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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • They were repeatedly being selected for the people who could handle a slightly colder environment, so by the time the population reached the polar regions, all that was left was people with traits to handle the cold. Any remotely beneficial recessive gene would quickly replace dominant alleles in the population.

    Although I’m sure there was some genetic adaptation, I’d argue it was more technological advancement. The northernmost tribe discovers a better make of clothing, or a better housing structure and suddenly the colder winters farther north are now tolerable so people settle there. The new northern tribe refines their technology and knowledge and now that they know how to… ice fish or something they have a winter food source, and now their descendants can settle even farther north.












  • I bought one of those vegan Spam-a-likes and I have to say I really didn’t like it.

    I my thought process was “Spam’s so heavily processed, how much worse could it be if no meat were involved?” the answer turned out to be “A lot.” I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like… you know how there are all beef hot dogs, but they don’t taste anything like beef? It was kinda that but with Spam… but Spam isn’t very meat like to begin with.

    All that being said, after the plant based Spam sat in my fridge until it started to get fuzzy, I threw it out for the stray cats in my neighborhood. Despite the fact I found it to be quite unappealing, starving alley cats found it to be meat like enough to eat it… which I guess is a mark in it’s favor?




  • There’s been research that language shapes how we perceive the world around us. Because there was no word for “blue” there was no concept of blue, the color still existed but their brains just lumped it into “green”. Sight works by the visual centers brain taking data from the eyes, throwing most of it out, then building a model which is what the rest of the brain gets to actually “see”. That’s why optical illusions work.

    A commonly cited source for language shaping our perception of color is Jules Davidoff’s studies on the Himba tribe. The Himba have no word for blue, and they struggled to pick out the blue square from this color wheel. However, they do have many distinctions for shades of green so when given this color wheel they could easily pick out the square that’s a different shade of green (and yes I opened it in MSpaint to check and one of the green squares is a different shade.)


  • Eh… I dunno. You’d be comparing the power consumption of the laser etching machine to the energy cost of shipping oil to make the plastic to make the label, shipping the raw plastic to a facility to actually print the labels, making the adhesive, then (probably) shipping the labels and adhesive to the packing plant and then adding in the power of the machinery to that actually sticks the label on.

    I have no real numbers here but I could see zapping a avocado with a laser being the more energy efficient one.