough microscope with medieval tech, which is not a trivial task) and they’d have to believe in it but how would you get them to believe that those little guys cause disease when that took us a couple hundred years in actual history?
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 1 day ago:
In what language? Modern English didn’t exist yet and neither did pretty much any modern language. Good luck trying to get the local nobles and priests to decipher the hundreds of codices you brought with you that are in some strange language that nobody has seen before
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 1 day ago:
I would die quickly because I don’t have any wilderness survival skills and the land I live in (USA) was inhabited by hunter gatherer tribes whose language is completely unrelated to anything I know and whose customs are completely unknown to me as well. But beyond that, even if I got teleported to England where I at least know a similar enough language to where I could figure out middle English decently quickly, I think people seriously overestimate how useful just having modern knowledge is.
For example, say you want to build a gun. Do you know how to forge a gun barrel with medieval steel and make gunpowder out of bat shit and sulfur? Because I sure as hell don’t. I could probably make gunpowder but how the hell would you get the money to pay someone to make a gun barrel for you? And further, even if you had the skills yourself, basically nobody today deals with raw materials as inconsistent as what they were working with back then and therefore don’t have practice working with them. Even if you introduced something like germ theory to them why would anyone believe you? You’d probably get just as sick as everyone else even with following modern sanitation standards for yourself because nobody else would be. Same with math. Want to speedrun introducing calculus to the world? Good luck trying to prove it to medieval mathematicians without having deep knowledge of euclidean constructive proofs and philosophy to even allow for something like an infinitesimal to exist. There’s very little one person can realistically do to change the world on their own.
- Comment on Ace Attorney became a hit IP only because Capcom pushed past the “failure” of first game, according to former dev 1 day ago:
Is there a way to play these games on PC or at least on the Switch or something? I know obviously I could pirate them but I was wondering if a proper port had ever been made.
- Comment on What's the point in getting married? 2 days ago:
It greatly simplifies life from a legal standpoint. It’s basically like creating a tiny corporation of two people that can act as a single legal entity. If you’re married it simplifies buying a house together, inheritance, medical decisions, etc. As others have pointed out, these are important especially when your partner’s family don’t approve of you or the relationship especially for LGBT people.
I am going to break the mold though and say the actual ceremony is important too. Declaring your intention to stay together for life in front of your friends and family changes things. It adds a level of security and finality to the relationship- you have to put your money where your mouth is on the relationship. Although people frequently do it, I don’t know how someone can go through the wedding process without reflecting on how big of a deal it is to stand up in front of so many of your friends and family and declare your intention to stay together forever, even without the religious ritual aspect of it. I wouldn’t want to have kids with someone without having this commitment, for example. Ultimately even though marriage is a social construct, I think it’s still a useful one even in a world where women are no longer considered property of men.
- Comment on What do office workers actually do? 5 days ago:
I’m a chemical engineer at a plastics company. When I’m in the office I’m looking at data and making decisions based on that, like whether to stop or increase production rates, whether to shut something down for maintenance, or finding what piece of equipment is broken and causing a problem. I also design improvements to the process like finding better ways to run the machinery, new equipment that gets us more capacity, or new ways to control the equipment. I would say about 80% of my time is in the office and 20% is in the manufacturing area.
- Comment on Anon studies Buddhism 5 days ago:
Bible stories are the same way, we’ve just heard them a million times so they don’t seem weird
“Hey Jesus what toppings do you want for pizza?” “Plain with cheese” Later the disciples are eating pizza with Jesus "“Hey Jesus why did you say you like cheese pizza when you normally order pepperoni?” “You dumb fucks how dare you not understand my hidden meaning, I am the true pizza and you are the pepperoni, the grease is my blood” “Oh of course, sorry boss”
- Comment on Put him on the cart. 5 days ago:
The hammer does +1d8 radiant damage against undead
- Comment on Happy Easter from the POTUS 1 week ago:
Pontius Pilates sounds like a much more fun guy who teaches a class at the YMCA
- Comment on And they haven't been back since 1 week ago:
If you think Christianity is unique in this regard look towards Buddhism, specifically the Vajrayana branches (often associated with Tibet) and you’ll see even more gruesome imagery than any Christian symbolism. Buddhas drinking blood out of the skulls of their enemies, stomping on corpses, and having sex all at the same time, and even more shocking things. These"fearsome" or “wrathful” manifestation of Buddhist deities that display raw power and the trappings of demons to destroy said demons are relatively common.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 1 week ago:
I am also curious. I’m spoiled by having access to Bluebeam at work and I have yet to find any software that comes close to the same ease of functionality for editing PDFs, even for extremely basic things like splitting, merging, and rotating pages.
- Comment on good morning bitches 1 week ago:
The issue is that this guy just kind of did it without going through any of the normal check steps to make sure he was doing it right or there wouldn’t be any unexpected consequences
- Comment on Anon notices 1 week ago:
You seriously misread that if you think it’s about Christmas trees in anything but maybe an abstract way. It’s about wooden idols. Who tf is chiseling their Christmas trees into shapes? I thought maybe this would be about Asherah poles or something at least kind of similar but this is a pretty obvious passage about idolatry.
- Comment on What TV show were you highly excited for, but ended up quickly disappointing you? 2 weeks ago:
Game of Thrones, but mostly because it was so good at the start. Controversially I think the series went to shit in Season 5, or even season 4, basically as soon as they started seriously deviating from the books. It’s extremely clear what is original for the show and what is from GRRM because everything they came up with outside of the book material is stupid as shit and nobody’s actions or motivations make any sense.
- Comment on What TV show were you highly excited for, but ended up quickly disappointing you? 2 weeks ago:
Idk what it is about modern TV but it’s like it’s like everything made in the Streaming Era is like this. I have trouble putting my finger on it. Even good shows coming out right now like White Lotus seem like they’re a bit dumbed down compared to “prestige television” of the past. It’s also like the later seasons of Game of Thrones vs. the early seasons. I know a lot of that is running out of source material and having to rely on their own (bad) creativity but I do wonder if part of it is something to do with the format of streaming or maybe even the impact social media and smart phones have had on our attention spans. It’s like shows are designed with the fact that you’re going to be watching with a phone in your hand scrolling Instagram and only half paying attention in mind. Even Better Call Saul vs. Breaking Bad, it’s like everything is a comedy, nothing can be too serious, and everything is just a bit dumber. Idk.
- Comment on IT'S NOT A COINCIDENCE 2 weeks ago:
99% chance that Marxist banking parasites= Jews. It’s just Judeo-Bolshevism but reworded to hide the fact that it’s an anti-semitic conspiracy theory.
- Comment on Anon needs to spend less time on 4chan 2 weeks ago:
$15 a month is a lot of money for poor people. Minimum wage at 40 hours a week is only $1160 a month. If rent is $700 a month (and that’s cheaper than any apartment I’ve seen lately that only leaves $460 for everything else. Sure the rec center is nice but is it worth spending 3-6% of your post-housing expenses on?
- Comment on Anon needs to spend less time on 4chan 2 weeks ago:
Lmao OP just described a public pool. I’ve never been to one that wasn’t like this and I grew up in a town that’s like 90% white. Turns out race doesn’t have anything to do with it
- Comment on Give us your craziest ocean facts. 🦑 2 weeks ago:
When a whale dies and its corpse falls to the bottom of the ocean, entire ecosystems rapidly develop around eating every part of it due to how scarce resources are in the deep ocean. This phenomenon is called a “whale fall” and it’s a major source of energy for deep ocean ecosystems.
- Comment on Why Do Sites Keep Shoving Features We Don’t Want Down Our Throats? 3 weeks ago:
Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.