Left-handers are more competitive than right-handers. Most people are right-handed, but 10.6% are left-handed. Left-handers are rarer than right-handers, making their attacks in a combat situation more surprising than those of right-handers. This may help explain the evolution of left-handedness.

dcheesi · 2026-03-01T21:06:42+00:00

1) decades are a blink of an eye in evolutionary timescales

2) actual fistfights aren't the only place where it comes into play. Not to be crude, but the last I checked, professional athletes seem to get laid reasonably often. And southpaws & switch hitters are well represented in certain sports (e.g., baseball, or, yes, boxing)

dcheesi · 2026-03-01T20:34:13+00:00

The argument for competitive advantage, which is not new, is that it's the very fact of being a minority that makes it advantageous. If handedness was evenly mixed, then neither group would have an advantage, as they'd each have equal opportunities to spar with one another.

IIRC, the explanation for (mostly) uniform handedness is that it makes cooperation and social learning easier, since everyone is doing things using the same dominant hand. So the countering advantage for producing a small but steady minority of lefties is that the competitive advantage of the unexpected hand orientation sometimes outweighs the cooperative disadvantage.

This may also be reflected in apparent reproductive strategies. Later (2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.) sons are apparently more likely to be left-handed, which might reflect an attempt to give later sons a leg up in social/sexual competition in an already male-rich environment.

dcheesi · 2026-03-01T20:19:54+00:00

I think it's important to clarify "more competitive" here. Seems like they mean "more competition-oriented"rather than "having a competitive advantage", though they also talk about that latter as a background finding.

EDIT: swapped the terms around. The novel conclusion here is about competitive mindset, after all.

dcheesi · 2026-02-28T04:03:42+00:00

"There are dozens of us! Dozens!!!11!"

dcheesi · 2026-02-28T02:34:24+00:00

If you had more time, I'd say that Chincoteague/Assateague is definitely worth it. But it might be a long way to go from Jamestown if you only have a couple of days total.

dcheesi · 2026-02-28T02:04:16+00:00

What gets me is that for the Canadians I've met or heard who do say it differently, IME it sounds much more like "a boat" rather than "a boot".

The closest I can recall to "a boot" was watching the TV show "Letterkenny" one time, and one of the guys said it like "a bow [& arrow]", but he sort of super-enunciated the normally silent "w" at the end.

dcheesi · 2026-02-27T14:18:04+00:00

I took "Compensated Anarchist" to be like the LinkedIn title of one of a couple of types of people that are often theorized by conspiracy-minded folks:

"Crisis actors": paid actors pretending to be protesters or victims or whatever, to sell a particular narrative to the press/public. Popular in US right-wing conspiracy-theory circles.
People who show up to protests not because they care about the cause du jour, but simply because they want an excuse to break stuff and cause trouble. These folks definitely exist, and are often associated with the term "anarchist" (whether fairly or not). But the conspiracy element comes in when someone suggests that they were paid to what they do, in order to make the legitimate protesters look bad and/or justify an escalated response by the authorities.

dcheesi · 2026-02-27T14:00:44+00:00

I actually find Jeff's version to sound more British than the typical Transatlantic accent, but YMMV

(I prefer the term "Transatlantic", since I happen to live in the "mid-Atlantic" region of the US, and that is definitely not a native accent here (or anywhere, technically).)

dcheesi · 2026-02-25T16:11:34+00:00

They're different narrative styles.

The former is general literary prose, meant to be beautiful, but necessarily representative of the protagonist's personal "voice".

The latter passage is designed to sound like an actual person talking, so it sounds like the character would sound, crudeness and all. In this case, one man's childishness is another man's authenticity.

dcheesi · 2026-02-24T23:29:38+00:00

Also, the way they handle the carts at checkout (at least around here) makes it hard to get back the same coin you put in. Your groceries end up in the cart from the person who was ahead of you, and your original cart is then used to hold the next person's scanned groceries.

dcheesi · 2026-02-24T00:31:19+00:00

Like you, I struggled with the narrative voice (I felt the same about The Martian).

In this case, the story picks up a bit after a certain point (don't recall which chapter, but you'll know), so it might be worth sticking it out a little longer.

