underthehedge

[underthehedge]

hiya! i’ve been wondering this for a while but, when/why did humans lose the ability to eat raw meat?

I’ll tell you a secret- humans never actually lost that ability! you are just as capable of chowing down on a freshly-killed antelope as, say, a chimpanzee is.

“wait, what?”

this is because raw meat, when it’s fresh off the hoof, is actually pretty clean in terms of harmful bacteria! bacteria only really shows up to the meat party when raw meat is allowed to sit for a while, like on a supermarket shelf, or the side of the road.

euuuugh!

but what there IS plenty of in raw meat is parasites! meat is just chock full of those little guys, which is why most wild predators are ALSO chock full of various internal parasites. always wash your hands after you shake paws with a lion, kids!

“WAIT, WHAT??”

this, combined with the fact that cooked meat is easier to digest and offers more energy per gram, is why early humans started charring their dinner over the fire before they tried to take a bite. 

so I mean, you COULD just grab a squirrel and chomp down, but why would you do that when hamburgers are a thing? early humans knew what they were talking about. 

give me your pickles if you don’t want em, though.

#i mean #i guess the asker has never met french people #humans #evolution

[underthehedge]

Most bird species can fly but corvids are the only ones that seem to really get that they can fuckin fly.

Like, you see them pulling shit like this and it's just, yeah, that's what I'd do if I could fly too, dude. They play with the air like a human would.

#birds #corvids

[underthehedge]

Swamp spaghetti time

#toads #amphibians #you know how it is with spaghetti

[underthehedge]

Particularly galling on YouTube because they go, to adult human beings creating videos for other adult human beings, as part of a job, "You said shit, which is naughty word and we can't run ads on that so No Money For You".

And then, as far as I can tell, they run ads on it anyway. They just don't give the money to the creator of the video. Basically fining grown adults for swearing.

Like, you can swear on the BBC after the watershed. Swear words are a part of language and tbh I actually approve of not having children swear/not swearing in front of children. The words only work if they're a little bit forbidden. But, once a child is old enough to be using the internet unsupervised they are already old enough to hear someone say fuck.

You know what really fucking Annoys Me about internet censorship is stuff like swear words being heavily censored because that's entirely an American cultural hangup being forced on the rest of us. I don't know a single country where swearing is as taboo as it is in America. In fact most languages have swear words that would have the same effect on an American as giving a Victorian chimney sweep a pepsi max cherry.

#internet #so often nowadays on reddit I have to explain to new users in various subreddits #that no it's totally ok you can say sex here you can say fuck here you can say shit #hell you can post an HD photo of your entire anus here if you want so long as you tag it NSFW and do it in the right sub #so now using your grownup words can you tell us more about this grown up book you're looking for without saying 'spicy' and 'h00kup' #i'll still never get over the r/whatsthatbook post that used 'spicy' three times for a four sentence request #including the phrase 'he got a spicy piercing' #girl just tell us he got a prince albert

[underthehedge]

Shoops are about as intelligent as your average goldfish, which is to say, not at all

So, marginally more intelligent than sheep then.

Behold! The noble Shoop.

#mammals #ok not actually mammals I guess #spec bio

[underthehedge]

Like I know we all love making ADHD seem cool but like, don't forget it's actually a disability? My ADHD is bad enough I've nearly been evicted for forgetting to mail the rent check to the property manager, I've forgotten to pay the utility bills and had my water or power get turned off or had to pay fines bcs I missed a credit card payment. Once I was supposed to cat sit for a friend and I lost the house key she gave me but didn't realize until she was already out of town, and she had to call the apartment office to get someone to give me the spare so her cats would have food for the week. When I'm unmedicated I can't even get myself to shower half the time, forget eating or cleaning. Before I started living with my fiance I'd just like, not eat for days because I didn't have anyone to remind me to eat or go buy me food. I've forgotten to turn the stove off so many times and ruined kettles and tbh been DAMN fucking lucky the house didn't burn down. I've done stupid, impulsive shit that's nearly gotten me KILLED. I can't remember to close the shower curtain reliably even through my fiance points out every single time I forget, and he's almost out of soap rn bcs for the last MONTH neither of us have been able to remember to order more once we get out of the shower.

I've had such bad memory my entire life that to this day someone suggesting I forgot something because I simply didn't care enough is a legitimate trigger that, in the worst cases, makes me have a breakdown.

