TIL: Today I Learned

[Kyriakos]

I used to think we are smarter than dolphins and whales but I'm not of the opinion if they had opposable thumbs, we'd probably be the by-catch of their factory-hunting operations rather than the other way around.

I suspect that it doesn't have crucially to do with limbs or easy to turn/use protrusions. Octopodes have far more efficient limbs than humans (and eight of them ) but still don't appear to ever produce anything to advance their state in a manner which is visible outwardly and can be progressed. On the other hand, take something like some species of ants which have at some early point developed agriculture (fungi cultivation) and animal husbandry (using smaller insects for their secretions), and then apparently just stopped advancing.
I have to assume that cosmic (here meant as having to do with the external world) advancement of a being is severely dependable on dynamics of its mental life. Even apes (not counting their relatives, humans) seem to not advance, and they clearly have more in common with humans than any other species on earth. Yet are stuck in a loop; which doesn't mean internal development and flux isn't there, but in this model it would connote that more powerful checks keep it from resulting to anything tangible to observers:

 

[Hrothbern]

TIL that it is 150 years ago that "patat", french fries, were made in the Netherlands.
As our most popular streetfood, on average, we eat 50 portions of French fries per year.
According to stories it originated in Paris just before the French Revolution, but the Belgians contest this with stories that, in the vally of the Meuse, the tradition to fry small river fish in oil was the base of that origin there in the 17th century.
The "kroket" we often eat with our "patat met", french fries with mayonaise and a fried croquette as "meat", was anyway no doubt invented in France at the end of the 19th century.

If you are ever in NL, don't forget to eat a "kroket"
Around 50 grams of tasty ragout held together, wrapped, in a crispy skin of small breadcrumbs.

 

[Kyriakos]

TIL that it is 150 years ago that "patat", french fries, were made in the Netherlands.
As our most popular streetfood, on average, we eat 50 portions of French fries per year.
According to stories it originated in Paris just before the French Revolution, but the Belgians contest this with stories that, in the vally of the Meuse, the tradition to fry small river fish in oil was the base of that origin there in the 17th century.
The "kroket" we often eat with our "patat met", french fries with mayonaise and a fried croquette as "meat", was anyway no doubt invented in France at the end of the 19th century.

If you are ever in NL, don't forget to eat a "kroket"
Around 50 grams of tasty ragout held together, wrapped, in a crispy skin of small breadcrumbs.

So, what is the dutch title of that Van Gogh painting with the potato-eaters?

 

[Hrothbern]

So, what is the dutch title of that Van Gogh painting with the potato-eaters?

"de aardappel-eters"
literally the same as in English.

That painting:
Poor rural people, living in home-made peat "houses" with a reed roof and eating home-grown potatoes. One bowl of cooked potatoes in the middle of the table, one small bowl of molten pig fat to dip the potatoe in, and everybody a fork. Lard being BTW much healthier than most people think nowadays. If the pig gets vegetable food, about 40% (IRRC) of the lard is oleic acid, the same basic healthy mono-unsaturated fatty acid that is ~ 75% of the olive oil.


Vincent van Gogh started as a social world-improver, himself coming from protestant middle class family with somewhat "modern", liberal elements.
He believed that when he would live among those poor people, and/or close with them, he could strenghten their faith in God (secularisation had started and Vincent's father was a minister of a protestant church).
But just like when he lived together with a prostitute later on in life when he had really started painting, he was always seen by the poor working class as a good-intending freak not to be taken serious.

The potato-eaters is a typical painting of that first period in Vincent's artist's life, where he pictures somber settings (with brownish somber colors) without hope.
His opinion on religion was BTW quite modern for those days: he saw nature and human achievements as "God", something "up there". He also believed that religion could be most purely found among the emotions of the "have nots". He stopped evangelising after I guess too many deceptions from that romantic approach and that is when he changes his style to the sunny colourful flowers etc. Escapes so to say.

 

[Kyriakos]

"de aardappel-eters"
literally the same as in English.

