• 2 Posts
  • 224 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle

  • I wonder if I’ve got the same kind of thing. I love onions but absolutely hate leeks. They taste like the smell of stale urine.

    I’ve never understood it - I know they don’t taste like this to other people. I like the other edible alliums, but leeks taste uniquely awful.

    I keep trying them every few years hoping that my tastes have changed, but they haven’t until this point.



  • I’m in a tricky position here.

    I use MyMiniFactory, have backed several frontiers things and am a member of a few tribes.

    I also use Thingiverse a lot.

    And while I certainly don’t want to pay for AI content, I don’t mind that much if it’s free. There have been times that I’ve looked for something for DnD and the only option was AI generated. And honestly, I’d much rather have that than no model at all.


  • Taxonomically speaking, birds are dinosaurs.

    There isn’t a place to put a line between them - all the things that make birds “birds” also apply to dinosaurs.

    A super fun fact is that of the two main types of dinosaur, Saurischia (“lizard-hipped”) and Ornithischia (“bird-hipped”), birds actually evolved from the lizard-hipped group.










  • It’s a ridiculous take that the political minutiae of the US is largely meaningless to people outside the US?

    Look, it’s enough for me to know that the USA has made a thinly veiled threat about forcibly taking over Greenland. This is of immediate concern to me.

    I don’t need to know the details of what the American version of Göring said in defence of the American version of the Gestapo this week.

    We have our own domestic nonsense that I’m sure you don’t get inundated with - why would it be so ridiculous for us not to want to get bombarded with yours?


  • Apepollo11@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzLamarck moment
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    He was. He just didn’t get the mechanism behind it right.

    A crude way of explaining Lamarckian evolution would be to look at giraffes. Lamarckism suggests that because an animal that spends much of its life stretching its neck to reach food, it ends up with a slightly longer neck. This trait is then passed down to children, who might spend much of their lives stretching their necks, making them slightly longer. And so on.

    He correctly identified that speciation occurs over many many generations, as a result of tiny incremental changes.

    What Darwin did was to recognise the actual mechanism behind speciation - Natural Selection. Darwin was aware of and built on Lamarck’s work.

    Weirdly, within the last thirty years, we’ve realised that the truth is not so clear cut. Epigenetic changes do occur as a result of the environment and are hereditary. While genes are still the main drivers of evolution, these epigenetic changes affect gene expression.





  • I’m going to go against the grain here and say “kinda”.

    But porn isn’t the driver, it was a facet of the actual reason - accessibility and cost.

    Betamax was, by any metric, the superior system.

    VHS, however, was cheaper to produce, and cheaper to buy the recording equipment.

    JVC had an open licencing strategy to encourage manufacturers to produce VHS-compatible equipment. Sony had a closed licencing strategy to maximise revenue.

    So in this new world, where small movie studios could now record directly to magnetic tape and small companies could duplicate and distribute copies for very little cost, which format would you pick? The cheapest one.

    The ready availability of porn was a factor for VHS’s success, but so was the ready availability of cheaply made horror films, martial arts films and other niche genres (niche by 1970s/1980s standards).