I get that for some of you this is just something that makes studying hard or you forget to take a pee break when you're playing Minecraft or whatever, that's still a valid struggle and you do deserve help and understanding, but like, ADHD is a disability. It's disabling. It's not impossible to improve and learn coping skills, meds help a lot, there are great accommodations out there(LIKE CLEANING SERVICES), but not every case of ADHD is the same, and a lot of them are pretty ugly ngl, and just because you managed to do something doesn't mean someone else is gonna be able to manage it too, or that they're being lazy for struggling. And that obviously doesn't mean ADHD people have a free pass to never work on themselves and make everyone cater to their every need or whatever, but we do deserve some understanding when we explain that our disability is actually disabling in ways that aren't palatable to you. So like, idk, maybe don't immediately recoil in horror when you find out that someone with ADHD can't keep their house clean. And for fucks sake don't ridicule them for it.

#adhd #actually adhd #yeah like some bits are cool and we do need positivity #but also uh a lot of ADHD objectively sucks shit #and it's not just because of society or capitalism it's because we have a brain disability

[underthehedge]

Sadly, since the reddit API change, reveddit and the suchlike are no longer able to archive reddit threads.

Though, also: reveddit policy was to remove comments and posts deleted by the user anyway. Their goal was to archive stuff and let you see what got deleted by the mods etc., but with the proviso that if a user deleted their own comments then it was right to have it removed.

Anyway, reddit is a treasure-trove of information on a broken internet but I am begging everyone on reddit who solves a problem to say what did it instead of leaving threads with "don't worry, I sorted it now".

girl typing a very specific question into google search bar, scrunching her face as she takes time to make sure she hasn't made any spelling errors, hitting enter, shaking her head as google only presents her with unhelpful websites that don't answer her query at all, moving her cursor back to the search bar and clicking on it so she can carefully write 'reddit' at the end, hitting enter again, sighing with relief as she finds a link to a reddit post asking the exact question she needed answered posted in a subreddit for a very niche topic, finally moving her cursor to click on the link, wondering why she didn't go straight to the subreddit earlier, only to be met with a deleted comment with a reply from the OP stating 'that was very helpful, thanks', sighing with frustration as she moves her cursor back to the search bar so she can copy the link and paste it into the wayback machine,

#reddit #anyway waybackmachine my beloved #and reveddit my beloved too #the not archiving user deleted content is annoying for sure #but I do get their idea behind it

[underthehedge]

ive done it lads. ive perfected paneer making in the united states. i can get perfect cubes of smooth and soft but with a bite paneer.

#ooh gonnae have to check that out #I mean I can just buy paneer at the supermarket here in the UK #and I do because hell yes paneer #but this is interesting #sometimes this is a cooking blog

[underthehedge]

Lately I've been fuming over the way we seem to have lost wildcard searches. I don't want my search engine looking for variants and synonyms on a whim, I want it to look for the words I tell it to look for.

Like, I would fuckin kill for a decent boolean search engine with functional wildcard operators.

Let me just fuckin search for (word) AND ("exact phrase") AND ((word) OR (wo*)) NOT (pintrest)

n.b. you can at least still do like -"pintrest" etc. on google still, and should

#internet #when will me search engines return from the war?

[underthehedge]

This is.....niche. Do period-appropriate chickens even still exist? Idk anything about chickens. I like the fancy ones.

#this is the kind of thing that bothers me #because I know Too Much About Chickens #birds #poultry #chickens

[underthehedge]

sure this has been done before but i still had to just in case

#see also: academia #still laughing over a friend of a friend saying neurodivergence was underrepresented in academia #like oh my gods man could not be more wrong #underdiagnosed? maybe #underrepresented? good lord no

[underthehedge]

This reminds me of behavioural studies on some ant species. It was a species with small colony sizes (~100-200), opportunistically in crevices and move nest semi regularly.

Some ants were never satisfied and always looking for a better nest, some were highly reluctant to move even if there was a better spot, and the decision was made by consensus. Some were in the middle. Moving nest is risky but a better nest is a better nest. And the colonies benefited from this mix of personalities, because the two personality extremes balance each other out and the push-pull dynamic minimises risk while encouraging finding the best nest spot.

What people need to remember about the whole “ADHD is evolutionary beneficial” is that humans are social animals, and a lot of human evolution only makes sense in this context. For example, the gay uncle hypothesis: being gay seems at first to be evolutionary detrimental (as they don’t pass down their genes), but in fact having a small amount of gay people is beneficial to the group as they can eg adopt orphans.

Imagine a person with ADHD is living alone in Palaeolithic times and is foraging. They common across a bush full of rather boring fruits, pick and eat a few, then get bored and abandon the bush in search of nicer fruit. They don’t find any and starve to death (womp womp). Not very evolutionary beneficial

Instead imagine a person with ADHD in Palaeolithic times who’s one of a group of 20, the others all being neurotypical. The group comes across the bush, and they start picking the fruit. The ADHD wanders off on their own, and most of the time they don’t find any better fruit and return to eat the fruit the rest of the group collected. Occasionally however, they do find better fruit, alert the group, and everyone gets to eat the good fruit instead.

