Building in an interrupt "Hey, pay attention to the real world now" feature would seem important. On the other hand, it'd still be awkward when you had to climb over someone to go to the toilet or something.
I'd be interested to try inflight VR. It could be really good, or it could just be a one-way ticket to airsickness.
What I'd really love would be a feature that lets me see the scenery currently around me, as if I were flying in the air without the plane. You could just use Google Maps data at first, but if someday they installed a few cameras on the exterior...
> What I'd really love would be a feature that lets me see the scenery currently around me, as if I were flying in the air without the plane. You could just use Google Maps data at first, but if someday they installed a few cameras on the exterior...
The IPCC 2nd report came out in 1995. They mention "...a rise in sea level of 30 cm to 1 m by the year 2100."
Seems a bit conservative given current sea level rise, but I suppose they have to go with something that everyone will agree to.
Back in the day I read a book that told the story of how a boy discovered that the old vagabond who skulked about his farm was actually the mighty Belgarath the Sorcerer.
Even out there, it's a pretty rare use case. If you're somewhere so remote that you can't get there with any kind of land vehicle, then... what are you even doing there, that you need a semi-permanent solid structure?
There's no good solution to running a large organisation. Instead of complaining that large organisations are badly run, we should instead marvel that they run at all.
Unfortunately the indispensible employee generally isn't the one getting fed hard technical problems, he's the one responsible for maintaining the complex, mission-critical thingy that only he understands and which seems to break down on a regular basis.
It's a trade off. I got in at 9.30, left at 5, was overpaid and spent most of my day reading HN, doing side projects, or playing cool js games like that cat one. My only meaningful responsibility was to make sure we didn't break down too much or for too long, and that took a few hours a week.
I think that for some people that would have been a trade off they'd be happy to make (and in many ways it was attractive), I think if I'd got on with the people I worked with I might still be there.
Also pity them if they want to fix the mission-critical thingy (after staring into the void for so long) but the business' "plan" is to quietly limp along forever.
This is about evidence of people who themselves personally came from North Africa. Not people who's ancestors came from North Africa.
The evidence is found in the oxygen isotopes in their teeth from the water they drank in their early lives, so it's nothing to do with genetics or ancestry and is purely environmental.
With DNA there would be no way to know when the African ancestry was introduced. Bear in mind we've had extensive contact with Africa via the slave and sugar trades for about a dozen generations.
I think that's exactly what you can use dna evidence for. E.g. its used to identify when Neanderthal was added etc. Or is it because the introduction was continuous? Hm.
We don't know from the DNA evidence itself when we received Neanderthal DNA other than the fact we know roughly when main-line Neanderthals died out.
There's a huge difference between saying these modern British people have some tiny amount of African DNA and we don't know where it came from, and saying this person right here in this grave from this historical period grew up in Africa. They tell us very different things.
To a point, but that wouldn't be useful in this sort of case. We're talking about people who lived 80 generations ago, many of them before the Saxon and Norman invasions that both flooded the English gene pool. I'm English with no 'known' African ancestry. But it's quite possible I have some African ancestry from 1800 years ago, but I might also have African ancestry from one ancestor in medival times, and perhapse an ancestor from the West Indies sugar plantation days. How would you ever tease that out? It would only add up to a few percent of DNA but would be all over the map. Many brits probably have ancestries all over the place like this. What about ancestors who were Berbers? They have largely Visigoth ancestry, but are from North Africa.
In any case, the idea that this specific evidence isn't of value 'because DNA' is just daft.
> They have largely Visigoth ancestry, but are from North Africa.
The berbers do not have "largely visigoth" ancestry. The berbers are descendents of Numidians and Mauri, and they have a north african origin and the majority of north africans (algeria, morocco, tunisia) regardless of language (arabic or berber) can be identified genetically by the "berber marker." Recent population studies prove the despite numerous military conquests of north west africa there was not a population replacement.
We inherit the genes of our parents not completely mixed but in large chunks. So someone who is first generation mixed race while have large continuous regions of their genome from one race or the other. If two such people have children they will have the same amount of genes from each race as their parents[1] but the continuous regions will be smaller. So from the average length of regions which we can attribute to different founder populations we can estimate how long ago the admixture happened.