That painting:
Poor rural people, living in home-made peat "houses" with a reed roof and eating home-grown potatoes. One bowl of cooked potatoes in the middle of the table, one small bowl of molten pig fat to dip the potatoe in, and everybody a fork. Lard being BTW much healthier than most people think nowadays. If the pig gets vegetable food, about 40% (IRRC) of the lard is oleic acid, the same basic healthy mono-unsaturated fatty acid that is ~ 75% of the olive oil.


Vincent van Gogh started as a social world-improver, himself coming from protestant middle class family with somewhat "modern", liberal elements.
He believed that when he would live among those poor people, and/or close with them, he could strenghten their faith in God (secularisation had started and Vincent's father was a minister of a protestant church).
But just like when he lived together with a prostitute later on in life when he had really started painting, he was always seen by the poor working class as a good-intending freak not to be taken serious.

The potato-eaters is a typical painting of that first period in Vincent's artist's life, where he pictures somber settings (with brownish somber colors) without hope.
His opinion on religion was BTW quite modern for those days: he saw nature and human achievements as "God", something "up there". He also believed that religion could be most purely found among the emotions of the "have nots". He stopped evangelising after I guess too many deceptions from that romantic approach and that is when he changes his style to the sunny colourful flowers etc. Escapes so to say.

I suppose Vincent would have felt ashamed of his grandson (was that grandson from some brother of Vincent's? Eg Theodore?)

 

[Hrothbern]

I suppose Vincent would have felt ashamed of his grandson (was that grandson from some brother of Vincent's? Eg Theodore?)

had to look that up !

Theo was a great-grandson of the brother (also Theo) of Vincent.


Yes, I guess also that Vincent would be ashamed. Vincent was the peace loving type. Theo the "I want to provoke every holy cow with my freedom of speech".
Theo described himself once as "the minister of the community of nihilism". He insulted everything available. Jesus was that "rotten fish from Nazareth", caramel flavor in Auswitch "the smell of burned jews with diabetes" (called sugar disease in Dutch).

When I brought my oldest daughter for a while before going to work, before her going to school, every week at 7.00 AM to the swimming pool, to learn to swim (a kind of must here with all the canals), Theo was there as well, doing the same with his young son.
He always looked totally worn out with red eyes (from late night binging ?).. a total mess. But yet there for his son so early, despite him being a movie maker.

But to set one thing straight.
Theo was absolutely not some rightwing extremist, or some traditional anti-Islam guy. He was just a fundamentalist anti-Monarchy, anti-religion, anti-establishment guy.
The message that tolerance (for him) goes only so far as that tolerance works better when it is reciprocal, was pearls for the swines for him.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

There were serious attempts at it in the 60s and 70s. The results were fairly predictable:

Going back to the ocean was their biggest mistake. Good luck discovering fire while underwater, thumbs or no thumbs.

I think you're right on water being a hindrance to developing technology. On the other hand, I also like to think that it wouldn't be an insurmountable problem and that we're insufficiently imaginative when it comes to underwater chemistry as we have had little reason to develop technology along those lines until very recently.

I suspect that it doesn't have crucially to do with limbs or easy to turn/use protrusions. Octopodes have far more efficient limbs than humans (and eight of them ) but still don't appear to ever produce anything to advance their state in a manner which is visible outwardly and can be progressed. On the other hand, take something like some species of ants which have at some early point developed agriculture (fungi cultivation) and animal husbandry (using smaller insects for their secretions), and then apparently just stopped advancing.
I have to assume that cosmic (here meant as having to do with the external world) advancement of a being is severely dependable on dynamics of its mental life. Even apes (not counting their relatives, humans) seem to not advance, and they clearly have more in common with humans than any other species on earth. Yet are stuck in a loop; which doesn't mean internal development and flux isn't there, but in this model it would connote that more powerful checks keep it from resulting to anything tangible to observers:

I think fundamentally neither octopi nor chimps are smart enough to advance much further. Chimps are on a different evolutionary path from us - while they have large brains, they've also retained features like fangs and muscle structure which allow them to compete with the rest of nature on a more 'traditional' (for lack of a better word) basis. Whereas our ancestors lost those features and went all-in on brain size and fine muscle control as a means for competing in nature. It was a pretty unique path to go down and once it started, I think the only successful way forward was to continue to double down on the strategy - our ancestors kept evolving bigger and bigger brains over time and the splinter lines of other homo species all died off. (and yes, I'm aware that no species 'chooses' an evolutionary path consciously)

I recently found out that octopi aren't even aware of where there limbs are and what they're doing when they're not in sight. You and I have a sense that allows us to keep track of where our limbs are even when we close our eyes. This doesn't work for octopi in the same way, and there tentacles tend to act in an automatic fashion (even responding to stimuli without conscious effort). To control their limbs, they have to be actively looking at them and focusing on what they are doing, otherwise the limbs just sort of hang out and do their own thing. It was very interesting.

 

[Kyriakos]

I think you're right on water being a hindrance to developing technology. On the other hand, I also like to think that it wouldn't be an insurmountable problem and that we're insufficiently imaginative when it comes to underwater chemistry as we have had little reason to develop technology along those lines until very recently.

I think fundamentally neither octopi nor chimps are smart enough to advance much further. Chimps are on a different evolutionary path from us - while they have large brains, they've also retained features like fangs and muscle structure which allow them to compete with the rest of nature on a more 'traditional' (for lack of a better word) basis. Whereas our ancestors lost those features and went all-in on brain size and fine muscle control as a means for competing in nature. It was a pretty unique path to go down and once it started, I think the only successful way forward was to continue to double down on the strategy - our ancestors kept evolving bigger and bigger brains over time and the splinter lines of other homo species all died off. (and yes, I'm aware that no species 'chooses' an evolutionary path consciously)

I recently found out that octopi aren't even aware of where there limbs are and what they're doing when they're not in sight. You and I have a sense that allows us to keep track of where our limbs are even when we close our eyes. This doesn't work for octopi in the same way, and there tentacles tend to act in an automatic fashion (even responding to stimuli without conscious effort). To control their limbs, they have to be actively looking at them and focusing on what they are doing, otherwise the limbs just sort of hang out and do their own thing. It was very interesting.

As Prometheus noted, humans had nothing else to compete with nature other than the ability to think. So he had to at least offer them fire (tech) ^_^

 

[Arakhor]

Neanderthals actually had larger brains than us, but our not needing all that extra fuel was possibly one the reasons that we simply out-competed them.

 

[MaryKB]

One of my teachers in high school said it's about surface area of your brain, and humans have a really "folded" brain surface, which gives us more total area than other creatures ... he compared us to cats, whose brains he said were smooth.

 

[rah]

Some might claim they're smarter than we are since they have tricked us into servitude.

 

[Kyriakos]

I know that cat people are really overly protective of their pets (who can't become aware of what others write on the web ) but imo cats do not seem intelligent. Certainly they are far smarter than dogs, but that doesn't mean much; dogs are among the dumbest creatures on earth :/
But cats certainly are acting as if they are the master of the human. A nice saying is "a dog looks up to man, a cat looks down on man, and a pig looks into his eyes and sees his equal"

 

[MaryKB]

I absolutely adore and fawn over my fur babies, but I know none of them are particularly intelligent compared to humans, lol.

Emotional Intelligence might be another matter though ...

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Neanderthals actually had larger brains than us, but our not needing all that extra fuel was possibly one the reasons that we simply out-competed them.

Neanderthals also had bigger bodies than us (they may have been shorter but were much, much stockier), so again it's hard to say whether that extra brain mass went to them being smarter or just controlling their bigger bodies. And their brains were also structured differently - we have huge foreheads because we have a bigger frontal lobe which for humans is where a lot of the 'higher' (for lack of a better word) thinking takes place. But hey, they may indeed have been smarter than us. It's very hard to say.