In this scenario, if everyone was ADHD then they’d be much more likely to all starve to death. If everyone was neurotypical they’d be much more likely to settle for the subpar fruit. With most people being neurotypical and a few having ADHD the group has the best results.

In a collaborative agricultural society rather than a hunter-gatherer one, having some individuals with ADHD is still beneficial to the group, but the ideal ratio of neurotypical:ADHD switches much more towards having mostly neurotypicals, as most of the tasks needed to be done require sticking to the same boring task for a long time. However, the only time the ideal evolutionary amount of ADHDers is 0 is in a hyperindividualist society.

Even in our current individualist society, having some ADHDers is beneficial as they’re better at jobs like being paramedics, but without the much more collaborative society we spent most of evolutionary history in (where the ADHD hunter-gatherer who didn’t find better fruit could simply eat some collected by the rest of the group) it is much more hard for the ADHDers to succeed. There’s also the fact that there’s a lot more Tasks™️ required in day-to-day life (I personally find that my biggest struggles are with things like household chores rather than school or work), and that phones/social media are designed to be very addictive which is especially detrimental to people who struggle with focus and internal motivation.

#actually adhd #adhd

[underthehedge]

3am it is, chief!

#adhd #actually adhd

[underthehedge]

The only thing that concerns me is that...ok credit scores work differently in different countries but I wonder if racking up a bunch of failed payments on prepaid cards would influence that. Would it matter if it was on a prepaid debit card?

Many questions.

I'm working out my business expenses for last year so I can file my taxes, and the sheer amount of ADHD tax I accidentally accumulated by forgetting to pause or cancel payments for subscription-based services (looking at you, stamps.com) is infuriating.

Like, I'm mad at me for forgetting, but why does everything have to be subscription-based? Why can't I just pay for shit when I use it.

Anyway. I've been derailed from doing my taxes and now I'm hunting down all the shit I'm not using but apparently still paying for. Fucksake.

#adhd #actually adhd #it just occurred to me that it might have associated problem is all #but it might not be a thing so I'll have to look into that

[underthehedge]

The two ADHD levels of activity: Indistinguishable From A Rock and Indistinguishable From A Machine.

lol. I can only presume Tumblr thought I was spamming people in quick succession but it looks like my ability to Dm people just got turned off.

#adhd #actually adhd #yeah sorry them's the breaks #you either do nothing or you do everything at a rate that doesn't seem human

[underthehedge]

I've mostly heard of the mental neoteny thing not in terms of simply making them dumb babies we could control so much as it being like...advantageous for living with humans because we do a similar thing. By which I mean that a lot of animals have a sort of critical period in which they learn about the world and things that happen in it and as adults learn to freak the fuck out at new things because they're Not Normal.

This is of course great for most wild animals because too much introspection is often not so different from hanging a big sign around your neck saying "remove me from the gene pool, I'm delicious!". But for animals being cared for by humans, adapting to regular changes and having a higher tolerance for Weird New Shit is an advantage when it comes to dealing with us.

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but the thing about dogs is that you very much can, it's one of the features of dogs compared to wolves. If you raise a wolf pup with dogs, it will hit an age after which it is significantly less able to adapt to changes in its environment and new stimuli than the domestic dogs it grew up with.

Idk, it sounds like the backing for the idea is rather shaky but none the less I've not heard it properly discussed in terms of like "ahahah we can so evilly abuse these moron animals because we made them helpless!" so much as "juvenile animals tend to be more open to new stimuli and it's easier to work with cattle that don't grind you to a gritty red paste on sight because you wore a new hat*".

I'd always heard there was some link between piebaldism and neurological development due to migration of melanocytes in embryological development but I wouldn't be surprised if that was just a vague hypothesis and there's a better explanation. Namely: humans like novel stuff and if a cow has patches instead of a solid colour a bunch of people are going to go "oh, cool cow! let's make more!". Weird coat patterning including large white blotches meanwhile are rarely a good look for wild animals.

On that note I wouldn't be surprised if a number of things considered to be part of a "domestication syndrome" are extremely incidental and merely represent common mutations that get selected out quickly in wild animals but can maintain themselves in the population when they're being protected by humans. Not linked to behavioural domestication directly so much as just the release from wild selection pressures.

*This is of course an example of what you say about how none of these things apply to horses because horses will 100% do that.

