exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Fact 8 hours ago:
Look at the video of her running, posted on September 29. A video posted on September 27 also shows short clips of her standing or walking or sitting with knees bent, showing that her femurs and tibias are proportional length. There’s a video called rapture prep posted on September 22 that includes a thumbnail that is a side shot with her knees bent, showing the ratio of femur to tibia.
I think it’s a normal proportioned short person whose camera angles tend to lengthen her upper body and shorten her lower body. And maybe a preference for high waisted pants that may trick the eye into thinking the hip hinge is higher than it is.
- Comment on Fact 11 hours ago:
She’s just short. And this image is taken from pretty close, so that little changes in distance to camera make a big difference in apparent length.
A typical smartphone camera’s default “1x” zoom tends to be a pretty wide lens with a short focal length. So you stand up close to your subject when taking pictures or video.
And people’s faces tend to look better when shot from at least eye level, especially with wide lenses from up close.
So if you imagine a 1.5 meter tall person photographed from 1.5 meters away, at height level, standing straight, the top 1/3 will take up about 18.435° of visual angle. The middle 1/3 will be 15.255°. And the bottom 1/3 will be 11.31°. So just like that, 0.5 meters can look 60% longer on the top portion of a subject than the exact same length, 0.5 meters, on the bottom of a subject.
As a result, there’s a warped perspective where the things that are higher on a person’s body or torso look longer, and things that are lower are further away and therefore smaller.
Bend the knees slightly and the difference becomes even more skewed.
We don’t notice these things with our eyeballs because our visual cortex corrects for these things with a three dimensional model of the world around us, but still photos don’t go through that same processing when perceived, so sometimes perspective plays tricks on perceived size/distance.
For a quick demonstration, pull out your phone and take a selfie from above your head, looking up at the camera. How small do your feet look, and does that match the real world appearance as you perceive them in real life?
- Comment on ChatGPT Atlas can automate Lemmy shitposting 12 hours ago:
Smart quotes are the default in certain interfaces (most notably the iPhone), so they’re not really a reliable indicator or bot-ness.
- Comment on Hell yeah 12 hours ago:
You’re telling me a crab ran this goon?
- Comment on Richest American to FAFO? 3 days ago:
He suffered from mental health and physical issues, blamed it on CTE, left a note requesting that his brain be examined for CTE, and was diagnosed with CTE after his death. All that is consistent with targeting the NFL headquarters in that building.
- Comment on Richest American to FAFO? 4 days ago:
The CEO of a specific fund that Blackstone operates, yes. And she was killed by someone targeting the NFL headquarters, who blamed football and CTE for some of his issues.
- Comment on hows keto working out for you 1 week ago:
also don’t think they are coprophages like rabbits.
Gorillas do selectively engage in coprophagy in certain situations, depending in large part on their nutrition and diet. Certain fruits in their diet, and the accompanying seeds in their shit, increase the likelihood that they’ll go back for seconds.
- Comment on hows keto working out for you 1 week ago:
The question was: how do gorillas get so muscular on a mostly plant based diet?
The correct answer is: they eat a shitload of protein that is present in the plants they eat, by consuming 20-30% of their calories from protein and eating 25-40kg of food per day.
Your answer included factually incorrect claims about how gorillas can synthesize any amino acid so that the concept of nutritionally essential amino acids don’t apply to them.
- Comment on hows keto working out for you 1 week ago:
at no point rebuts the fact that the essential amino acids are themselves ultimately essential
I’m taking issue with your claim that no specific amino acids are essential for gorillas. That’s wildly implausible, given that pretty much any animal studied has shown that animals all have essential amino acids, and that mammals generally require the same 9 amino acids as nutritionally essential. Even ruminants, whose gut microbes can synthesize many of the essential amino acids, still have issues if they don’t separately consume enough of those amino acids, because the rumen microbes can’t actually provide enough for their metabolic needs.
Yes, essential amino acids are essential. No, gorillas are not some kind of sole exception in animals to that general principle. They just get enough from their relatively high protein plant diets.
- Comment on hows keto working out for you 1 week ago:
because they can synthesize everything they need.
What are you talking about. Pretty much every animal lacks the ability to synthesize certain amino acids. No animal can rearrange the carbon skeletons of 11 out of the 21 amino acids relevant to animal protein (cysteine, histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, tyrosine, and valine), so the ability to synthesize certain amino acids necessarily relies on the presence of the amino acids that share the same carbon structure. See here, which talks about the essential/non-essential categorization as being outdated and needing to be understood as a sliding scale in which synthesizing even non-essential amino acids carries a cost, and that eating complete proteins in a species-appropriate ratio is still necessary for animals to thrive.
Gorillas consume something like 20-30% of their calories from protein depending on the ratio of low protein fruit to high protein leaves in their diets. Their plant food sources just don’t have all that much in the way of energy, so even the small amounts of protein in any given leaf is made up for the fact that they’re eating up to 40 kg of food per day.
The truth is, gorillas do consume quite a bit of protein. Plant matter, like pretty much any living organism, has protein. Leaves are relatively high in protein compared to other plant foods. Let’s not forget, broccoli has more protein per 100 calories than steaks do.
So no, gorillas are not capable of freely synthesizing the amino acids they need. The truth is that they’re eating a lot of protein from various sources at different amino acid ratios and using those amino acids pretty efficiently.
