Interesting Links for 03-12-2023

[andrewducker]

1. DNA-researcher: It's not 'woke' to portray prehistoric Europeans with dark skin. It's evolution.

(tags:evolution colour skin Europe prehistory genetics )

2. Reminder that you don't own any streaming content that you "bought" and it can be removed at any point

(tags:drm movies intellectual_property streaming )

3. "I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You"

(tags:love romance movies society OhForFucksSake )

4. Israel intercepted step-by-step Hamas massacre plan over a year ago - but dismissed it

(tags:Israel Palestine terrorism intelligence epicfail )

Comments

2

[channelpenguin]

Back when I worked for the video streaming tech company, we did the backend for TalkTalk (amongst others) and it was a weekly task for our admin lady to disable titles from the service based on licensing changes. It is constant.

Re: 2

[andrewducker]

And that's fine for rental.

But when you "buy" something there is an expectation that it will remain accessible indefinitely.

If it's not then a different word to "buy" should be used.

Re: 2

[channelpenguin]

Totally

[simont]

Not to mention charging less, because you're getting less actual stuff!

[andrewducker]

Yes!

If it was "You get to not worry about ever losing or scratching the disk and so own this forever!" that might be an advantage. But this isn't even that!

DNA-researcher: It's not 'woke' to portray prehistoric Europeans with dark skin. It's evolution.

[jack]

Although again, a good article has a title I want to quibble with: surely portraying prehistoric Europeans accurately *is* woke by many people's definition. (I know what people mean when they say "not woke", but I'm annoyed that language is working both ways like this.)

Re: DNA-researcher: It's not 'woke' to portray prehistoric Europeans with dark skin. It's evolution.

[andrewducker]

I think it's "This is not an attempt to indoctrinate anyone, it's just basic facts" - but as some people see basic facts as indoctrination I see how that's going to upset them anyway!

[danieldwilliam]

At some point I will get round to writing my blogpost on why Love, Actually, is a good film with a good and useful message.

[andrewducker]

I shall look forward to it!

1

[danieldwilliam]

I once (20 years ago?) attended a talk at the Cheltenham science festival on evolution of humans in Europe, specifically northern Europe which mentioned rickets and skin tone. It used as exemplars three traits, lactose tolerance, wheat tolerance and skin pigmentation.

And the chat on skin pigmentation seemed to be that as humans arose in equatorial regions and then moved out from those we should not be surprised that humans arriving in Europe had dark skin. However, as you move north and you get longer, darker winters you run the risk of vitamin D deficiency and rickets. Rickets is quite a strong evolutionary driver. Women with bad rickets struggle to give birth so there's a powerful filter.

And it seemed to be bound up in adaptations for eating wheat.

Pale skin, and the associated vitamin D absorption, look likely to become widespread very quickly in northern Europe once the adaption arises because the impact on fitness is very strong. I suspect there is also a warfare advantage driven by small but significant population advantages in kin-groups - but that's me guessing.

And at some point, given our African origins, we (white people in northern Europe) must have started out with darker skin. That must have happened at some point in the past. So there would be a before and an after. It doesn't seem "woke" to realise that in a thing with a before and an after some thing will be before and some after.

Re: 1

[andrewducker]

I don't think you realise - any mention or appearance of a non-white person is automatically Woke. That's just science.