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cahn(Or: December 2019: the month D would say to me before bed, "What were you doing tonight, giant ants or Fritzmas?")
Traditionally I make a post here on the media I consumed for Yuletide and have a more conventional reveal post elsewhere. This year I have a more conventional reveal post as usual, and in addition because all the (two other) people who are interested are here, I also have a collaboration-detail post for Frederician RPF here :)
I don't have a lot to say about canon this year, as I said most of it in the fic, I think. I did learn some things related to Bible/Tanakh/Book of Esther and my feelings thereof, ants, and flutes. A small sampler of weird things I learned tangentially (none of this actually made it directly into any final drafts):
-Apparently I have some dreadful mixed feelings about Mordecai (which were flagged in beta, lol). (Especially the bit where Esther goes "so, I might die!" which I feel is a totally legit emotional response, and then Mordecai comes down on her. Which, I mean, I understand his viewpoint too, but I guess my sympathy is with Esther :P :) ) Though I am working through those feelings :)
-Male ants are haploid (one set of chromosomes) and female ants are diploid (two sets of chromosomes). Male ants are basically walking sperm! One of the very weird things about this is that male ants can't directly have genetic sons (the haploid contribution comes solely from the mother), but they can have genetic grandsons -- they can combine their genetic information with a diploid female to make a diploid daughter, and that diploid daughter can pass some of the male's genetic information down to a son. (How weird is that?!)
-According to a general who (wikipedia says) apparently was not very reliable, the Persians won a major battle with Egypt by carrying cats, which the Egyptians regarded as sacred, and the Egyptians didn't shoot because they were afraid of hurting the cats.
-There's this guy who pours molten aluminum inside ant nests and sells them as sculptures
-Jan Dismas Zelenka, whom I have never heard of before, was a Czech Baroque composer who wrote some really cool stuff, like the secular oratorio Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis (youtube link)
Traditionally I make a post here on the media I consumed for Yuletide and have a more conventional reveal post elsewhere. This year I have a more conventional reveal post as usual, and in addition because all the (two other) people who are interested are here, I also have a collaboration-detail post for Frederician RPF here :)
I don't have a lot to say about canon this year, as I said most of it in the fic, I think. I did learn some things related to Bible/Tanakh/Book of Esther and my feelings thereof, ants, and flutes. A small sampler of weird things I learned tangentially (none of this actually made it directly into any final drafts):
-Apparently I have some dreadful mixed feelings about Mordecai (which were flagged in beta, lol). (Especially the bit where Esther goes "so, I might die!" which I feel is a totally legit emotional response, and then Mordecai comes down on her. Which, I mean, I understand his viewpoint too, but I guess my sympathy is with Esther :P :) ) Though I am working through those feelings :)
-Male ants are haploid (one set of chromosomes) and female ants are diploid (two sets of chromosomes). Male ants are basically walking sperm! One of the very weird things about this is that male ants can't directly have genetic sons (the haploid contribution comes solely from the mother), but they can have genetic grandsons -- they can combine their genetic information with a diploid female to make a diploid daughter, and that diploid daughter can pass some of the male's genetic information down to a son. (How weird is that?!)
-According to a general who (wikipedia says) apparently was not very reliable, the Persians won a major battle with Egypt by carrying cats, which the Egyptians regarded as sacred, and the Egyptians didn't shoot because they were afraid of hurting the cats.
-There's this guy who pours molten aluminum inside ant nests and sells them as sculptures
-Jan Dismas Zelenka, whom I have never heard of before, was a Czech Baroque composer who wrote some really cool stuff, like the secular oratorio Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis (youtube link)
no subject
Date: 2020-01-07 06:40 pm (UTC)I kind of suspect this is related to something a former biologist once told me. Some aspects of biology are forgiving, some are not. If you look at the shape of human eyeballs, they're all pretty much the same, because if you mess with it too much, you lose functionality. If you look at the shape of human cartilage folds in the ear, you get more significant differences, because as long as there are some folds directing sound waves toward the earhole, the exact configuration doesn't matter as much. (The idea, I believe, is to get enough differences that our brain can learn to map the differences to distances.)
Sex differences strike me as the latter. You need some kind of difference between sexes, large enough that they can play complementary roles in reproduction, small enough that they're still members of the same species. There are many ways to get differences of that scope where both parties are still fertile. Therefore, you should expect to see different ways of doing it evolve.
I'm making this up, but it's reasoning backwards from things we know are true to principles I've learned.
Hee, yeah, the Fredersdorf fic was definitely my "light and easy" fic, lol. I think it helped that because of betaing your fic I had a lot of Opinions about Fritz and Fredersdorf and their characters :)
:D It also helped that we got some chatting going on with