What have you learned today?

Dalisclock

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Bonobos are horrendous perverts and are constantly having sex with anyone and everyone regardless of age or sex. Bonobos have sex with infants.
There's a reason most Zoos don't have them, because imagine trying to explain to the kids what the Bonobos are doing. I'm all for sex education but I'm not sure I want the horny fucking apes to be the lesson plan.
 

Drathnoxis

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There's a reason most Zoos don't have them, because imagine trying to explain to the kids what the Bonobos are doing. I'm all for sex education but I'm not sure I want the horny fucking apes to be the lesson plan.
Funny you say that, because from what I read, of all the primates their sexual behavior is thought to be closest to humans.
 
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EvilRoy

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Talked to a train engineer today. I learned that train rails are actually not these static permanent things the way they often seem. Apparently the efficiency of the train depends a huge amount on the running surface of the rail, which is the shiny strip you see when you look at them. If the strip is a straight, regular polished line then its in good shape. If you see the strip getting very wide, thin or wobbly it means that it needs to be ground and adjusted. Apparently the "boober" cross sectional shape has to do with allowing a certain amount of tolerance in the placement of rails and the travel of the wheels, but if everything is going right you're really only supposed to be using like a 1 cm portion for anything.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

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Hall & Oates loathe that name and have never been credited as such in any of their releases - it's always been "Daryl Hall & John Oates", or simply "Daryl Hall John Oates". The reason they hate the name everybody uses to refer to them is that it presents them as a duo rather than individual artists, although everybody knows them as a duo, let's face it.

Also their first album is called "Whole Oats", which shows a can of oats in the cover. And they sued a granola company for a product called Haulin' Oats in 2015. So they hate the name but they're also protective of it and willing bank off it.
 
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Dalisclock

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Funny you say that, because from what I read, of all the primates their sexual behavior is thought to be closest to humans.
Without the enforced social taboos about sex humans have(depending by culture, obviously).

Though apparently Bonobos are more likely to fuck then fight, and apparently Bonobos don't actually kill each other. I've seen that said a bit but I haven't done enough research to know if it's true. In that we're more like Chimps then Bonobos, even though we're probably about as closely related to each and in a way it puts in kind of in the middle. We're horny fuckers but also figured out we could beat each other to death with bones and sticks pretty early(and apparently Chimps have been observed making spears to hunt prey). https://phys.org/news/2015-04-chimps-senegal-fashion-spears.html#
 
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Dalisclock

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I've been reading a bunch up on early cultures and religion and I'm kinda fascinated now watching how early religions evolved. Particularly how gods got incorporated, changed prominence, fell into decline, got imported/exported and sometimes just showed up from somewhere else and eventually kicked out of the rest of the pantheon to be the one true god. In particularly, the evolution of Yahweh/YHWH who eventually because the Judaic/Christian/Muslim god but other examples such as the idea that Venus/Aphrodite can be argued to be an evolution of the Sumerian Goddess Ishtar/Inanna via Astarte who might even predate that religion according to some scholars. Which would make her one of the oldest gods by proxy that most people have any knowledge of(In the West, since my knowledge of Eastern Religions is slim, though dating back to Sumar puts it in the Old Gods Club for sure.)

There's also the whole Snake/Dragon thing which is fucking weird that when you try looking back at the really, really old stuff, you end up getting into basically animal and spirit worship, you end up seeing snake cults and snake worship and the gods killing a snake/dragon to establish their supremacy(which implies the snake/dragon was always there first). In some religions it became established(Ancient Egyption and possibly Ancient Minion) and some religions still practice it or incorporate the snake thing, but the fact it pops up everywhere is just really kinda weird and only slightly creepy. I'm not alleging lizard people or stupid BS like that but such a universal theme is kinda fascinating and the fact its held on like forever.

I'm not an anthpology expert by any means so I know there's a lot deeper to go in this but it's all kind of amazing to dive into.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

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Jonathan Safran Foer left his wife for Natalie Portman, apparently convinced they were meant to be, but then Portman turned him down.

Moby says he dated Portman. She says they didn't.

All three are vegan.
 

Xprimentyl

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Well, more like “realized” today that the Regen magic from Final Fantasy 8 is pronounced with a hard “g” (as in giraffe) and not a soft “g” (as in goat.) It’s short for “regeneration”… which is what the spell does, regenerates your party’s health. No idea why it never occurred to me; I went with what my mind read first in 1999 and hadn’t look back for 22 years.
 
