Are they tasty?
Apparently, based on contemporary accounts, opinion was varied, but they were meaty and easy to catch. A bit of selective breeding would probably make them ideal poultry farm animals.
Readit Newshelloworld11 commented on How we plan to de-extinct the Dodo bird colossal.com/dodo/... · Posted by u/geox
helloworld11 commented on How we plan to de-extinct the Dodo bird colossal.com/dodo/... · Posted by u/geox
They should start with Harpagornis moorei, much more interesting species.
But nowhere near as captivating for media soundbites and news posts. The dodo is one very symbolic bird and just about everyone recognizes it right away.
helloworld11 commented on How we plan to de-extinct the Dodo bird colossal.com/dodo/... · Posted by u/geox
If you founded a company that actually, really, visibly de-extincted the very famous,, deeply recognizable, colloquially-adopted dodo ("dead as a dodo, "dumb as a dodo", etc), and then had a literal dodo-looking dodo bird walking around in some game preserve for all the world to see, finding funding via dodo leasing would be the least of your monetary inflows.
VC money would rain down upon you like mana from heaven and the publicity would garner your company so many indirect financial rewards that you could later move on to all sorts of things. Not to mention the IP and patent rights you'd presumably create along the way with your cloning process and related procedures for future profitable use.
Also worth noting that dodo birds were reportedly very tasty and meat-rich, so farming millions of them as a resurrected species for food is hardly out of the question.
helloworld11 commented on How we plan to de-extinct the Dodo bird colossal.com/dodo/... · Posted by u/geox
What would the business model look like for doing this?
I spend $20M on lab time and experts to clone a dodo... Then I lease that dodo to zoos for $2000/day... and in the dodo's lifespan I will never make a profit...
Or I spend $30M to clone two dodo's - one male, and one female. I then breed 100 more dodo's from that initial pair. I then rent them to zoos around the world, at perhaps $200/day (lower price because there is no exclusivity anymore). Even this plan is dubiously profitable, considering my rental income will only slowly ramp up over 20 years as dodos are born...
If you founded a company that actually, really, visibly de-extincted the very famous,, deeply recognizable, colloquially-adopted dodo ("dead as a dodo, "dumb as a dodo", etc), and then had a literal dodo-looking dodo bird walking around in some game preserve for all the world to see, finding funding via dodo leasing would be the least of your monetary inflows.
VC money would rain down upon you like mana from heaven and the publicity would garner your company so many indirect financial rewards that you could later move on to all sorts of things. Not to mention the IP and patent rights you'd presumably create along the way with your cloning process and related procedures for future profitable use.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/2/3/lebanon-us-dollar...
> Ad hoc lirafication has been happening since the country first started sliding into crisis in August 2019, when Lebanon’s banks began to withhold deposits in US dollar accounts.
> Currently, depositors can withdraw from their dollar accounts in Lebanese pounds – but at an unfavourable exchange rate that wipes out 70 percent of the market value of those dollar savings, while helping banks trim their losses and expenses.
"But crypto is a terrible idea. People who violate banking regulations are criminals, Why do we need cash? I pay for everything with my card, it's sooo convenient!" Say many naval-gazing, privileged people on this very site who've never had to deal with the grotesquely regular bullshit of third world banking and government finance...
helloworld11 commented on A Witch Trial at the Legal Aid Society thefp.com/p/a-witch-trial... · Posted by u/mckern
Guess so! Anyway thanks for letting me interrogate you. I've never before had the chance to understand what people who are scared of "cancel culture" are actually upset about.
Get "canceled" in your own work or social sphere, or in social media in a way that filters down to your work or social sphere for saying, writing, being recorded doing (or saying) something that doesn't fit the dominant ideological narrative of modern culture, and maybe you'll rapidly find out just why and how some people get scared of cancel culture. Sure, Stalinist show trials or Maoist purges these things in our modern western world certainly are not, but examples abound and in a non-lethal modern context, they can be very damaging indeed.
helloworld11 commented on Has Earth’s inner core stopped its strange spin? nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/headalgorithm
Contagion is a very realistic depiction of a global pandemic.
Second this recommendation. I loved Contagion, and watching it during the early days of our own very real recent pandemic put a whole new spin to an already great film.
helloworld11 commented on Has Earth’s inner core stopped its strange spin? nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/headalgorithm
Trash disaster movies have their place, 2012, Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Moonfall, etc. They are all entertaining in their own right, and are usually very self-aware of how stupid they are. Ben Affleck's commentary on Armageddon is gold. Though, I think that film was a higher tier than most of the list here, the Aerosmith song made for that film dominated the summer radio that year and the soundtrack flew off the shelves. I wish things like that still happened, you'll get a bump on Spotify but its cultural impact is much less.
Deep Impact doesn't quite deserve a place with the others. Its depiction of an asteroid impact and many other things is surprisingly realistic considering the source material.
helloworld11 commented on Has Earth’s inner core stopped its strange spin? nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/headalgorithm
I think that might be an over simplification of the impact of a weakened magnetosphere.
The magnetosphere protects the lower levels of the atmosphere from charged particles from the sun and further sources. This isn't just solar flares, but a constant bombardment of energy. Without it the rest of the atmosphere will began to degrade, with specific worry about our ozone layer. Some animals such as birds are shown to relay on the magnetosphere to help navigate. Aside from the changes to ecosystems and climate, the magnetosphere is also responsible for the aurora borealis, so we would miss out on that.
On the plus side, we'd finally have enough data to answer questions about what sort of radiation shielding generational spaceships would need, and exactly how much cancer prevention Earth's atmosphere is providing.
If the magnetosphere disappeared tomorrow, completely, as it did on Mars at one point, it would take literally billions of years for our atmosphere to totally degrade away. It would take at least tens of millions for it to degrade appreciably. The magnetosphere of Mars failed just 500 million years after our red neighbor formed, and even after the several billion intervening years, and after having started with much less overall atmospheric bulk than Earth, Mars still has some atmosphere left (very little to be sure, but we're talking about billions of years of being bathed in solar wind and radiation). In other words, if our magnetosphere disappeared tomorrow, you likely wouldn't have to worry about major atmospheric failure for many generations of your family's lives.
Caveat: Even with the atmosphere fully present, the magnetosphere does indeed stop many charged particles that a gas barrier does not, and this would definitely be an immediate problem to surface life to some extent (how much is debatable however). We'd also be much more susceptible to electronic and electrical grid damage caused by a much larger percentage of solar storms that would have previously been too weak to do much because of our giant magnetic shield..
helloworld11 commented on When Truman Capote’s lies caught up with him theatlantic.com/books/arc... · Posted by u/samclemens
Who says erased? They're just outdated, that's all.
For many of them, not even that. Is Socrates outdated, or Thomas Jefferson? How about Picasso? The first of these is widely believed to have been what we would today call a pedophile (this being common in his culture and time), the second was a slave owner and the third was an abusive, jealous womanizer.
Or how about Gone with the Wind itself: The novel and book deal with many universal themes of families, love and human ties being destroyed and deformed by terrible circumstances outside of individual control. Many, many victims of political and social tragedy from any time in history right to the present can easily identify with that central concept without being completely blinded into flippant, fashionable woke dismissal by focusing only on the type of society portrayed in the book and film. The movie's central emotional drama is nearly universal to human history. This is why it was so enormously popular, and its central emotional concept still is today.