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Baronjutter posted:Humans have this idea that we're weak and lovely and our only advantage is our brain, but our endurance is actually extremely good. Ancient hunters would just chase deer and poo poo until they collapsed, there's still people that practice this. Prey animals and carnivores are built for bursts of speed but humans are the loving Jasons of the animal kingdom. We just keep coming, we never stop. We have some of the best endurance on earth. I would be nice if any fantasy or scifi setting would ever acknowledge this rather then having humans be average at everying or having them be weaker and shorter lived then all the other races.
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Jun 27, 2014 06:58
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There was an SF book series where humans were bigger, stronger, and faster than every other intelligent species in the galaxy. There's a scene where an alien scientist accidentally makes a human subject flinch involuntarily, and from their point of view there was a blur and suddenly one of them had multiple broken bones. Read it so long ago I can't remember the name of it, though.
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Jun 27, 2014 07:37
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Baronjutter posted:Humans have this idea that we're weak and lovely and our only advantage is our brain, but our endurance is actually extremely good. Ancient hunters would just chase deer and poo poo until they collapsed, there's still people that practice this. Prey animals and carnivores are built for bursts of speed but humans are the loving Jasons of the animal kingdom. We just keep coming, we never stop. We have some of the best endurance on earth. Please take a look at this awesome Attenborough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o A Buttery Pastry posted:Wolves often cover distances of up to 200km/day, so getting to Vermont doesn't seem that unlikely from that standpoint at least. Though of course there is the Saint Lawrence river, which would probably cut down on wolves randomly wandering that far south. Germany has seen a resurgence of its wild wolf population throughout the last decade or so after the last wolf being killed in 1904; they've all come over from Poland, apparently, with the exception of the dead wolf found in the Westerwald area, which seems to have wandered in from Italy.   (green = solitary wolf or at least one pack; yellow = traces of wolves (e.g. droppings, trails), red = dead wolf, hatched areas = military training grounds) steinrokkan posted:There's decent linguistic (as well as growing genetic) evidence to show that most of the original population wasn't displaced - rather it was assimilated. So the Celtic Boii confederation covering both the modern Bohemia and Bavaria (both of which are named after the Boii) mostly remained in place as the Germanic tribes moved in [...] Close, but no cigar: the scholarly consensus concerning the etymology of Bavaria is that it comes from Germanic *Bajowarjōz (plural), meaning "men from Bohemia", making it stem from the Boii only indirectly. Bohemia, in turn, comes from the Germanix *Bajohaimaz , "home of the Boii"  The Bavarians were more of a mixture of various ethnicities anyway, probably forming out of the remaining Celtic population, Romans living there, Alemannic, Frankish, Thuringian, Eastern Gothic and Langobardic migrants and Germanic mercenaries in Roman service.
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Jun 27, 2014 07:49
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I personally love the Turtledove story, The Road Less Taken, where humanity overlooks some magic that allows for interstellar travel and gets really good at science and murdering things instead. Aliens are not amused. Doesn't really make a lick of sense (Turtledove.txt), but it's a neat read. There's another story that I remember only bits of where Earth is apparently in a region of space that only produces insane species for some reason, so all the aliens are pretty concerned when humanity emerges from there as a real civilization. Then we accidentally start a fight during a first contact moment, so the rest of the galaxy assumes we're all murdering psychopaths, and humans just sort of shrug and go with it.
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Jun 27, 2014 07:49
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Vorpal Cat posted:I would be nice if any fantasy or scifi setting would ever acknowledge this rather then having humans be average at everying or having them be weaker and shorter lived then all the other races. There are some internet short stories of varying quality along those lines you can find by searching for "Humanity, gently caress Yeah."
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Jun 27, 2014 07:54
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Widestancer posted:I'm a GIS programmer/analyst by trade and this thread has caught my eye for awhile. If anyone's interested I can see if I can dig up some old maps I've had to do for clients before that were pretty loaded one way or another.  PittTheElder posted:There's another story that I remember only bits of where Earth is apparently in a region of space that only produces insane species for some reason, so all the aliens are pretty concerned when humanity emerges from there as a real civilization. Then we accidentally start a fight during a first contact moment, so the rest of the galaxy assumes we're all murdering psychopaths, and humans just sort of shrug and go with it. This sounds amazing, I'd love to know the name of the story.
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Jun 27, 2014 08:39
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Vorpal Cat posted:I would be nice if any fantasy or scifi setting would ever acknowledge this rather then having humans be average at everying or having them be weaker and shorter lived then all the other races. Yeah but humans judge things based on them selves so the aliens will be strong or weak compared to humans. People are only tall if they are taller than you. 
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Jun 27, 2014 08:57
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Rumda posted:Yeah but humans judge things based on them selves so the aliens will be strong or weak compared to humans. People are only tall if they are taller than you. Really? No one bothered to ask Canada?
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Jun 27, 2014 09:17
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Ammat The Ankh posted:Really? No one bothered to ask Canada? And yet asked North Koreans, who are much shorter than South Koreans. I can't find that picture  EDIT: Found it! 
