No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
This reminds me of something I've been wondering about for a while now - burning hair has a distinct and very strong smell. That makes sense - if your hair is on fire, you want to know ASAP. My question is whether our hair evolved to have something in it that produces this smell, or if we just evolved to be particularly receptive to the smell of burning keratin.
That is of course ignoring the boring answers: "A little bit of both" and "It just worked out like that randomly", as well as the best answer "Wait, that's what that smell is?! Oh shit, you're right, I'm burning! AAAAAAAA!!!!"
You had it: people whose hair didn't smell when burning probably died more often, skewing the chances of survival towards smelly-when-on-fire hair.
All hair smells bad to us when burnt, not just human, ergo it's unlikely that it's some human specific adaptation. It seems more likely that it's related to avoiding wild fires than anything else.
People would not have been catching their hair on fire when the only fire they would encounter was natural wildfires or bonfires.
How often were people catching on fire and not noticing that this would cause any kind of selection criteria?
People catch on fire a lot actually. I’ve caught my hair on fire dozens of times. It didn’t cover my whole head on fire because I noticed and put it out. Having long hair and cooking over a fire …. You’re occasionally going to catch on fire.
But did you notice because of the smell? Or because your head was on fire?
Smell. I noticed it before it reached my skin.
Yea in our modern society sure. But not for the last 250,000 years of human evolution.
“Having long hair and cooking over a fire” - me
Yeah I’m sure it happened alot
Does the subject's awareness of the selection matter?
The premise here was that they noticed in time to not die... So, yes?
Ah I misread it.
I reckon it's not so much about noticing in absolute terms (to notice vs not to notice), but rather about the smallest difference that smelly hair would make. Amplify that over millions of years and smelly hair has a good chance of being everywhere eventually.
I dunno. I'm just having trouble conceptualizing any kind of scenario that could happen with enough frequency to cause this trait to be selected for.
I think it's more likely that the chemicals in hair just happen to smell bad when burnt. Those chemicals may have been filtered for other reasons.
Yea that could also very well be, that it was pre-existing and had no impact during evolution. I could see there being an evolutionary advantage to hair smelling bad. That's as far as my confidence and knowledge reaches on the matter. Very interesting nonetheless! :)
Not what I was wondering about, but thanks.