- Comment on Aight. Let's be honest. How many of you dress for yourselves, and how many dress for others? 1 week ago:
I dress for myself. And my own comfort does depend on things like social interactions and conversation dynamics and office relationships and others’ perception of me and my reputation. So dressing for myself includes dressing within social conventions.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 1 week ago:
You’re just listing reasons why they were reliant on a single crop for sustenance. Cool, but the actual historical example shows why that particular arrangement is brittle and vulnerable to shocks, which is the point being made here.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 1 week ago:
The Irish genocide that you refer to as using the colonizer’s term “Irish Potato Famine” had absolutely fuckall to do with potatoes or the Irish.
But it has everything to do with potatoes (a particular blight that affected potato crops) and the Irish (the actual affected people of this genocide).
The social and political reasons for why the Irish ended up so dependent on a single crop for sustenance is part of the story, of course, but this discussion right here is about the fragility and brittleness of relying on a single crop.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 1 week ago:
For another example of a plant that just didn’t make it into modern society at scale, there are skirrets. Carrots, parsnips, and skirrets were related umbellifer plants with edible, nutritious roots, cultivated over the centuries as food. Carrots and parsnips were responsive to breeding for root size, and could produce comparatively huge roots, but skirrets never really did. Once the potato was brought over from the new world, the skirret fell out of favor.
- Comment on soda 2 weeks ago:
…Peyton is just a common name in Tennessee. Maybe Peyton Manning helped that trend with his success as a quarterback, but there are a lot of kids with that name in Tennessee.
- Comment on Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo 3 weeks ago:
If I remember correctly, the book opens with a prologue describing the business/finance hype in biotech, where a bunch of startups are raising funds and racing to get rich revolutionizing how to commercialize the exciting cutting edge in biological science in that era. It has nothing to do with the plot and the characters of the book, except that it establishes the tone, the background, and the incentives at play.
- Comment on Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo 3 weeks ago:
My favorite moment in the book is where they realize that the computer program for tracking populations had an incorrect assumption and just returned the full count if it counted the expected population for an enclosure. Only, the dinosaurs were breeding, so the system didn’t catch that the populations were actually higher than expected, and therefore didn’t notice when some dinosaurs escaped from their enclosures.
I didn’t get what chaos theory was until like 10-20 years later, but to my 12-year-old self it was the first time I learned about how bad assumptions can cascade in real world failures.
- Comment on Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo 3 weeks ago:
Michael Crichton was a successful novelist, and his first foray into show business was writing the screenplay for Westworld, about a park where everything goes wrong. It flopped commercially but basically planted the seeds for him to try it again, but with dinosaurs. Spielberg directed the adaptation and then there was a rush to adapt a bunch of other stuff. He was also an executive producer for ER, as it was adapted from a pilot he wrote, based on his own experience from med school (he graduated with an MD but never practiced).
- Comment on Pet rent 3 weeks ago:
Oldest profession.
- Comment on PUT THE TRAINS IN THE BAG 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 4 weeks ago:
Now Dennis, I hear speed has something to do with it.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 4 weeks ago:
It’s too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you’re breathing heavily. Then you’ll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!
- Comment on PUT THE TRAINS IN THE BAG 4 weeks ago:
The problem is that population distribution means that almost nobody is going to be getting on or off the train between Minneapolis and Seattle. The population of North Dakota is 800k, South Dakota is 925k, Nebraska is 2 million, Montana is 1.1 million, Wyoming is 590k, Idaho is 2 million. That’s nearly a whole quadrant of the country with less population than the Houston metro area. If we’re building trains, let’s build trains in Houston and serve the same number of people with like a tiny percentage of track that it would take to serve the upper plains states.
- Comment on hyperbaric oxygen chamber 4 weeks ago:
Call me a Luddite but I don’t like the sound of toxin injections and “shockwave therapy” for my genitals.
- Comment on hyperbaric oxygen chamber 4 weeks ago:
I don’t know what it is about computer science that makes people so confident they’re always the smartest person in the room, but it does lead to some interesting scams.
It’s not computer science. It’s money and power. Having everyone else in your life falling all over themselves to kiss your ass is toxic to one’s personality, and makes it hard to stay grounded.
The thing with becoming rich and powerful through other avenues, it might happen in a way that you’re less confident in your intellectual capabilities and are used to outsourcing things to professionals. If you’re a pro athlete or actor or musician, you might come up with the understanding that you need your agents and lawyers and accountants to do what they do.
But tech business leaders who become rich feel that they know the tech, know the business, and know the world. The thing they are most confident about is the thing that made them rich.
See also some athletes believing in nonsense about health and fitness, because of their superior athletic performance.
Or artists who descend into terrible rabbit holes, artistically, because nobody is around to tell them no.
Anyone who gets rich off of their smarts is susceptible. Engineers, doctors, bankers, financial professionals, lawyers, etc.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 4 weeks ago:
In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It’s only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.
We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don’t actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.
So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified “touch” perception.
Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one’s proprioception, because it’s all integrated in how it’s perceived.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 4 weeks ago:
Nero
The dude who fiddled as Rome burned?
- Comment on I'm very happy for her. In youth tightness can be a problem 4 weeks ago:
Mannn it’s the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice!
- Comment on Natural selection at work 4 weeks ago:
It’s interesting because it’s very obvious, biologically, that the panda has a digestive system that has a carnivore past, and yet, the very plentiful biomass in bamboo forests just waiting to be eaten rewards the animals that can make use of it. So the giant panda may or may not be “optimized” for meat, but has generations that came out of the free food that is bamboo, so that their very survival depends on a herbivore diet.
- Comment on Natural selection at work 4 weeks ago:
I remember reading that the common ancestors of all birds was carnivorous. Basically every herbivore bird descended from carnivores.
See also the giant panda and the red panda.
