Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)A
Posts
20
Comments
1407
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Institutions aren’t the sum of their parts—their behavior is dependent on human participation, but is largely independent of the values or goals of the participating humans.

    Unless you’ve identified a specific weakness and have a plan to exploit it before going in, your participation will probably benefit it more than any opportunistic harms you can do to it while participating.

  • Mixing vermicompost into the regolith seems a bit like cheating.

  • Grace keeps pushing Smoke to take the vampires head on, before they go to her store and kill her daughter. When the others refuse, she forces it by shouting “come on in, motherfuckers!”

  • Or that it was a holy relic you’d brought back from the Crusades.

  • Explain why the US hasn’t gone back in so long, and why with modern technology it seems so difficult?

    The Apollo program took 4.5% of the US budget. NASA’s entire budget now—including space telescopes, earth satellites, and interplanetary probes—is less than half of one percent.

  • If the two Republicans both with the primary and go on to the general election, could a campaign to recall the winner start gathering petitions to get on the general election ballot before they even know who they’re recalling?

    Could a candidate get elected and recalled in the same election?

  • Nationalism—the idea that there ought to be (or ever was) a 1:1 correspondence between countries, cultures, and ancestry—is a 19th-century invention unsupported by history, anthropology, or genetics. Ancestry tests that categorize results by country are obfuscating real data to meet a demand for pop pseudoscience.

  • 4′33″

  • Sure—but I’d guess that the reason similar trends seem to be underway in Africa and Southeast Asia is that climate change has made the conversion of forest to pasture more profitable in the tropics than elsewhere.

    In the Amazon all it takes to get profitable pasture is fire and a minimal amount of labor, but in Siberia the same investment would get nothing. Which is why the cattle industry buys the government of Brazil instead of Russia.

  • So the general pattern is that temperate forests are increasing, but tropical forests are declining (presumably due to climate change).

    Given that tropical forests are richer in species diversity and biomass per unit area, the discrepancy is probably greater than the changes in area suggest.

    • Velvet Underground and Nico
    • Bringing It All Back Home (Bob Dylan)
    • Kind of Blue (Miles Davis)
  • MediaWiki’s probably overkill for basic wiki functionality, but I use it for the sake of Semantic MediaWiki and associated extensions. But SMW has more of a learning curve, so it might not be worth it for a casual-use wiki.

  • That was my first assumption on reading the title, but the article mentions two other things:

    • The male-gene bias apparently persisted for subsequent generations after the initial human/Neanderthal pairing: male children of mixed ancestry had more offspring than their female siblings
    • In Neanderthal communities, the bias was reversed (i.e., more human DNA was retained in the X-chromosome female line.)
  • If the two species were biologically incompatible, modern human DNA should have been missing from Neanderthal X chromosomes as well. However, the analysis revealed that Neanderthal X chromosomes had a 62% excess of modern human DNA compared with their other chromosomes – a mirror-like reversal of the distribution of Neanderthal DNA in human populations.

    I dunno—isn’t that still consistent with a scenario where there’s a specific incompatibility between some gene on the Neanderthal X chromosome and a human gene on some other chromosome?

    Otherwise you have to have two parallel-but-opposite trends in human and Neanderthal societies, where human societies favor male offspring of human/Neanderthal unions, but Neanderthal societies favor female offspring.

    (Maybe this is addressed in the full paper—I don’t have access.)

  • Humanity? Sure.

    Human institutions? Less and less.

  • If you open the box, he might not have a cat. But before it’s opened we can be 100% certain that it contains a superposition of cat and non-cat.

    Do you want to be responsible for the loss of his uncertain cat?

  • He had more waves than he knew what to do with.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    Horses must think we’re mocking them when we use them to carry us around, then put them in trailers that carry them faster than they can run.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    If Civ I had been a real-time strategy game, people who started playing a game the year it came out would currently be up to 3965 BC.

  • Ask Science @lemmy.world

    Is it likely that we’re underestimating the extent of metamorphosis in the fossil record because we’re mistaking different stages of the same organism for different species?

  • Wikipedia @lemmy.world

    Investment theory of party competition

    en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Investment_theory_of_party_competition
  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    The Lord of the Rings spinoff the world needs right now isn’t Rings of Power or Hunt for Gollum—it’s a feature-length version of the Scouring of the Shire.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    Turing speculated that the ability to act human would be the best indication of humanlike thought, but a better indication would be the inability to act otherwise.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    The first evidence of human activity every archaeological expedition encounters is evidence of an archeological expedition.

  • Wikipedia @lemmy.world

    Dionysian imitatio

    en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Dionysian_imitatio
  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    I wonder what humans do when they’re not taking showers. And where does all this water come from? And how did I become sentient?

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    Maybe "CAESAR STABBED IN BACK BY BRUTUS AND CASSIUS" was just an ancient clickbait headline, and the actual event was a minor policy dispute instead of a literal assassination.

  • California @lemmy.world

    California opened college savings accounts for millions of kids. Why do so few know about it?

    oaklandnorth.net /2025/11/03/california-opened-college-savings-accounts-for-millions-of-kids-why-do-so-few-know-about-it/
  • Wikipedia @lemmy.world

    Shift-and-persist model

    en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Shift-and-persist_model
  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    The first century BCE and the last century BCE are the same century.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    People with six fingers can get away with anything, because everyone will assume that any videos of them were AI-generated.

  • Ask Science @lemmy.world

    What would be the drawbacks of a genetic code with 6 nucleotides instead of 4, but each amino acid could be coded with 2 base pairs instead of 3 (so the genome could be 33% shorter)?

  • California @lemmy.world

    Governor Newsom to deliver major address to Californians ("Democracy at a Crossroads")

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    If the Romans had put Jesus in a box with Schrödinger's cat, Christians’ souls would be in a quantum superposition of saved and damned.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    Trying to build viable third parties by voting for them in presidential elections is like trying to build a third door in your house by repeatedly walking into the wall where you want the door to be.

  • Biodiversity @mander.xyz

    Emerging niche clustering results from both competition and predation. (My takeaway: more species can coexist in an ecological niche if they have distinct predators.)

    onlinelibrary.wiley.com /doi/full/10.1111/ele.14230
  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    If whales are ignorant of conditions on land, they probably think humans are an endangered species.