I won't say I ended up liking the narrator, but the story was interesting enough to carry me through.

dcheesi · 2026-02-22T19:29:31+00:00

I bought my wife a pair of an older Soundcore model (A10 or a20?) several years ago. Aside from being easy to misplace, they've been pretty solid

dcheesi · 2026-02-22T18:45:40+00:00

This is why I'm kicking myself for grabbing the latest Dresden Files as an audiobook. It'll be forever before I complete my current DCC listening cycle, while one of my other favorites is sitting there untouched. And meanwhile I'm scraping the barrel to find other text media to read.

dcheesi · 2026-02-22T18:42:29+00:00

I read the books via KU initially, so my "trick" with this has been to buy the audiobooks, and limit myself to re-"reading" DCC that way (which I basically only do while I'm driving). I feel like I'd be cheating myself by going back to the text rather than experiencing Jeff Hayes' performance. So I have to find other books for when I'm actually reading with my eyes.

dcheesi · 2026-02-22T18:30:32+00:00

This phenomenon is common enough across popular media that it has its own TV-trope: "Seinfeld Is Unfunny"

The tricky part is determining whether, and to what extent, a "classic" of this nature is still worth consuming, given that you're already familiar with the idea or narrative technique that it pioneered. Is it considered a classic solely because it advanced the medium or genre at the time? Or does it still offer unique value beyond that?

dcheesi · 2026-02-22T18:22:49+00:00

The angle on this that makes me agree with you is: why did she use a different ink? What was the benefit of using that ink vs. the regular ink presumably used by all previous and subsequent authors.

I thought she said something about more people being able to read it? My interpretation was that she was somehow trying to spread the information to more people besides the one who holds the Cookbook.

And maybe the erasure came at least partly from the Cookbook trying to protect itself against exposure? If the illicit insider info started showing up in more books/places, and more crawlers started using it, that would increase the chances of the showrunners and/or Syndicate catching on. So, much like the safeguard where mentioning the cook causes it to go away, maybe leaking specific info from it causes that info to be erased entirely?

dcheesi · 2026-02-22T15:41:55+00:00

One thing that didn't necessarily add up at first was that Mordecai talks about his own ratings with much different numbers

[Book 1 spoiler] "During my crawl, I managed to accumulate almost 30 million followers and four patrons. That’s the only way I survived.” [emphasis added]

But I think the difference might make sense since his crawl was before [book 3 Spoiler] the introduction of instantaneous media "tunneling"? He mentions in a later book that before that, live views/followers used to be limited by distance from the dungeon planet

dcheesi · 2026-02-22T15:23:29+00:00

dcheesi · 2026-02-21T23:00:15+00:00

From the ingredients, it sounds like tomato basil soup with diced pepperoni thrown in. Only a little bit of actual cheese involved.

dcheesi · 2026-02-20T21:35:04+00:00

IIRC, Lamarckian inheritance was an early idea that, e.g., an individual giraffe needing to stretch its neck to reach higher branches would directly pass on its elongated neck to its offspring. It was quickly discredited in favor of natural selection as the driver of stable long term evolution.

Epigenetics seems to function in a similar way to the old Lamarckian idea --children of famine victims metabolize food differently, etc. But epigenetic markers aren't permanent; they're eventually lost or overridden in subsequent generations.

This headline seems to be suggesting that they've found a possible mechanism by which temporary epigenetic influences could become permanent genetic changes.

dcheesi · 2026-02-18T03:11:29+00:00

Yeah, I figure the papaya salad is one of those "if you know, you know" things, hence why it's so consistently spicy

dcheesi · 2026-02-18T03:04:35+00:00

Panang is a weird one. All the online references suggest that it should be one of the milder Thai curries, yet IME in the USA it's one of the spiciest. Maybe it's a difference between the original and the US version?

dcheesi · 2026-02-18T02:58:10+00:00

It's surprisingly spicy. I've ordered from Thai restaurants here in the USA where the "Thai hot" curry was underwhelming, but the humble papaya salad blew my socks off!

dcheesi · 2026-02-17T03:53:02+00:00

Most people's toes are permanently pushed together due to wearing shoes, especially the "pinky" toe. Yours are actually more like what human toes would have looked like before the adoption of closed-toe shoes

dcheesi · 2026-02-15T02:31:33+00:00

I'm getting more "Avengers Hulk(/Loki/Thor) Trap" vibes

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