I've read articles to the effect that Neanderthals didn't tend to have the same level of advanced material culture (tools and such) until they began contacting humans which had already developed it. But recently I read that there was recent findings of cave art attributed to Neanderthals that predated comparable human cave art by many millennia, so who knows?

One of my teachers in high school said it's about surface area of your brain, and humans have a really "folded" brain surface, which gives us more total area than other creatures ... he compared us to cats, whose brains he said were smooth.

For human and mammal brains this is definitely a key feature. Going back to my original post, it's hard to say this is true for all orders of life. Some of the articles I was just reading is that for birds in particular, the way their brains are structured means they are far less dependent on surface area for computational power as they tend to have the same sorts of neuron networks buried within the brain itself that are only found in the surface layers of mammalian brains.

 

[The_J]

If you are ever in NL, don't forget to eat a "kroket"

Honestly not the first thing I'd recommend ^^.

 

[BenitoChavez]

This seems to be saying that, because beach sand can't be used, they use beach sand.

There's no mention of desert sand, and I would guess that there's much more desert sand than beach sand,

So beach and desert sand does have it's uses. It isn't used in construction as much but it is used for other less utilitarian purposes like creating artificial beaches, replenishing existing beaches, and creating entire islands made of sand. The sand mafias take river, lake, beach, and desert sand depending on what they can sell and what is readily available to them.

My bad for not clarifying that in my original post.

 

[Hrothbern]

Honestly not the first thing I'd recommend ^^.

ohhhh

I had for a while also a room in Bruehl, near my main desk, a small duke town near Cologne, in the middle of brown coal and vegetable plots on the loess.
And the main asset for me, besides a cozy centre, was a snackbar selling patat en kroketten... and it was always busy.

 

[The_J]

From my international friends (incl. me), I think most are not really fond of it (but that really depends also on your ...hunger)
Somehow bitterballen are regarded higher, despite that it's probably the same stuff as in the kroket.
First thing would for me would be a stroopwaffel probably.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

TIL Antonio Banderas had a pretty interesting story for breaking into Hollywood. After achieving some success in Spanish theater and film, he flew to LA to meet with a talent agency to get representation in the states. The meeting turned out to be a nothingburger but as he was leaving, a coffee boy held him up and said he was working on becoming an agent and wanted to know if Antonio would allow himself to be represented by him. Antonio said yes as he had no other options and went back to Spain feeling the entire trip had been a waste of time. He got a call a couple of months later from the coffee boy who had managed to become an agent and had also arranged an interview between Antonion and a director to be held in London. Thing was that at the time, Antonio didn't speak English and the director didn't speak Spanish. So he went to the interview and just said 'yes' and 'of course' to everything, which worked for a bit but by the end of the appetizers, the director had figured out he didn't speak English and laughed at him. For whatever reason, the director decided to move forward with Antonio and had him learn some lines phonetically for a few test scenes and ended up giving him the job which led to him breaking into American film.

It was a pretty interesting story but the one part that didn't make a lot of sense as Antonio told it was that he said the director somehow explained to him very carefully and with much effort that he was to go to New York and learn lines phonetically and film test scenes. I was once asked by a lady who only spoke Spanish to give her directions and even with help from google, it didn't go that well. I can't imagine working out something as complex as what Antonio claimed over dinner without the internet. I kind of figure the director just called Antonio's Spanish-speaking agent afterward and had him relay the instructions and over time this story morphed into the way Antonio tells it now. Kind of like how Bryan Williams was once in Iraq with a helicopter unit which had come under fire just prior to his arrival and that ended up becoming a story wherein Bryan WIlliams' own helicopter was forced down under enemy fire after enough re-tellings.

Malcolm Gladwell did a whole show on the Bryan Williams helicopter story and it was pretty obvious he hadn't really consciously intended to steal valor and also quite sad he ended up facing such severe consequences from it.

 

[Zkribbler]

TIL Antonio Banderas had a pretty interesting story for breaking into Hollywood.

For what it's worth, IMHO, Antonio Banderas is the most underrated actor in Hollywood.