modeler

joined 1 year ago
[–] modeler 4 points 1 day ago

If the Russian missile fails, it will automatically be tested against western radars and anti-aircraft missiles.

[–] modeler 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The stones in Machu Picchu are so perfectly fitted that you can't insert even a razor blade between them. Thousands of tiny monkey aliens swarming over the construction site with nuclear powered angle grinders polishing the rocks is the only reasonable explanation for this.

[–] modeler 31 points 2 weeks ago

You're in the process of describing a Cybertruck, just the misfitting panel 'teeth' aren't rotating

 

Spotted an owl in the woods in Bishan Park in central Singapore early in the evening. Logically this makes it a spotted wood owl.

Sorry for the low quality - it was at the limits of my Pixel 6 camera.

[–] modeler 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

As an aside, oysters are not bivalves, they are brachiopods. Brachiopods do have a nervous system - some even have eyes.

What's the difference and how do you tell a brachiopod from a bivalve? It's the plane of symmetry. In bivalves the plane of symmetry is where the shells (also known as valves) join. So bivalves have two identical shells. Whelks and razor shells are bivalves. Brachiopods also have two shells, but the shells are normally quite different. The oyster for example has one big concave shell and one small flat one on top. The big shell has a hole at the apex (just next to the hinge) and a root-like anchor grows from it to bind the brachiopod to the matrix on which it lives. Brachiopods have an axis of symmetry from this root/foot that vertically separates each shell into two mirrored parts.

[–] modeler 1 points 1 month ago

Well Texas was welcoming them with lots and lots of arms - handguns, rifles and more.

[–] modeler 10 points 1 month ago (9 children)

Because of the danger that the tray has traces of sourdough?

[–] modeler 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Don't mention carpet anywhere near the campaign in case Vance starts eyeing the furniture again

[–] modeler 34 points 1 month ago (5 children)

This is true for only red and green loght detecting proteins (opsins) - the blue opsin gene is on chromosome 7.

The red and green detecting proteins have an interesting history in humans.

Fish, amphibians, lizards and birds have 4 different opsins: for red, green, yellow and blue colours. And the blue opsin sees up into the ultra-violet. Most animals can see waaaay more colours in the world than we (or any mammal) can. So what happened that makes mammal vision so poor?

It's thought that all mammals descend from one or a few species of nocturnal mammal that survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. The colour detecting cells (the cones) need a lot of light compared to ones that see in black-and-white (the rods) and therefore nocturnal animals frequently lose cones in favour of the more sensitive rods for better night vision. The mammals that survived the Cretaceous extinction had also lost the green and yellow opsins while keeping red and blue - basically the two different ends of the light spectrum.

Consequently today most mammals still have only 2 opsins so your cat or dog is red-green colourblind.

Why do humans see green? Probably because our monkey forebears, who lived in trees and ate leaves, needed to distinguish red leaves and red fruit (visible to birds) from the green background.

But how did we bring back the green opsin? A whole section of the X chromosome (where the red opsin is coded) got duplicated in a dna copying mistake and then there were two genes for red opsins. As there are different alleles (versions), they could be selected for independently and so one red opsin drifted up the spectrum to be specific for green. So our green opsin is a completely different gene to the green opsin in fish, birds, etc. This kind of evolution happens a lot which is why, for example, there are many families of similar hormones like testosterone and estrogen. And steroids too.

[–] modeler 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Just to add one more sidenote: France is of course named after the Franks, a German people who lived next door to the Alemanni and the Saxons.

[–] modeler 15 points 1 month ago

It is the defecal standard though.

[–] modeler 2 points 2 months ago

Someone has to decide whether it is or is not perjury. In this case it's the Senate and they need 2/3rd majority. So that basically means Supreme court judges (and presidents) are impossible to get rid of, even for perjury.

[–] modeler 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

He's hiring a ghost writer because they are very cheap.

When a person dies, they stop needing earthly rewards. And, because a lot of great authors and writers have died, there are a lot of candidate ghost writers, like Martin Amis, Truman Capote and Barbara Cartland. A good spiritualist can summon the right auteur from beyond this mortal coil for any compositional need you have!

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