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Jun 27, 2014 09:23
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Ammat The Ankh posted:Really? No one bothered to ask Canada? Canada is just America II!: THE SEQUEL! so it's probably the same.
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Jun 27, 2014 09:33
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Ammat The Ankh posted:Really? No one bothered to ask Canada?  The real problem is that they couldn't be bothered to use an overlay with the right borders look at Sudan and South sudan
Rumda fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 10:27
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Rumda posted:
That's nothing; did you know that Greenland isn't really the size of Africa?
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Jun 27, 2014 10:29
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Fojar38 posted:That's nothing; did you know that Greenland isn't really the size of Africa?  Have your ever like looked at a map upside down....
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Jun 27, 2014 10:33
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Poizen Jam posted:That would indicate to me small populations of wolves somehow got here from the mainland- and if that's a possibility, the St Lawrence hardly seems daunting. I can believe isolated populations appear much further south than those ranges would indicate. Pakled posted:Yeah, I'm guessing it's around 900 based on the presence of "Anglo-Scandinavians," Hungarians, Franks, Greeks in southern Italy, and Anatolia not being Turkish yet.  Haven't found an equivalent map for mtDNA though, so I can't say for sure, but there is some overlap here. System Metternich posted:Germany has seen a resurgence of its wild wolf population throughout the last decade or so after the last wolf being killed in 1904; they've all come over from Poland, apparently, with the exception of the dead wolf found in the Westerwald area, which seems to have wandered in from Italy.
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Jun 27, 2014 10:37
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Southern Proto-European supremacy! :cryinggrecoslav:
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Jun 27, 2014 11:09
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SaltyJesus posted:Southern Proto-European supremacy! :cryinggrecoslav:
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Jun 27, 2014 11:21
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Please don't forget your northern brothers. :cryingprotoeuropeans:    Now let's go give steinrokkan swirlies for being a Central Indo-European scrub.
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Jun 27, 2014 11:28
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Still, a major river will probably reduce the number of wolves randomly trekking down south, even if it's not a hard barrier. Of course that assumes it's random, and not population pressures driving them. Yeah but this is water that at least partly freezes in the winter. If you cross the Gulf of St. Lawrence in winter there's a fair bit of sea ice floating around. And my understanding is that there is very significant sea ice in the Strait of Belle Isle for 8 months of the year. And so, the theory I've heard is that the wolves are Labrador wolves that get stuck on ice pans. You seemingly only need a few to get across and into central Newfoundland--which is a vast, uninhabited wilderness filled with moose and caribou--to revive the population. There's supply on the other side. There's even a town on the Labrador side of the strait called L'anse-au-Loup (Wolf Cove). I hope we get a significant wolf population around here. It was stupid to hunt them off. They'd control the moose population and the moose are a serious menace. I think on balance wolves are less dangerous than moose.
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Jun 27, 2014 11:29
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Disco Infiva posted:And yet asked North Koreans, who are much shorter than South Koreans.
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Jun 27, 2014 11:41
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On the "Humans are the worst" sci-fi subject, The Forever War is basically a Vietnam allegory that is less than charitable to humanity as a species. It might even be the source of one of the stories mentioned above.
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Jun 27, 2014 11:50
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There's a whole generation of North Koreans who are currently in their 20's and 30's, those who grew up during the famine years, who are actually quite stunted in that way. They missed out on lots of growth when they were kids, because they never got proper nutrition.
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Jun 27, 2014 11:53
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SaltyJesus posted:
That sounds like the Veil of Madness stories.
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Jun 27, 2014 13:27
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ClearAirTurbulence posted:There was an SF book series where humans were bigger, stronger, and faster than every other intelligent species in the galaxy. There's a scene where an alien scientist accidentally makes a human subject flinch involuntarily, and from their point of view there was a blur and suddenly one of them had multiple broken bones. Read it so long ago I can't remember the name of it, though.
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Jun 27, 2014 13:37
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SaltyJesus posted:
Gleri posted:Yeah but this is water that at least partly freezes in the winter. If you cross the Gulf of St. Lawrence in winter there's a fair bit of sea ice floating around. And my understanding is that there is very significant sea ice in the Strait of Belle Isle for 8 months of the year. And so, the theory I've heard is that the wolves are Labrador wolves that get stuck on ice pans. You seemingly only need a few to get across and into central Newfoundland--which is a vast, uninhabited wilderness filled with moose and caribou--to revive the population. There's supply on the other side. There's even a town on the Labrador side of the strait called L'anse-au-Loup (Wolf Cove). As for which is more dangerous, it probably depends a lot on the area and how people live in it. Habitat destruction following human expansion of farmlands puts pressure on wolves to find other types of prey, at the same time as you introduce a new potential food source (farmhands), which obviously isn't a recipe for not having wolves attack people. That's probably not that big of a problem on Newfoundland though, or the West in general. TheBalor posted:There's a whole generation of North Koreans who are currently in their 20's and 30's, those who grew up during the famine years, who are actually quite stunted in that way. They missed out on lots of growth when they were kids, because they never got proper nutrition.
