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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Materials.

    If you’d have seen the marble sculptures when they were new, you would have described them as anything but realistic. We now know that many, if not most, sculptures were painted in bright garish colours.

    Why paint a delicately crafted sculpture with a dodgy paint job? Party taste, perhaps, but more definitely because that was what was available.

    The paints that we have now are carefully designed, mixed and stored to deliver a wide range of colours of a consistent quality (and even modern companies like GW struggle with that!).

    The further back you go, the fewer pigments there are and the less sophisticated the binders are. It’s no coincidence that the rapid explosion in science and trade of the Renaissance led to the rapid development of paints. Even in those days, an artist didn’t buy paint, they made it - access to new raw ingredients was all that was needed.

    So, why the Renaissance? Because it’s the earliest point in time it could have been possible.




  • I think you’re a little off on the “we need to fix this world” guys.

    Although zombie films / TV series lean heavily into the action side of things, that’s just because it’s more entertaining than watching people building things, developing tech, doing scientific research.

    Remember with COVID 19? Huge numbers of people immediately set out to find a cure, inventing and deploying ways to prevent and monitor the spread, creating pop-in treatment centres, etc.


  • Apepollo11@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldAny ideas?
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    2 months ago

    It’s the money-men making the decisions now, instead of people who actually care about the product.

    Mind you, this isn’t sustainable - by shifting to the more “luxury” end of the hobby, and their refusal to embrace emerging technology, they’re creating huge gaps in the market for exploitation.

    They’re on the verge of Nokia-ing themselves out of market dominance.


  • Apepollo11@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldAny ideas?
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    2 months ago

    Warhammerers?

    The initial buy-in, especially at a Games Workshop/ Warhammer store is astronomical.

    You’ll need paintbrushes to start - here, try these, the most expensive paintbrushes you’ll ever buy. And paints too, how about our mindboggling range of expensive paints?

    When I took up mini painting again as an adult, with dirt-cheap acrylic paints and brushes, and achieved far better results than I ever did as a kid with the “proper” stuff, it was a real eye-opener.






  • That’s not wrong at all, but there is a much more recent Adam and Eve - an actual anatomically modern human woman and man that all of us are descended from (although, again, they probably lived about 100,000 years apart - I.e. they weren’t a couple)

    It should also be stressed that I’m not saying that at one point there was only one woman alive or one man alive.

    Mitochondrial DNA isn’t like the usual inherited mix of DNA - instead it’s passed down directly from mothers to their children. If they have girls, then it’ll be passed down to their children too. If they only have boys, though, then that mitochondrial DNA has come to a dead end. Basically it’s matrilineal - it passes down the female line.

    The same with the Y Chromosome. Fathers pass the Y chromosome to their sons. If they only have daughters, well it’s come to a dead end. It’s patrilineal - it passes down the male line.

    DNA analysis shows that all of our mitochondrial DNA is shockingly similar - especially compared to many other animals. Rolling back the clock (by accounting for the tiny random mutations that occur over time) shows that everyone converges to a single person around 155,000 years ago. Before modern humans, as a species, had expanded out of Africa and spread across the world.

    Interestingly, especially so if looking for biblical comparisons, the Y-chromosomal Adam can be traced to around 100,000 years earlier than Mitochondrial Eve - so he did appear first.

    So, the next question might be, “if anatomically modern humans existed for at least 100,000 years before the Mitochondrial Eve, what happened to all the other mitochondria variants - why did we end up with only one?”

    That is simply a numbers game. Compared to many other animals, humans only have relatively few children in their lifetime. This keeps small populations from exploding suddenly, but it also increases the likelihood of only having boys (and stopping that line of Mitochondrial DNA).

    You can map it out on a piece of paper:

    Get five different coloured pens and a black pen.

    Across the top of the page, draw dot in each coloured pen, with a black one beside it. The coloured dots are female, the black ones male). These are the parents.

    Now for the kids. Toss a coin twice - heads for a boy (draw a dot in black pen beneath the parents), tails for a girl (draw a dot the same colour as the mum). Do this for all.

    Now pair up the offspring and carry on.

    You’ll find very quickly, one colour will start to dominate the paper. This represents the Mitochondrial DNA.