Humans are the weirdest aliens?

Discussion in 'General Chatter' started by Sethrial MacCoill, Nov 29, 2016.

  1. Everett

    Everett local rats so small, so tiny

    the lesson my graddad apparently demonstrated was the purpose of curling is to somehow step into a hole at some point and break your leg or ankle? Also showing humans' ability to break leg and s u r v i v e
     
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  2. Re Allyssa

    Re Allyssa Sylph of Heart

    Have you gotten to prepostion verbs yet though
     
  3. Sethrial MacCoill

    Sethrial MacCoill Attempts were made

    The fact that exercise is addictive, that exerting effort, expending energy, and physically struggling without gaining anything from it can be literally addictive... that's probably going to be difficult to explain to aliens.

    also the difference between weight lifers, strongmen and body builders.
     
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  4. Re Allyssa

    Re Allyssa Sylph of Heart

    I know at least the strong men will be happy to wax poetic on the subject for anyone who asks lol
     
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  5. vuatson

    vuatson [delurks]

    That’s difficult to explain to me tbh. I mean I know there’s endorphins and all but the fact that some people get that much of a kick out of running in circles for an hour mystifies me. Why not just get a job in construction or something if you like physical exertion that much?
     
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  6. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    because physical exertion makes your body make endorphines aka Your Body's Own Morphine.

    That's it that's the magic.

    It makes sense that we're build that way because as persistence hunters, being able to keep moving past the time is important to staying alive but these days when most of us don't have to walk after things to eat them anymore, it ends up with people who trigger the 'walk or starve' endorphine rush via exercise and then succumbing to well... Homebrew Morphine. That's why longterm physical exertion is such a good set-off for it, too.
     
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  7. Sethrial MacCoill

    Sethrial MacCoill Attempts were made

  8. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    the next evoluntionary step is clearly to put spikes on humans.
     
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  9. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    Today on 'humans will survive anything'

    Our Hospital is currently hosting a dude who, due to metabolic fuckery, was still perfectly conscious and talking with a blood sugar oft 20

    Hypoglycemia starts at 50.
     
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  10. palindromordnilap

    palindromordnilap Well-Known Member

    Some human in a Tumblr HFY story, probably: "Oh, yeah, I guess that guy took keto a little bit too far but it is a great way to burn fat"
     
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  11. Everett

    Everett local rats so small, so tiny

    i had to look up the conversion bc we use mmol/L in Canada but hopy shit my dude what the fuck

    I went biking for way too long one night when i was younger, when i got home my parents were alarmed bc my blood sugar was somewhere between 2.0 and 2.5 mmol/L (36 and 45 mg/dl if i converted right) it maaaay have been 1.7,not as low as that guy but i really doubt i got that far, it was a low as hell number and they were surprised i was standing and conscious and coherent. Like, i've been at 2.5 (45) and been pouring with sweat and frantically shoving honey in my mouth, congrats on not dying my dude
     
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  12. Sethrial MacCoill

    Sethrial MacCoill Attempts were made

    I had a conversation with a woman at work the other day that made me think. She got hit in the head a while ago and has some brain damage that reduces the amount of stimulus she can process at any given time. It made it so she can't drive over about 20 miles an hour or on crowded roads, because there are too many things happening too fast and she can't keep track of all of them or filter out the unimportant ones.

    Which made me think, humans are incredible multiprocessors who can keep track of dozens of things at once. What if there are species of aliens that just... aren't? Like they can walk down the street with other people just fine or talk to up to four people at a time, but any faster, any busier, or any more people to keep track of and they just overload and can't function.

    All their travel is automated because they can't reliably process their car moving along with the five other cars surrounding them, the next three turns they need to make, the signs flashing by, the advertisements on the road, the curves of the streets, the music on the radio, and their passenger talking to them. Car crashes because of autodriver failure are common enough to be a tragedy and completely unavoidable if they ever want to get more than fifty miles from the place they were born. So they're impressed and absolutely baffled by stories of humans manually stabilizing a spinning spacecraft, landing a plane in tornado level turbulence with no autopilot and a stuck landing gear, or even just those assholes who weave through traffic going twice as fast as everyone else and somehow finding safe paths through hundreds of cars moving at all different speeds.
     