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Jun 27, 2014 14:13
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A Buttery Pastry posted:This is probably the reasons European Americans are kinda short compared to their European counterparts, too many kids with bad nutrition and even worse healthcare. Average US height (like, not just European Americans but in general) is essentially identical or taller than anywhere in Europe outside of Scandinavia.
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Jun 27, 2014 14:30
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computer parts posted:Average US height (like, not just European Americans but in general) is essentially identical or taller than anywhere in Europe outside of Scandinavia.
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Jun 27, 2014 14:48
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computer parts posted:Average US height (like, not just European Americans but in general) is essentially identical or taller than anywhere in Europe outside of Scandinavia. A Buttery Pastry made the mistake here. Depending on the influence non-European Americans have on average US height, it doesn't reflect well on the US to have the same height as the continent that includes a host of countries with much worse living conditions now or in the (relatively recent) past than the USA had.
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Jun 27, 2014 14:53
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Torrannor posted:A Buttery Pastry made the mistake here. Depending on the influence non-European Americans have on average US height, it doesn't reflect well on the US to have the same height as the continent that includes a host of countries with much worse living conditions now or in the (relatively recent) past than the USA had. I'm going by country; in Western Europe (Spain/France/UK) they're about the same height as the US.
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Jun 27, 2014 14:59
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Why are you guys even discussing this without a map? http://www.averageheight.co/average-male-height-by-country
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Jun 27, 2014 15:02
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PittTheElder posted:I personally love the Turtledove story, The Road Less Taken, where humanity overlooks some magic that allows for interstellar travel and gets really good at science and murdering things instead. Aliens are not amused. Doesn't really make a lick of sense (Turtledove.txt), but it's a neat read. I remember that Turtledove one! It was a neat concept, after musket-wielding iron age aliens get their butts kicked when they try to invade the Earth the scientists examine their ship. and when they see how their ship drive works they are baffled that nobody on Earth had ever thought of such a ridiculously simple technology. The story mentions in passing that there was one alien race that went to space with bronze spaceships because they hadn't invented iron yet when they learned gravity manipulation. I didn't quite buy the idea that technology tended to stagnate and stop advancing once intelligent beings discovered the stardrive, though I guess it was necessary for the story.
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Jun 27, 2014 15:12
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TheBalor posted:There's a whole generation of North Koreans who are currently in their 20's and 30's, those who grew up during the famine years, who are actually quite stunted in that way. They missed out on lots of growth when they were kids, because they never got proper nutrition. There are a lot of stunted South Koreans, mostly in their late thirties and older, because South Korea was poorer than North Korea until the 1980s. I remember that it's a plot point in The Host, the father of one of the main characters explains that he is mentally slow and falls asleep a lot because he was a kid in '80s. That's odd about the short North Korean border guard in the photo and I wonder if it is a strange angle...I'd heard that they too put only their tallest soldiers near the border.
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Jun 27, 2014 15:18
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I think one issue here is that I forgot to clarify who I was talking about : Young Americans. The American average might still match up pretty well, but the younger generation aren't growing taller than their parents, unlike in other OECD countries. Men are essentially stagnant, and it's obviously not because they've reached some limit imposed by biology since America isn't chilling at the front of the pack.  Meanwhile, American women are actually growing shorter (alongside Islandic women.) 
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Jun 27, 2014 15:23
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I think one issue here is that I forgot to clarify who I was talking about : Young Americans. The American average might still match up pretty well, but the younger generation aren't growing taller than their parents, unlike in other OECD countries. How much of that is related to changing racial demographics though?
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Jun 27, 2014 15:30
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I would bet all kinds of money that the stagnation is entirely attributable to immigration.
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Jun 27, 2014 15:34
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Bloodnose posted:I would bet all kinds of money that the stagnation is entirely attributable to immigration. Yeah, I came across some height tables once which listed average heights by race. After seeing it, I called up my mom to tell her that if more Hispanic women move to the US, she wouldn't be short anymore, she would be average.
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Jun 27, 2014 16:14
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computer parts posted:How much of that is related to changing racial demographics though? This study, which divides the population along ethnic and immigrant lines, has both white and black America as essentially stagnant too. (White America might have gained a bit in one of the cohorts.) A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 16:21
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 A map of the percentage of dwellings with a bathroom in Poland. source Hambilderberglar fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 16:48
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Grand Fromage posted:Iran has a long, long winemaking tradition. Shiraz being the most common example we get in the west. Iran still has a lot of vineyards for making verjus/ab-gooreh, which is a tart, unfermented young grape juice. When I make a mead-with-verjus (omphacomel, if you want to be a dick about it) I go to little Persia and grab some on the cheap since American bottles of verjus are quite expensive. I have to imagine there is a regular stream of grapes that are, uhhh, accidentally harvested late and then, after processing to verjus are, uhhh, accidentally forgotten about only to be "rediscovered" a few months later.
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Jun 27, 2014 16:58
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Hambilderberglar posted:
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Jun 27, 2014 17:00
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So the most heavily purple areas both the main base of support for PiS and the parts of Poland that were part of the Russian Empire's territory.
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Jun 27, 2014 17:05
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