Like Benjamin Marr said, it looks better in real life. The wattles are hideously pop-out yellow in the sample note, and were the reason why people poked abundant fun at it when it was announced.
New Australian $5 bill compared to ‘clown puke’
In real life, they’re mercifully more subdued. But the transparency is jarring.
Only what was in Ctesias’ work Indica (Ctesias).
The text only survives in quotations from later authors, and in a summary by Photius:
Photius’ excerpt of Ctesias’ Indica
It was second hand information: Ctesias worked in the Persian court, and relayed fanciful Persian notions of what India was like. Megasthenes, the first Greek author to have actually gone to India and recorded his impressions, was an envoy to India of Seleucus I Nicator, one of the successors of Alexander.
It’s interesting, isn’t it. We don’t hear Mongoloid or Negroid in the US. That isn’t because the US has suddenly turned away from Racial categories; they call them Asian and Black or African-American. And add to that Latino (very much an American classification), Native American, and Islander.
But Whites have retained Caucasian in the States.
Of course, one of the salient things about racial categorisation in the US, which is alien to the Old World, is that the most salient social tribal groupings within the US have not been based on ethnicity (whatever that may mean), as is familiar in the Old World. Whites as a tribal grouping in the States results from a melting pot of European cultures; English was the common language, but people didn’t rally around an English or even British culture—too many Irish and Germans from the very start. The same of course goes for Blacks in the US, with the added component of repression and cultural suppression.
So whiteness is a big deal in the States that it wasn’t elsewhere. Other whites, even slave-owning whites, would identify by ethnicity first and skin colour second; that wasn’t quite an option in the US. There was of course the new identity of American; the problem with that was, it didn’t adequately exclude blacks.
So. That’s why whites get referenced much more in the US than elsewhere. But why Caucasians and not Negroids?
My surmise (since I don’t get good guidance from Wikipedia this time) is that in the late 19th century, White Americans were aware that their allegiance to race rather than ethnicity was an odd thing by European standards, and were eager to find scientific backing for it. “White” and “Black”, and even more now “Yellow” and “Red”, sound like a bizarre focus of allegiance: you’re proclaiming allegiance to a pigment, not a tradition or a community. (White people in Europe sure didn’t feel they all belonged to the same thing.) Racial Anthropology supplied that for White Americans.
White Americans did not feel the need to speak of Negroids or Mongoloids outside the context of anthropology or eugenics. I think that’s because the scientific discourse was more about ennobling White Americans’ self-identity, than about systematising their notions of other races. Caucasians may have felt funny paying allegiance to a pigment; they didn’t feel embarrassment from reducing other races to a pigment.
Yellow and Red are long dead. The opposition of African-American to Black and Negro came from the astute observation that Blacks had an ethnic identity in the US, comparable to all the ethnic identities of “hyphenated Americans”, which could be opposed to a pigment. That move has its own problems: South African Americans and North African Americans are not who it is meant to designate; and “African” is an ethnic identity only in America, for the same reason “Caucasian” is an ethnic identity only in America. But it has been successful.
And that leaves Whites. Caucasian was appropriated from the framework of Racial Anthropology. But it was recontextualised, and it was never thought of as derogatory. You can argue that Negroid and Mongoloid are derogatory; in fact, it’s hard to use those terms now with a straight face. But Caucasian is no longer defined in the same paradigm as Negroid and Mongoloid: Americans have forgotten all about the original Racial Anthropology framework, and I doubt most users of “Caucasian” have even heard of “Mongoloid”. Caucasian is now defined in opposition to Asian and African-American. Its etymology is now just an historical accident.
So in short: the legacy you allude to for Caucasian, OP, has been forgotten about. The word is being used in a paradigm that owes a lot to that legacy—but that existed before it, and have survived after it.
Imagine a world in which humans didn’t have Electroreception. None of that electric frisson you get when a predator lurks outside. No ability to use your body as a compass; why, the number of humans that would get lost on hikes! No ability to tell what’s in front of you just by its capacitance or resistance. And how the hell would humans ever develop an intuitive understanding of electrical engineering?
Oh, I’m sorry. I said humans. I was, of course, speaking of sharks and platypuses.
A society that never had sound would never know what it’s missing, just as we don’t know what we’re missing out on compared to sharks and platypuses. (Or for that matter dogs.) So, no music, and no loss: humans are still creative animals, they would divert their creativity to the senses they did have.
Don Grushkin has written a meaty and substantive answer; but I have to say, I disagree with some of it.
So the speculation that Eyeth* would be more peaceful, collaborative, and understanding than Earth is one I’m not buying.
Written language would start like Chinese; I don’t know that there would be as much incentive for it to move away from pictograms as there was for abugidas and alphabets, given the complexity of sign language phonologies.