[1] This is not completely true as we seldom inherit exactly 25% of our genome from any grandparent, but it is usually pretty close.
Ongoing arguments about representation. Some people want to maintain the lie that there were no black people in the UK before the Empire Windrush. Some people want to insist that fantasy novels of pseudo-medieval settings should not have black people in as it's not "realistic", which is also silly.
It should be noted that North African is generally not black and in fact genetic testing of remains of some individuals living in the region of Carthage at the height of its power show them to possess a European haplolyte that has since mostly disappeared, and survives predominantly on the Iberian peninsula.
> It should be noted that North African is generally not black
It's not as simple as that. Do a Google image search for 'Tuareg' and you'll find a number of faces that meet modern British (and American) conceptions of 'black'.
>It's not as simple as that. Do a Google image search for 'Tuareg' and you'll find a number of faces that meet modern British (and American) conceptions of 'black'.
I didn't put it in overly simplistic terms. I said it "is generally not black", not "it is not black" or "it is never black". I was referring to the majority, rather making a blanket characterization about all North Africans.
Considering the large slave trade that filled the harems etc with black female slaves, there should be quite a lot of black ancestry in the Arab world?
Similarly, North Africans of the late/post-Roman period could actually be Vandals or Alans, ethnically. There's a huge amount of flux in populations in the ancient period.
It's worth noting that 'blackness' is a kind of modern era invention -- the Romans were deep into north Africa, it was entirely integrated into the empire, more so than much of Europe, and in their texts the colour of Africans skin is not really even mentioned. They are just referred to as Africans, which means Romans who live in North Africa. That's it.
You're absolutely right, and that's another reason why this is considered important: race is a modern way of viewing the world. The Romans were colonialists, but their kind of supremacy was based on culture and civic behaviour rather than skin colour. You could become civis romanus, and be accepted.
Not to mention that along particular corridors, there was contact with sub-Saharan Africans. Especially down the Nile, but also via routes through the desert.
While ultimately all people are of African origin it is still interesting to see whether there were later migration waves out of Africa. (Or even back into Africa for that matter)
While not mainland Africa, Madagascar is an example of a migration back into Africa. It was settled by Austronesians from Borneo. Malagasy is an Austronesian language:
All people are of African origin on a very long timescale of over 50,000-300,000 years ago.
That there were Africans in a more modern Britain sooner (just 5000 years ago), is interesting for this reason and it begs the question as to where the population went to-
> it begs the question as to where the population went to
I'm guessing they married out.
I cannot find a reference, but I seem to remember learning that eighteenth century Covent Garden in London had a significant black population, possibly former slaves freed by and then recruited into the British Army during the Revolutionary War. Within a century, that population had gone, at least as a distinct, visible group: the original population were all male and had taken local wives.
Why? Someone might know what I'm talking about and provide the reference that eluded me; or, just as usefully, they might be able to demonstrate I'm speaking nonsense.
Go back far enough and we'll find a common ancestor, and they probably came from Africa, and while confirming this is in itself interesting I think that people travelling and cross settling in our history is excepotion ally interesting.
Agreed - I'm certainly somebody who finds the history of the many waves of immigration to and emigration from the British Isles absolutely fascinating, particularly where these might overlap with the various origin myths for where peoples believed they originally came from.
[e.g. I've always wondered why I have epicanthic folds (which are fairly common in the part of Scotland I come from) even though my family has been in Scotland for many hundreds of years, although I think I've found a Finnish connection in the 17th century].
Given the ongoing mess that was the onlineification of the 2016 census, I don't think anyone (the people or the government) would have any interest in this.
The Australian election system is pretty damn good, and very trustworthy, because it works with pencils, papers, and lots of eyes on the ballots and the counters.
I'd be interested to try inflight VR. It could be really good, or it could just be a one-way ticket to airsickness.
What I'd really love would be a feature that lets me see the scenery currently around me, as if I were flying in the air without the plane. You could just use Google Maps data at first, but if someday they installed a few cameras on the exterior...