this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Science Memes

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A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



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[–] [email protected] 90 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Holy fuck this carving looks absolutely beautiful

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

You too, huh? Something about it speaks to me. The simplicity, clean lines, dunno?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago

I think it’s something about the skill needed to make this and the fact that no machines were involved. It’s quite something though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Modernist art deco, like it was made in the 1930s

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Not just the clean lines, but the smooth curves too. It's difficult to do something like this and not make it all bumpy and uneven. Definitely lots of skill and time involved.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 104 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That the Sumerian’s will use anything but metric.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Apparently, muricans are a lost tribe of Sumerians.

Hold on a sec. I need to write up some golden tablets or something.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Well you see, in 1793, 'Merica requested the metric artifacts from France so we could be metric too. France sent over a kilogram, but the shipment was lost at sea. And that was a little sad.

All joking aside, US feet, inches, pounds, and so on have been secretly really metric since 1893.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

eh.

Fun fact. if you use your knucklebones to count instead of fingers, and you use multiplication instead of addition you can get to 144 counting on your fingers. (i.e. one digit on the second hand is equal to a full hand- 12- on the first.)

yeah. some bullshit about that being why we have 12 hours, and 12 inches in a foot, is totally going into those golden tablets.

(IIRC, we have 12 hours because there was 10 hours of daylight in Egypt, and an hour on either end for twilight. that evolved into the 24 hour system we have today.)

I think I'll call my new religion ~~Bullcrap~~ ~~Bulk'rap~~ bulq'rap.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

You can count up to 1023 without knucklebones if you use a positional representation.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Sumerians also tried to metrify, but the copper weights they bought mysteriously corroded

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's a screenshot of a Twitter post, that's a meme right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well if we want to get pedantic, every unique thing passed around and spread is a meme. Jokes, art styles, idioms, words, greetings, most social behavior really. And you can go a step further and say diseases, species, even all of life is a meme.

And if there ever was a place to use this definition of meme it would be... LinguisticMemes, but this is a good second place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Well if we want to get pedantic

Let's! You are absolutely right, of course.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

If I remember correctly, Homo sapiens sapiens was not only coetaneous with Mammoths, but we are widely considered to be one, if not the main cause of their extintion.

Also constructions like Gobekli tepe, with it's carvings and decorations, predate the extintion of Mammoths by something like 6000 years.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Hell, there were still mammoths around when the pyramids at Giza were built.

Pygmy mammoths, on an island in northern Siberia, but still.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago

Well, that's a new word on me. Thought spell check corrected contemporary.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Well, ice age ended and elephants still live.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I... am so disappointed this didn't go where, for a split second, my brain thought it was going.

Homo sapiens sapiens was not only coetaneous with Mammoths, but we are widely considered to be one

Chickens are dinosaurs - and humans are mammoths!!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

birds are the continuation of the theropod dinosaur lineage.

humans are the continuation of the early synapsid lineage also present at the time (which later gave rise to the early mammal progenitor).

when people say birds are dinosaurs they mean the lineage didn't branch as much as it did for humans, which I think is more survivorship bias than anything.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

People say birds are dinosaurs because every living thing is in every clade of it's ancestors which means they are dinosaurs. They're also a lot of other things from all of the other clades so they're not saying that birds are just dinosaurs, but that they are part of Dinosauria and every other clade of their ancestors and so too will all of their descendants be.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Weren't there like full blown civilizations at that point? Kinda weird to refer to mammoths as if it were some stone age prehistoric period and be surprised that someone could craft something like this then lol

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think the pyramids at Giza were a few millennia old at that point eh?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not millennia, but several centuries.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

Several, yes. Egypt, Uruk, Indus, etc

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Just using some tiny mammoth population on an isolated island in Siberia to state "MAMMOTHS WERE STILL ROAMING THE EARTH WHEN BLAH BLAH BLAH" is somewhat disingenuous.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Roaming the earth means roaming all - or at least a very significant portion of - the earth, not some very isolated region. So I would say yes - if some tiny population of mammoths was still alive in some limited area at this time, they were not 'roaming the earth'.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Also pretending that 4000 years ago humans were still hunter gatherers or something (it's kind of implied in the wording imo). 4000 years ago there were plenty of fairly developed civilisations around.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 weeks ago

Locusts ARE grasshoppers. If enough grasshoppers group up in the same area they literally become locusts and fuck everything up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Maybe, but a locus is a type of grasshopper.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

Ur mom is a locust. Huht huht huht.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

tite (or titi) means penis in my language

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

he ma means "him, mother" in my language

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

How much for the weight? I'll take two.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

The eyes don't make sense to me. How did they know to use this pattern? Are there some really big grasshoppers out there?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

No doubt there are insects big enough to be able to see the patterns on the eyes without magnification.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

An alternative that I like to use in the lab is squinting and holding the sample really close to my face. Perhaps they used my method if the bugs weren't big enough?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)
  1. Exactly this. Just eyesight & time.
  2. Not to mention that some insects even have a bit of contrast between the lenses so it's easier to understand they are compounded.
  3. And additionally due to individual lenses compounded eyes arent smooth - by reflecting light at different angles you can make the "bumps" obvious.
  4. Also if there is like a water droplet on grasshoppers eyes you can clearly see it's surface structure. Just like you can see individual pixels on your (high dpi phone?) screen the same way.

Tho I bet they didn't study this ones eyes:

It's called a fairy wasp (wiki/Megaphragma_mymaripenne) and it's only the third smallest insect known.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

I'm sure they had plenty of experience with bugs in their environment, both alive and dead. I'm sure you can see the eyes pretty well close up.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

The aliens lent them a magnifying glass

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