AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around? 6 days ago:
Even if every human on earth had their own pet since dogs were first domesticated ten or twenty thousand years ago, their ancestors were facing the stress of migrating into new and unfamiliar environments for several hundred thousand years prior to that.
- Comment on What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around? 6 days ago:
Beneficial mutations are random, but the odds of them persisting are proportional to the frequency of the events in which they affect our fitness. And the proportion of stressful events in which pets were available would have been only a fraction of the total number of stressful events our ancestors experienced.
If pets are available for 10% of the stressful events we experience, the selection pressure for stress reduction that doesn’t require pets would be ten times greater.
- Comment on What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around? 6 days ago:
That’s a personal benefit, but it’s not necessarily an evolutionary benefit. If it were an evolutionary benefit, our bodies would generate that response spontaneously without needing an external stimulus that wouldn’t have been available to many of our ancestors.
- Comment on How would you run a society? 1 week ago:
Accept that there’s going to be political diversity and social change (for better and worse), and try to create an overarching framework to channel it into something other than violent conflict. One idea:
Let societies do whatever they want, but institute a “risk mitigation’ tax (or other form of resource redistribution) based on size and similarity: if a social strategy is popular and widely adopted, it’s taxed at a marginally increasing rate until it reaches an equilibrium level; and the revenue is used to fund more experimental social strategies. This flips the historical dynamic on its head: instead of each society trying to forcibly convert the rest of the world to its own system, each society has an interest in discouraging others from following its example.
- 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 week ago:
I claw my way out of a few feet of soil, and walk about thirty minutes to where the local Olhone maintained a ceremonial shellmound from 800 BCE until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s. By all accounts the Olhone were chill hunter-gatherers, so my best bet would probably be to befriend and join them.
They’d be more knowledgeable than me about everything in the local environment, so I don’t think I’d have much knowledge that would be of use to them. (They seem to have known of other nearby groups that practiced agriculture, but saw no need for it.) I might eventually consider traveling north or south along the coast, but many other groups in western North America practiced warfare and/or slavery, so I’d probably be best off staying put.
- Comment on With Tim Pool in the White House Press Pool, will we ever find out what's under that beanie? 1 week ago:
So “Tim Apple” is CEO of Apple, and Tim Pool is on the White House press pool.
Does Trump just believe in some kind of obligate nominative determinism? If I call myself “Tim General”, can I sit on the National Security Council?
- Comment on Why are popes always really old? 1 week ago:
It’s an emergent phenomenon—institutions will naturally behave in ways that increase their power without that being the conscious intention of any given member.
- Comment on Why are popes always really old? 1 week ago:
The older the average pope, the shorter the average term, and the more papal elections in a given span of time.
One of the main powers of cardinals is electing the pope, so more papal elections means more power for the cardinals.
- Comment on What accent would I even have? 2 weeks ago:
Any accent of English, including more recent ones, perceived as a mixture of American and British English, and often perceived as incorporating the prestige speech of one or both countries
- Comment on Do you use your blinker in a car? 3 weeks ago:
Using it 75% of the time is harder than using it all the time, because it means you’re consciously thinking about it each time instead of doing it instinctively.
- Comment on It's a sin in Christianity to consume media based on ancient mythology and folklore? 3 weeks ago:
Plenty of writers in the early Christian church continued to reference Greek and Roman mythology as a source of literary analogy—so a background knowledge of classical mythology is required to fully understand foundational Christian literature.
- Comment on Now that the US is under influence by Russia, what will happen to Whistleblower Edward Snowden? 4 weeks ago:
I doubt Trump will do anything that could be perceived as encouraging more whistleblowers, at least while he’s in office.
Best case—a Democrat wins the next election, Trump gives up on trying to stop it, and pardons Snowden on his way out.
- Comment on How do you pronounce "centaur" and why? 4 weeks ago:
If it’s in a Greek or ancient Latin context I pronounce it with a hard C, but if it’s a general English context I pronounce it with a soft C.
