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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Some are random and have no disadvantage, so they stick around. Others have an advantage that may or may not still be relevant.

    High melanin levels help with bright equatorial sun. Low melanin levels help with vitamin D synthesis in areas where there’s less sun.

    Curly African hair is better at protecting the scalp from the sun and heat. There’s less hair follicles overall, allowing for better airflow and the tight curls keep the hair away from the scalp allowing it to cool better. This also meant less sweating, which made it easier to remain hydrated and clean.
    Straighter hair tends to be more dense, and to do a better job keeping you warm.

    A lot of the other traits are random, or in genes connected to the general melanin genes, since evolution is unlikely to specifically target just the melanin levels of skin, and not the overall melanin level.

    Some traits are also a result of sexual selection. Peacocks have large, vibrant plumage because it helps them attract a mate. Some human characteristics are the same. We essentially selectively bred ourselves based on the whim of aesthetics.

    Finally, much of what we consider racial differences between people are social constructs.
    That’s not to say that the differences aren’t real, but that the racial division is a relatively arbitrary line.
    For example, I’m nearly a foot taller than my wife. My ancestors wandered up from Africa, landed in Scandinavia and then drifted to Scotland and southern England before coming to the Americas and getting mixed up in the Canadian fur trade in the 1600s. My wife’s ancestors stopped in Germany before coming to the Americas in the late 1800s.
    Our children are not considered mixed race because our skin is the same color, even though the actual lineage is pretty distinct.

    We decided that skin color is a race marker, but not things like “height”, “toe and finger length”, or things like that.
    Except for where we did, like when European colonizers relatively arbitrarily decided that different traits were racial markers amongst the colonized, like nose shape and chin thickness.

    All that to say, much of what we consider obvious racial differences that stand out are only such because we decided to pay attention to them. Other perfectly visible variations are just normal individual variations.


  • You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
    People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

    People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn’t let them vote for president, so they can’t legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
    One of the proposals that’s come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there’s never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.





  • I know that in general, proverbs are difficult to translate because they assume a lot of cultural knowledge to convey their idea.

    Like if I say to you “bird in the hand”, you’ll understand that I’m referencing the notion that there’s value to a sure thing that can outweigh the value of potentially having more.

    If you ever watch a UN speech, the translators sometimes pause for a bit to figure out how to convey not just the literal words, but also the meaning and the meaning in context.

    • onion sorrow
    • the horse did not roll
    • There are elderberries in the kitchen garden, and your uncle in Kiev




  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzGet good.
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    16 days ago

    I thought the universal part was the tone and cadence people use when talking to small children, and not the actual words or grammar changes.

    It’s why you can listen to a recording of a language you don’t know and tell if they’re talking to a baby, but there are also cultures that essentially don’t talk to them at all until they have language.



  • I have an assigned voting location, but there are several in my district that are all “valid”, and I was just assigned the one closest to my house. If I were to be confused and go to a valid location I wasn’t assigned to, I’m still in the ledger. Since I’m attempting to vote in the correct district, they don’t really have grounds to turn me away.

    If I were in the wrong district, I’m still allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which lets you vote but they sort it out later.

    You can also vote absentee and then also in person and not disclose that you need to invalidate the absent vote. Here that’s automatic, but in some places it’s a crime.

    You’re also allowed to go to a clerks office, which has the equipment to print any ballot and handle it correctly.


  • The exact specifics vary based on the state, but it’s roughly the same in each of them.
    You track the voter, ballot, collection and counting.

    Voter A issued ballot 3. Ballot 3 collected Ballot 3 counted.

    The counting phase involves removing the tracking number from the ballot before removing a cover that keeps the vote private.

    You can’t slip an extra ballot into the box because then the totals don’t add up, and you know where in the process the discrepancy occurred.
    Making sure there are multiple eyes on issuing and counting means it’s hard to create or count a fake ballot.
    When not observed by multiple people, the containers are locked with multiple locks with keys held by different people.

    It’s why most voter fraud is a voter going to multiple valid voting locations to vote multiple times. Once the tabulations begin, you see you counted the number collected, collected the number issued, and that you issued one ballot to each voter except one, who got three.





  • Most modern plans for eradication involve creating a virus that handles it, rather than a pesticide.
    Have the virus introduce a gene that takes a few generations of breeding in the impacted population before it starts to debilitate or sterilize the mosquitoes. That way your virus can start to kill the population even as it spreads to areas that were missed.


  • All of our best data on the impact says that it really wouldn’t matter. Sometimes a species is a linchpin for the ecosystem, and sometimes it isn’t.

    Sucks for mosquitoes, but there’s a very real chance that we’ll smallpox them, and the biggest concern will be our confidence that the virus we use doesn’t impact other species unintentionally.


  • if you technically pull people out of poverty by outsourcing to the lowest paying, least labor regulated parts of the world, is the fact that extreme poverty went away in those areas even a good thing?

    Yes. Your prospects of a healthy life increase when going from not being able to provide for yourself to being barely able to provide for yourself by working in fantastically poor conditions.

    If a sweatshop didn’t provide more worker value than extreme poverty, people just wouldn’t work there.

    The bare minimum of improvements is still an improvement, and that we should strive for better than the bare minimum doesn’t make the bare minimum worthless to the people who got it.