Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

I explained why that data does not contradict what the previous commenter was trying to say.

Speed is less of a factor than endurance in a persistence-hunting scenario where we’re much slower than our prey anyway.

I don’t know the facts for this specific claim, but the logic is fair. One group can be better suited for endurance without being faster. One group could also be faster on average without having the individual fastest performers. Not only because of cultural factors, but also because the distribution curves might have different shapes for men vs women. There could be greater outliers (top performers) among men even if the average is higher among women in general. It’s not necessarily as straightforward as, say, height, where men’s distribution curve is almost the same shape as women’s, just shifted up a few inches.

I don’t have the data to draw any real conclusions, though.

One of the problems looking at athletic records is that it’s really just the elite among a self-selected group of enthusiasts, which doesn’t tell us a whole lot about what might have been the norm 100,000 years ago, or what might be the norm today if all else were equal between genders. These are not controlled trials.

I’ve read that the top women outperform the top men in long-distance open-water swimming, supposedly due in part to higher body fat making women more buoyant, helping to regulate body temperature, and providing fuel. This is the first time I’ve read that women might have an advantage in running, though.

I wish the article provided citations. The reality is probably too complex to fit into a headline or pop-sci writeup.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

I don’t think there’s any way to count years without rooting it somewhere arbitrary. We cannot calculate the age of the planet, the sun, or the universe to the accuracy of a year (much less a second or nanosecond). We cannot define what “modern man” is to a meaningful level of accuracy, either, or pin down the age of historical artifacts.

Most computers use a system called “epoch time” or “UNIX time”, which counts the seconds from January 1, 1970. Converting this into a human-friendly date representation is surprisingly non-trivial, since the human timekeeping systems in common use are messy and not rooted in hard math or in the scientific definition of a second, which was only standardized in 1967.

Tom Scott has an amusing video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

There is also International Atomic Time, which, like Unix Time, counts seconds from an arbitrary date that aligns with the Gregorian calendar. Atomic Time is rooted at the beginning of 1958.

ISO 8601 also aligns with the Gregorian calendar, but only as far back as 1582. The official standard does not allow expressing dates before that without explicit agreement of definitions by both parties. Go figure.

The core problem here is that a year, as defined by Earth’s revolution around the sun, is not consistent across broad time periods. The length of a day changes, as well. Humans all around the world have traditionally tracked time by looking at the sun and the moon, which simply do not give us the precision and consistency we need over long time periods. So it’s really difficult to make a system that is simple, logical, and also aligns with everyday usage going back centuries. And I don’t think it is possible to find any zero point that is truly meaningful and independent of wishy-washy human culture.

Writing is hella OP. Please nerf.