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Bedinsis

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I watched a youtube video about the Berlin conference, aka. the Scramble for Africa conference today, which led me to the Wikipedia article of the same subject.

What I learnt there was that the Swedish representative on that conference, Gillis Bildt, was the great-great-grandfather of Carl Bildt, who used to be the Prime Minister of Sweden.
 
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Baffle

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That I have vastly overestimated by ability to cycle a long (for me) way.
 

happyninja42

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I've been reading a bunch up on early cultures and religion and I'm kinda fascinated now watching how early religions evolved. Particularly how gods got incorporated, changed prominence, fell into decline, got imported/exported and sometimes just showed up from somewhere else and eventually kicked out of the rest of the pantheon to be the one true god. In particularly, the evolution of Yahweh/YHWH who eventually because the Judaic/Christian/Muslim god but other examples such as the idea that Venus/Aphrodite can be argued to be an evolution of the Sumerian Goddess Ishtar/Inanna via Astarte who might even predate that religion according to some scholars. Which would make her one of the oldest gods by proxy that most people have any knowledge of(In the West, since my knowledge of Eastern Religions is slim, though dating back to Sumar puts it in the Old Gods Club for sure.)

There's also the whole Snake/Dragon thing which is fucking weird that when you try looking back at the really, really old stuff, you end up getting into basically animal and spirit worship, you end up seeing snake cults and snake worship and the gods killing a snake/dragon to establish their supremacy(which implies the snake/dragon was always there first). In some religions it became established(Ancient Egyption and possibly Ancient Minion) and some religions still practice it or incorporate the snake thing, but the fact it pops up everywhere is just really kinda weird and only slightly creepy. I'm not alleging lizard people or stupid BS like that but such a universal theme is kinda fascinating and the fact its held on like forever.

I'm not an anthpology expert by any means so I know there's a lot deeper to go in this but it's all kind of amazing to dive into.
Is it really that big of a surprise though? I mean animalistic, totemic images are pretty common everywhere. Sports teams often identify with animals as their mascots, and the teams frequently will adopt some sound or physical behavior of the animal, in an echo of old shamanistic empowerment before a game. Serpents are in the medical field, in theory to represent like rebirth and healing (and also probably just an artifact of weird ass, old shamanistic cultural traditions). We use terms about animals to describe our own species behavior. "He was a beast/animal in bed." "That guy was acting like a dog." "Those two women were being catty last night at the club." etc etc. These animals were hugely significant in ancient human societies, either are serious threats that needed to be looked out for (like snakes), or creatures that were witnessed doing things that boggled ancient humans (shedding skin to be reborn, widening jaws to eat objects ridiculously larger than they are), that would make ancient cavedude be like :O WTF?!?

So yeah, makes sense to me. I mean yes, it's interesting, to see how these things have changed throughout history, but I don't find it weird. We are only, within just the last few centuries, as a whole, actually thinking "Hmm, maybe I should actually study and research some shit, instead of just coming up with mystic bullshit as an excuse for things." And even then, a ton of people still firmly embrace that kind of mojo thinking about all of their lives. So we're still pretty fucking primitive in how we interact with the world, as a whole.
 
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Piscian

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I learned about the largest bomb ever dropped. Scary stuff.

 

hanselthecaretaker

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FNAF dude quits videogames after being outed as a Republican.

Speaking of things Freddy, oddly enough, I was reminded of Tom Green’s character from Freddy Got Fingered after learning the God of War level designer’s only other job was working with cheese.

 

Terminal Blue

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Today I learned about Shrink-Wrapped Dinosaur Syndrome

Shrink-Wrapping is the term that's come to be applied to a tendency in paleoart (which until recently was completely the norm) for artists to adhere rigidly and conservatively to the skeletal structure of the animal they're illustrating. In reality though, most animals have a lot of soft tissue covering their bones, not to mention fur and feathers and all kinds of other adornments which wouldn't survive fossilization as well as bones do, so sticking rigidly to bone structure gives us an idea of what extinct animals looked like that is almost certainly wrong.

To illustrate, raptors in the 2000s.

1624013515796.png

vs. raptors today.

1624013536736.png

To clarify, it's not that dinosaurs actually looked exactly like the second picture, rather that we can't actually know for certain what they looked like but we do know they probably didn't look like their skeletons.
 
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