• 1 Post
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 8th, 2023

help-circle
  • I always hated sugar, and ate 3 large meals a day. Huge breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snacks. Never gained at all.

    That all changed after my pregnancy at 28. Suddenly I seemed to gain weight through osmosis. I mostly lost interest in food, and only started eating sensible quantities twice a day.

    Now I can’t lose weight at all, even with nearly a gallon of water per day and one small cup of food every day or two (to be fair, my body now rejects most food because of an autoimmune disorder), but I can actually gain weight on less than 500 calories a day. It doesn’t make sense by conventional logic, yet here I am. I mostly live on Ensure and Pedialyte, yet I weigh more than I ever have. It’s really weird.



  • The common excuse I’ve seen from them is that he was entitled to have all of it.

    Of course, they also freaked out about Biden having a few things from his previous White House stint in his garage around the same time (none of which held a candle to what trump had in quantity or severity), but nevermind that double standard. Trump was allowed because reasons.





  • LillyPip@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzsame as it ever was
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    6 days ago

    What about caring for the elderly and disabled? We see anthropological evidence of many behaviours that can only be explained by compassion and empathy, some of which would have actually detracted from security.

    The notion that the early formation of societies was based on security rather than empathy is outdated. Compassion has many evolutionary advantages, especially in primate species where offspring are born vulnerable. It’s clearly evident in other primates who live in groups (or ‘societies’), as a driving force of cooperation and group cohesion.

    Here’s a recent paper (2022) by Penny Spikins, PhD at the University of York, Department of Archaeology, that explores how compassion shaped early human evolution and the formation of societies: The Evolutionary Basis for Human Empathy, Compassion and Generosity.

    And here’s another from 2011 by Goetz et al that explores in detail the evolutionary advantages of compassion: Compassion: An Evolutionary Analysis and Empirical Review.

    Those papers are both fascinating reads, and I highly recommend them both for a deeper understanding of why and how empathy is crucial to our success as a species.

    e: a word


  • Millions of years, likely. The whole reason we’re successful is because our pre-human ancestors were empathetic and cooperative enough to build societies.

    We see those same traits in many other primates, and they’re not something it makes sense to evolve, lose, and evolve again. Those traits predate us.

    Language almost certainly predates us, since we see it not only in other primates, but in non-primate species, too. And based on the humour we see in many animals, you can bet we were making dick jokes nearly out of the gate.





  • I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).

    The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.

    What the fuck was going on?

    In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.

    This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.