I looked up some stuff about the "domestication syndrome" in animals because I read a couple times in books the idea that domesticated animals are neotenous, meaning they retain juvenile traits into adulthood. The idea being that humans have essentially created more helpless, more exploitable versions of wild animals to "dominate" and abuse nature.

I thought, "Okay, that sounds like something that couldn't be proven. How much do we even know about the juvenile brain development of, say, wild goats or boars, anyway?"

So I found this review of the literature that goes back to the fur farm fox domestication study and it's even worse than I thought: We don't even know that a 'domestication syndrome' in animals exists at all, let alone whether it is a retention of juvenile traits into adulthood.

So the fur farm fox domestication study: you may have heard of it, it claimed to have demonstrated that within a few generations, by selecting for tameness, the researchers bred "domesticated" foxes with a whole suite of traits that appear in many domesticated animals but seem unrelated to tameness, such as piebald coloration and floppy ears. The idea is that the genes for tameness and for these other traits commonly seen in domestic animals are linked, that is, an animal that inherits one is likely to inherit the other.

There's some major problems. First of all, all the foxes used in the study were from fur farms, and had already been selected for some level of docility and for coat color variation. The foxes didn't get white spots on them because they were selected for tameness, instead the pre-existing population they were selected from had those genes in it to begin with. Also, the effective population size of the foxes in the study was pretty small, meaning a small amount of genetic drift could have a big impact.

Second, there isn't very much evidence for most of the "domestication syndrome" traits in most animals. Even where the "domestication syndrome" traits can be found, they are often particular to specific breeds, and it's unclear whether they are linked to domestication as such or just the development of that specific breed.

This study only deals with a few animals, mostly small animals. It would be even more interesting to see a breakdown of even more animals (particularly more large animals). Off the top of my head, almost none of these would apply to horses, and only in specific cases would apply to cattle. Even in dogs, extreme changes in skull morphology have happened relatively recently with breeders in modern times going after extreme phenotypes.

Particular to cats: extreme skull changes and floppy ears occur as part of some "breeds" because they are specific painful genetic disorders that breeders of cats decided to perpetuate VERY recently. Scottish Folds were deliberately developed from cats that just so happened to have a disease that causes them to be in constant suffering due to their messed up joints, it's not just a variation that regularly pops up in cats to varying extents. Likewise with the smushed-face Persians. Their brains are getting squished into where their spinal cords should go because their skulls are so messed up from selective breeding for an extreme look.

What domestication means has been majorly shaken up in the past hundred years. With companion animals, breeders are in a race to make the most screwed up animal with the most extreme, striking traits possible, and with livestock animals, lots of heritage breeds with more variations have straight up gone extinct because they've been flattened into industrial monocultures to produce meat and milk as efficiently as possible, health and genetic diversity be damned.

To study domestication itself, you would have to study landrace breeds, right?

Basically there isn't one thing that domestication is

#animals #domestication #I'mma have to read that review now because it sounds interesting #but yeah the coat colours thing is an interesting point about the fact they were fur foxes anyway #but also just like...yeah you're going to see some whacky colours in domestic animals because they're not in the wild #you see these things in wild animals pretty regularly too tbh they just don't survive long term #because they stand out to predators and prey usually #interestingly the wild ancestors of horses in Europe apparently came in a bunch of colour patterns already #cave paintings show they were pretty varied as is #maybe because horses don't go for camouflage so much as just being Very Fast and if that fails Kicking Shit To Death #as their primary defence mechanism

[underthehedge]

Even that is still valuable. If people make it easier for researchers at big ag companies to find and promote a wider diversity of food crops that still helps towards food security, and it doesn't stop the public and NGOs etc. from accessing and propagating the information to use either.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-22/food-plant-solutions-malnutrition-farming-edible-plants/12580732

https://fms.cmsvr.com/fmi/webd/Food_Plants_World

This guy is my new hero. I LOVE learning about native food plants that just grow everywhere without human help.

The database is a little clunky to use (especially on a phone), but still loads of excellent information.

#plants #listen crop diversity is a great way of fighting malnutrition and ensuring food security #but farmers as well aren't equipped to start sorting through hundreds of genotypes of wild plants to find ones that work with cultivation #if big companies get hold of this information it actually would benefit people still #because they have the power and resources to find improve market and distribute novel crops #truth is big agricultural companies may be evil because y'know corporations and capitalism #but they've also been instrumental in uh helping ensure people are staying fed #and say monsanto developing a commercial strain of random berry number five #doesn't stop subsistence farmers or whatever growing it to supplement their harvest #it just means that there may be better yielding varieties out there too