I’m not sure what the third way would be.
- Comment on Why Titles Are Written Like This? 5 weeks ago:
The same reason we capitalize peoples’ names, since a title is the proper name of a written work.
- Comment on Mother 5 weeks ago:
After the predator instantly becomes enamored with the adorable baby quokka, and calls her own kids over to play.
- Comment on Hey, do americans just want to take a break from normal politics for a bit and focus all our efforts solely on the wild boar problem? 1 month ago:
Some animals are more equal than others!
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
In theory, authoritarianism is the fastest way to transform a society from one form to another—so it’s rational that regimes that take power based on the promise of rapid social transformation will be drawn to authoritarianism.
But it’s also rational for institutions to try to preserve themselves—which for these authoritarian regimes means preserving the conditions that led to the belief in their necessity, instead of delivering on the promise of transformation that would lead to their dissolution.
- Comment on If any external factor made you create art, would your art be created by that factor? 1 month ago:
I guess in that sense you could say the only “creator” is the Big Bang.
- Comment on Between Linux or Windows which do you think will be first to have a viable OS for quantum computers? 2 months ago:
Quantum circuits aren’t general-purpose computers—they’re added to conventional computers to allow them to perform a small handful of algorithms more efficiently. I don’t believe any of those algorithms would benefit a general operating system enough that an OS would be modified to require the use of one.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
States are explicitly prohibited by the Constitution from “enter[ing] into any treaty, alliance, or confederation” with foreign states, but there are plenty of cases of state and local governments joining economic partnerships and initiatives.
- Comment on Why do most Americans use an iPhone? 2 months ago:
I would never use an iPhone if my phone were my primary computing device. But I just make occasional calls and texts, and use a handful of apps (for instance, Nextcloud and Home Assistant connected to my home server, bypassing most of Apple’s ecosystem). I just want something simple and sturdy that I have to think about as little as possible, and for that specific use case the limitations are a plus.
- Comment on Why there is no photos of earth from space? 2 months ago:
There’s a certain neurological disorder where people can look at their own reflections and believe them to be fake or inhuman. I would expect them to make posts very similar to this one.
- Comment on Why are there silly license requirements? 2 months ago:
There are plenty of activities that are perfectly harmless when done by one person, but need to be managed when a bunch of people try to do them at once.
- Comment on Why do some people think others are troll just because they don’t like what they have to say? 2 months ago:
In some cases, assuming the poster is a troll is the more charitable option.
- Comment on WTH is going on with the price of a quart of Hydrogen Peroxide? 3 months ago:
Are you looking at the 3% topical solution, or something more concentrated?
- Comment on Should I avoid communities on lemmy.ml? 3 months ago:
In circumstances where similar communities exist on multiple instances, I would subscribe to all of them at first—but pay attention to differences in moderation and community norms, and unsubscribe from communities you’re less comfortable with. I wouldn’t judge a community on the basis of its instance without trying it first, unless the instance admins have unusual rules they’re imposing on all their communities.
- Comment on How to make multiple paragraphs render with a space? 3 months ago:
Ah, so you want to increase the default space between paragraphs? (That’s UI dependent, by the way—in Alexandria the default paragraph spacing is closer to a full line.)
You could always add a horizontal rule between paragraphs if you want to indicate a more substantial division.
- Comment on How to make multiple paragraphs render with a space? 3 months ago:
Your post text is rendering as two paragraphs for me in both old.lemmy and alexandria. Are you seeing something else?
For standard markdown, a paragraph is indicated by two successive returns in your source text (and a line break within a paragraph is indicated by a line ending in two spaces followed by a return).
- Comment on Do you ever simply not understand a piece of text no matter how many times you read it despite the fact that you understand the language and individual words? 3 months ago:
- Comment on Can cats see color? 3 months ago:
Except that a rose/red filter would pass wavelengths centered around red, while a magenta filter would block wavelengths centered around green. So a magenta filter would let in proportionally more blue.