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  13. Verily

    Verily surprised Xue Yang peddler

    Interestingly enough (to me at least), if their computers are like our current computers, they’re in exactly the same boat as the aliens, only further from shore. Computers more or less do exactly one thing at a time, they just do it incredibly fast. They’re faking the multitasking with their incredible speed and whatever efficiency help we can provide.
     
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  14. Verily

    Verily surprised Xue Yang peddler

    Computers can even also have issues dealing with competing demands regarding what information is immediately relevant. It’s been a while since I studied this, but as far as I remember: you’ve got your registers. That’s storage for the bits of data you are currently processing at this moment.

    Then you have caches. That’s where you store the data you expect to be reading in and out of the registers in the near future. Those can’t be too big because the cost of manufacturing them would get way out of hand. There are probably several levels of caches, increasingly distant, which gives a speed penalty.

    Out in the boonies, accessible only by bus (it’s literally called a bus), is the RAM. The bus has limited speed and capacity. It can’t keep up with the CPU, hence the caches.

    And then there’s the hard disk, a huge lumbering thing. It’s slow as fuck and it’s frigging enormous. It takes a While to load things onto and off of the disk.

    So say you’re doing some really intensive task. It involves a lot of data. But then something else comes up, and it’s also really intensive and involves a lot of data. Now what do you do? If you’re not clever about this, your illusion of seamless multitasking is gonna fall apart.

    If you frequently switch back and forth between large tasks, you’re gonna have to figure out what to do about the cache, and the RAM. What data do you need available for each task? Where do you put it and will it remotely fit?

    Are you gonna have to graaaadually swap a bunch of contextual memory onto and off of the disk every time you change tasks? This can bog you down enough that the user, a being who is incomprehensibly slow, is going to start complaining about the delay.

    So there you go. Computer task switching woes.
     
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  15. Verily

    Verily surprised Xue Yang peddler

    I was wondering the other day if aliens who aren’t persistence predators would understand the appeal of long walks on the beach. Not fast, gradually and for a long time. How romantic!

    Then I thought maybe I understood why walking your cat is not typically a very fruitful attempted activity, and why your dog wants to go way too fast but then gets all tuckered out while you’re pretty damn winded but will be fine in a couple minutes.
     
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  16. Sethrial MacCoill

    Sethrial MacCoill Attempts were made

    They probably wouldn't get the walking part of things, but a long sit on the beach in the shade with someone you enjoy spending time with would probably appeal to an ambush predator or the descendants of prey creatures.

    And yeah, can relate to the dog and cat thing. Boo (cat) likes to go outside on her terms, on her turf, and chill in the bushes for twenty minutes before it's couch time again. Padme (pibble) loves the first half of walking with me because I'm willing to power walk with her and she can trot. Then she gets tired and wants to go home, and I'm still fresh and have another two or three miles in me.
     
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  17. Verily

    Verily surprised Xue Yang peddler

    Enjoys long lurks on the beach...
     
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  18. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    *necros this thread to share a great revelation*

    Nobody should be surprisdd at the amount of alienfuckers out there, because as far as human genetic history can tell us, every time homo sapiens has met another sentient hominid species, we proceeded to interbreed with them,introducing new genes and local adaptations into our genepool

    Alienfucking isn't a bug of humanity, it's a feature
     
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  19. palindromordnilap

    palindromordnilap Well-Known Member

    Oh, fun thing that's surprisingly never been mentioned in this thread:
    So, in 1979, Skylab re-entered the atmosphere with debris falling in Australia, primarily in Esperance. Which promptly fined NASA $400 for littering.
    Which made me think of an interesting scenario: imagine having some sort of evil alien overlord on trial for war crimes, and on top of all the charges, getting slapped with a littering fine for orbital bombardment.
     
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  20. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    if anyone wants proof that humans as a group are certifiable insane: sky jumping and sky flying as sports. like, you launch a lightweight human down a very tall, very steep hill, have them jump off the cliff at the bottom and then have them...sail...down with nothing to help them but very long skis and their own body surface

    and get distances of over a hundred meter (ski jump) and over two hundred meters (ski flying) and these people stand the landing, too. Usually. but like, this is a fucking thing humans do for sport. What is wrong with us. Evolution didn't cough up any wings but like hell is that stopping us.
     
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