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Well, given that the target of the injustice was based on race, it doesn't seem unreasonable to make the target of the restitution to be based on race. I have no problem with you addressing every wrong that has been committed since the beginning of time. I wish you good luck. But just as I don't see the need for the Breast Cancer Society to address pancreatic cancer, or the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples to address workplace injuries suffered by those carpenters who built the Indian Residential Schools, I also don't see the need for those addressing unjust race laws in the United States to cover every ancillary harm suffered. When Germany paid reparations to Israel they did not simultaneously address the German citizens who were harmed by breathing in the ashes of dead Jews. Personally I'm glad they kept their focus. It will take long enough to simply address those who were the targets of race laws. I'd rather we not delay their compensation any longer than we already have. If you wish to start a commission to address wrongs perpetrated by the government on other groups that have been singled out I think that would be great. We could even start another thread to focus on that exclusively. And seriously, I do wish you good luck in helping more people who were harmed. I just don't think your idea to expand the pool of recipients for reparations due to slavery, by adding white people who weren't slaves, will gain much traction. Thus my willingness to ignore that group during this particular effort.

Can you link the version of Cantor's proof that you're looking at? I looked up this translation: https://www.jamesrmeyer.com/infinite/cantors-original-1891-proof.php and could not correspond it to your exposition. Just to pick one example, this phrase appears nowhere in the translation I linked.

In Antarctica, yes. In Sahara, no.

I can think of one - nonsense 😝

Except in the cases highlighted most recently in this thread, the people who did something wrong were The People, as in We, The People of the United States of America. We're not dead, we're not gone, and there are more of us than ever. Btw, that's not what "An eye for an eye" means. If you run into someone's car and agree to pay for it, it's reparation or compensation. An eye for an eye would be more like, "You ran into my car, so I'm going to run into yours!"

Absence of modification may mean it was already adapted... first time lucky, so to speak.

Are they no longer edible nor subject to standard predator optics when they’re no longer trawling the sand and are instead floating though much higher columns of water? The white bottom and dark tops were selected. Do you have an alternative / counter explanation for why this is so if it’s not simply to reduce visibility of prey animals in dark ocean conditions… conditions where down is darker and up is lighter?

Could the turtles bellies be adapted for when swimming near the surface, to reduce attention from predators lower down in the water?

Yes, more than one type of selective force will drive coloration. Slow animals with bellies on the ground or near the ground perhaps have less need for countershading. And more need to look like rocks or other non-mobile surface features.

Seems like experimental evidence was minimal until recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countershading Despite demonstrations and examples adduced by Cott and others, little experimental evidence for the effectiveness of countershading was gathered in the century since Thayer's discovery. Experiments in 2009 using artificial prey showed that countershaded objects do have survival benefits and in 2012, a study by William Allen and colleagues showed that countershading in 114 species of ruminants closely matched predictions for "self-shadow concealment", the function predicted by Poulton, Thayer and Cott. If Thayer's Law is valid, then one would expect some predators to favor early morning or near sunset to hunt, when the countershading would be of less use.

Please permit me to take this opportunity to remind you that the enslavement of entire civilizations was only ONE single piece of what’s under discussion here in terms of reparation. For centuries, even after emancipation and even after amending the constitution itself to ensure equal rights and opportunities for all, despite those steps we’ve seen how the enforced rights and systemic experiences of millions upon millions of US born citizens have remained very much unequal. For generations and with appalling consistency and based solely on the melanin content of one’s skin. And let’s recall that it’s not like we need to engage in some archeological dig or interpret barely visible hieroglyphics to see evidence of these skin color based inequalities. We need only to drive today across the tracks down any MLK Blvd in any major US city, open our eyes, and look around. Right now. Today. In the summer of 2023. We still see it everywhere. 2 years since Daunte Wright was killed by uniformed officials of the US government. 3 years since George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. 5 years since Stephon Clark. 7 years since Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. 8 years since Walter Scott. 9 years since Tamil Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner… and that’s only a subset of what we’ve seen this last decade. It’s not comprehensive, and it’s only a tiny sliver of this much larger puzzle under discussion in this thread. These asymmetries in rights and experiences across the US system are still happening right now today 50 years AFTER the equal rights amendment. 150 years AFTER the 14th amendment and reconstruction began. 160 years AFTER the emancipation proclamation was signed. Not measured in days, weeks, months, or years. Not even measured in decades. It’s measured in CENTURIES these segregated Jim Crow KKK redline underfunded asymmetries. Can we please agree that mention of what to do in Africa is a bit of a red herring here and remain focused / not intentionally throw wrenches into the gears? Can we please agree that historic slavery is a related, but very much separate topic? Will you please join me in AT LEAST recognizing that continuously reintroducing that separate thing is NOT helpful toward progressing THIS discussion HERE about MODERN issues? Will you please consider that doing so only further distracts from our attempts to nourish threads of consensus across diverse minds? How you and me already agree that we both can and should be better as a community of citizens, and that one possible path for getting there together involves reparations?

Whatever. I'm tired of trying to follow you around the room.

I suspect that they never had or lost pigmentation on the underside because it is not needed. Also possible, that an ancestor of rays was pelagic with a light underside like in manta rays, for example. The stingrays evolved to be bottom dwellers but retained the light underside of the ancestor.

I don't see how the countershading hypothesis applies to the green turtle. I'd rather hypothesize that the top is dark for the camouflage purpose, and the belly is light because of lack of this purpose.

Does this fact support this hypothesis?

I don't see anything wrong with his post. You said, "I really don't think that I use heuristics." He replied, "You certainly use them." I don't understand what attitude it is an example of or what is there against yourself.

Drug assisted.

So why don't you all clear off back where your ancestors came from, and give the continent back to it's rightful owners?