You Say What You Eat | Hacker News Reader

You Say What You Eat

archaeology.org

80 points80mph33 comments

There are a lot of really challenging questions about how to count languages, so I'd need to read the actual study to determine how they counted. But this is a pretty cool result actually. I'm also interested in how they quantified 'ease of articulation' for bilabials vs labiodentals.

Also, for those who don't have an overbite, can you more easily make er... reverse labiodentals (dentalabials?) where you use your lower teeth and your upper lip? I have an overbite, but the sound seems largely indistinct from my 'v/f'. I guess I'd have to see it's effect on surrounding vowels a bit more too. But different articulation points for the same sound are not unheard of (there are two different ways of making 's' for example).

Quite cool.

They sound very distinct to me (with an overbite mind you). They would not be distinguishing in English, but they are very much different sounds.

Web devs, please don't do this:

    p { color: #707070 !important; }
    body {     color: #7b7b7b; }

This is a deeply hostile attack on your users, telling your users that you don't want them to read your site's primary content.

If you think you need this, UI development is not a good career choice for you.

What in particular is wrong with this?

I think he's mad about !important, maybe he uses an extension to add css to the page, perhaps to make dark mode

no, he's mad about the color.

He's mad about the order and the usage of important

That !important makes it tough for Browser user-styles to override, which can be an accessibility issue for some users.

Why? I can read the grey for the most part, which doesn't seem too hostile.

> for the most part,

is a terrible standard for main content. You should be able to read it for the all.

You can read it, but many people do not have high-performance monitor and high-performance eyes.

Users can configure monitor/browser defaults for contrast and text however they like; web devs shouldn't try to forcibly reduce constrast for the primary content that is supposed to be the main recipient of visual attention.

How about not trying to back your personal dislike with some army of phantom users?

Do you disagree that there exists people with bad eyesight?

I myself have bad eyesight. I can read that website perfectly fine. And author owns the original commenter nothing so does not really deserve this kind of attack. And most importantly — very high contrast (pure black on pure white) is actually bad.

I can assure you that developers are not the archenemy of implementing good color schemes...most of the time. The Creative Director and six Editors listed on the About page probably have more say in why they can't read their own work on certain monitors.

>I can read the grey for the most part, which doesn't seem too hostile.

for the first 30 years behind monitor (and that is if you start with perfect eyesight).

It is really hard to understand/fell issues of the others until you hit the same issues yourself. This is why there are accessibility and good (not pretty/cute/beautiful/etc.) design guidelines which one has to follow even if the one doesn't see the need for it. ~15 years ago i noticed when some of my older colleagues started to use eyedrops, to mention eye fatigue, etc. while i was easily doing 12 hours almost non-stop, and i was pretty dismissive about their "minor" issues. Well, these days, closing on 50, i understand much better what they were talking about back then :)

And for those healthy&happy youngsters who may want to walk a mile in someone else's shoes or just read a light gray text with white background :) - aging/disability simulation GERT suit:

https://diamedicalusa.com/medical-equipment/manikins/wearabl...

"The age simulation suit GERT offers the opportunity to experience the impairments of older persons even for younger people. The age-related impairments are: opacity of the eye lens, narrowing of the visual field, high-frequency hearing loss, head mobility restrictions, joint stiffness, loss of strength, reduced grip ability and reduced coordination skills."

The site runs on Joomla (https://www.archaeology.org/administrator/), so it might've just been default CSS from a template.

It actually reads really nice with inverted colors (using Dark Reader extension).

This is why I appreciate reader mode in browsers that support it.

By this logic, all CSS is an attack on your users, forcing them to see your sites content under the assumption that you know better than them how it should be presented.

I tend to agree with this sentiment, but it's a lost war at this point.

You hold UI Development in too high esteem. It is not a graceful and delicate art, narrated by a smooth voice as the hints of a beautiful interface coming together are seen as reflections on a developer’s glasses, contemplating the placement of pixels quietly and softly in a dimly lit room on well calibrated monitors, thinking of the people who will consume the content.

It is loud boiler room sweatshop where a low wage Javascript assemblyman slumped in his chair looks away from his laptop to eye the clock while his manager stands over his shoulder with arms crossed nodding his head and suggesting to give the page some more pizazz.

Jony Ive would agree. The dichotomy is strong.