But I agree with Don that Eyeth society would look pretty similar to Earth. (In fact, I’m arguing it would look even more similar.) Society is how it is because of cognition, not modality of perception.
* That is, while the planet of the Hearing is EARth, the planet of the Deaf is EYEth.
A2A from Pegah. Same answer as User. I know of the Armenian genocide, and the counterclaims of Armenians massacring Turks. Being Greek, I have been disinclined to research the counterclaims too seriously. I wouldn’t be surprised if the statistics of Azeris killed were conscripted into the statistics of Turks killed. But no, I was not aware of it.
Not the answer you deserve. I’m sorry.
And thank you for putting it the way you did, Pegah. Who was killed must matter more than who did the killing.
EDIT: About not knowing.
Georges Drettas wrote a grammar of Pontic Greek in 1995. The texts he gathered for the grammar talked about how life was in the Black Sea, before the population exchanges. The Pontic Greeks overlapped geographically with the Armenians. The texts make no mention of the Armenian genocide.
Drettas’ conclusion: the Pontic Greeks did not mention the Armenian genocide, not because it didn’t happen, but because they didn’t care. That’s what relations between ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire looked like.
Hm.
I liked Steven de Rooij’s and Mujahid I. Ally’s answers, from the blockee’s perspective, and hated everyone else’s.
So clearly I’m out of sync with the community norm.
Let me write an answer that addresses my discomfort.
In normal circumstances, questions and answers are an interaction between people, and follow the socialising norms for such interactions. That includes associating respect for a person with respect for what they say, and vice versa. And the social norm is that when someone gives you offence, and you accordingly sever ties with them, you are no longer exposed to contact with them, and you do not exchange social pleasantries with them.
This doesn’t happen here; as Joshua Engel decried in a comment, “block” here doesn’t actually mean “block” (by which I presume he means, “block + mute”).
The result is the question OP poses: blocking yet upvoting.
I’d argue that this is not normal for human interaction (“feels weird”, as Carlos Matias La Borde and Jeff Fuhrer put it). It’s not normal to refuse contact with people and then applaud people. So what’s going on?
Here’s some theories:
I guess I can understand the reaction. I still resent it. I have the luxury of resenting it because I manage to avoid contentious topics, and am not a TW; I’ve never blocked (though I have muted two people), and I’ve been blocked only twice (Which people on Quora do you believe have blocked you unfairly and why?). So it’s still a big deal to me. (One of the latter has turned up in comments here, as an avowed trigger-happy blocker; and to him I say: do not fricking upvote me.)
But I also resent it because I find the imbalance of the interaction dehumanising. That’s not how people interact anywhere else, offline or online. No, my words are not separate from me. No, you don’t get to hate the sin and applaud the virtue from the same person. If you’re going to take offence at me, and block interaction from me to you, it offends me that you still get to interact with me at your discretion; and an upvote is not an interaction with disembodied words, it’s an interaction with me.
And if I matter so little to you that you don’t even remember blocking me, I don’t want your upvote.
Original question: What is the oddest ethnic mix you’ve seen?
With the obvious disclaimer that “odd” is not a value judgement.
Nick Kyrgios. Greek–Malaysian Australian.
… Kyrgios is odd, alright, but not primarily because of his ancestry…
They are subsets (Unicode block) of the Unicode repertoire of characters:
Since Quora Shall Not have an API, they don’t want you doing cool things based off content. (They must be the only social media company in the Valley not to. Oh, I forget. They’re not social media.)
There were many data visualisation in the elder days: Oliver Emberton did a bunch of stuff, as did Stormy Shippy. Long since disabled. The best there is around now is whatever can scrape your profile page, which is down to:
Note that they visualise the post count on topics on your profiles. If you aren’t a MVW in a topic and haven’t indicated that you know about that topic, the topic will be missing from your profile, and hence your list. Going through your answers and identifying other topics is a good thing to do…
… except that with all API attempts disabled, you can’t do that. The best you can do (as I did recently) is download all your answers, eliminate the questions not tagged with a topic you know, and see what’s left. It’s suboptimal.
Oh yeah. Download your content. Once more, thank you Brian Bi: Brian Bi’s answer to When, and how, will I be able to download all of the Quora content I have produced, like the Facebook and Twitter feed export options?
Yes, sometimes it’s nonsense, and sometimes it’s the right thing to do, because merges are done by users. Some of whom are wise, some of whom are idjits, and some of whom are not idjits but don’t grok the Quora criteria for question distinctiveness. Someone has to arbitrate as to whether the merge is right or not, and whoever arbitrates, someone will be displeased.
The present dispensation, we are told, is that there is human internal Quora review of all merges. That to me is as good as can be reasonably expected.