Totally agreed. If users can’t consume the data then whats the point of the website.

The agricultural revolution and its effects have been a disaster for the human race.

No grain, no gain!

In every aspect except for survival.

This seems to be one of Harari’s arguments in Sapiens. In many ways, hunter-gatherers lived better lives, ate more varied foods, suffered fewer health problems, and left a much less lasting mark on their environment. But now that we’ve gotten to a point where much of the population lives in relative comfort, we can see that there was a long-term payoff from investing in agriculture.

Well, that and industrialization, technology and specialization of labor has enabled us to be able to travel to outer space, for example. So we may be able to be the first species to colonize another planet. Earth will probably be smashed by another huge meteorite at some point in the future, so it's an important feat.

Unsubscribe from Unabomber quotes.

Weston A. Price did a lot of studies on nutrition and its impact on health, bone development, and growth, in particular, he focused on the impact of nutrition on dental health [1]. He noted that people who consumed meat and more primitive diets had superior dental health with few cavities (<1% of teeth impacted) and almost perfect dental arches (as opposed to folks nowadays who often require braces and extensive dental work in childhood or well into adulthood).

It's interesting to see the skulls of pre-Columbus native Americans, for example [2]. I'm not sure if we're "evolving" as the article says. I think evolution tends to only evolve for traits that promote survival to the next generation. In this case, I think modern agricultural diets promote underdevelopment of the jaw and teeth, and we've compensated for that by adding additional consonants to our language. The truth is though, the diet that our jaws evolved for still live on in our genes and we're just suffering from malnutrition to an extent.

[1] https://healthwyze.org/archive/nutrition_and_physical_degene... [2] http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html#ch13

I had to do some research to understand the downvotes. For anyone else, the Weston A. Price Foundation and Price's writing has a fair bit of criticism for its weak science (see Quackwatch [1], Science Based Medicine [2], Rational Wiki [3] among others).

It's hard to navigate their website, but it seems they're, among other things, pro-homeopathy, critical of vaccines, anti-soy, pro 'natural' foods, and advocate some controversial and potentially dangerous diets.

[1] https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/holisticd... [2] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling... [3] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Weston_A._Price_Foundation

Don't know about the foundation itself, it was founded almost half a century after his death (1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weston_A._Price_Foundation). But his research itself is highly cited.

As for "weak science" the book itself "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" is cited by 585 sources on Google Scholar, for example: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1184515186752252859...

It squares with the parent article that's posted, that diet affects jaw and dental development.

It's well documented that diet and nutrition drastically affect health, and plenty of other sources besides Weston Price's book attest to that:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14972061

The interesting thing about Price's book, is that he spent time traveling to every continent and met with aboriginal tribes and met with the modern (book was written in the 30's) tribes there. He took photos of their teeth. Keep in mind, this book was written in a time before television, before dental hygiene products were readily available in many countries, etc. The interesting thing about the book is the photo evidence itself. Maori, Chumu, Samoans, Melanesians, Gaelics, Aborigines, Inuit and many others are covered.

I spent some time looking through your Google Scholar link. Some of the citations were blanket "nutritionists have studied diet (1-6)" where Price is 4, but I did like this citation:

Nevertheless, since Price did not report his original measurements or statistical analyses, these observations need to be interpreted with some caution.

Which is to say, citation count is not a proxy for quality.

I've read the book and it's filled with cited sources, charts, photo evidence and logs. He was a published researcher and had over 150 publications on dentistry.

Guy was one of the foundational figures in modern dentistry: https://books.google.com/books?id=pZnzxgEACAAJ&dq=weston+pri...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104863643...

He's also far from the only one to link nutrition with dental health (or health in general)...here's an article showing links between early carb consumers and dental caries: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903197/

And another study confirming Price's assertions, with 34 Paleolithic skulls being inspected for dental and oral health: https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.2536 (NPR interpretation here: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/02/24/1726888...)

Another study confirming link between sugar intake and cavities: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/4/881S/4690063 (conclusion is that fluoride is a crutch for bad nutrition and doesn't fully solve the problem)

Suffice to say, criticism of some aspects of Price's works or opinions over his many decades of work, I'm not here to defend all of that. But the links between nutrition and dental health and development are well founded. And that's exactly what the OP article suggested as well.

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