So many posters here going on about cheap IKEA tables. Did they ever visit IKEA? I have an IKEA wooden dinner table with the top made from sturdy panels of solid wood bars glued together for eternity. We've only had it for twenty years of course, so who can tell if it is any good…
Sure, the LACK coffee table is recycled honeycombed cardboard. That's on purpose, and totally fine. I hope people don't eat their dinner of those outside of student life though.
> DreamLand: another toy store chain with venerable Belgian roots owned by Colruyt group that briefly had a fancy underground store near a new parking lot not even five years ago. Of course it had to go. […] The bigger store about 30 km away from us recently also closed down. The store chain is still alive as is their webshop, but for how long… There’s still a DreamLand nearby but no longer in the centre.
DreamLand actually grew significantly in terms of physical stores due to their merger with ToyChamp, and is present in both the Netherlands and Belgium now. Of course, these huge (for European standards) stores tend to be located in malls and such; not in the historic city centres where toy stores used to be.
So why are us southpaws a rarity? The article and the linked research paper both point to bipedalism and bigger brains as the cause, and the paper vaguely seems to hint at selective pressures leading to the right hand getting favoured by the majority of the population, but why?
The question from the headline is excellent, if only it was actually answered.
Here's my five minute lunchtime hypothesis: it's because the heart is on the left. As human behavior demanded increasing precision from the hands, being a little farther from the heartbeat was a slight advantage.
Here’s my multiple years of anatomy classes response: the heart isn’t on the left. The aorta is, sure, but the vena cava is on the right. Also people with situs inversus (essentially all organs flipped laterally from
“normal”) aren’t obviously more prone to left-handedness.
> Also people with situs inversus (essentially all organs flipped laterally from “normal”) aren’t obviously more prone to left-handedness.
I feel like this isn’t really an argument against the theory. If right handedness did evolve because of heart position, a later genetic mutation to have the heart on the opposite side wouldn’t suddenly undo the previous evolution towards right handedness.
Why are you assuming situs inversus, which occurs in species with no handedness (or, indeed, hands) came after handedness?
The argument is that the selection bias was towards precision and the hypothesis was that precision is influenced by heart position (which is, still, in the middle in humans)… individuals with situs inversus would be more precise in the left hand, thus if the causal hypothesis is correct AND the argument holds then there should be a selection bias that would result in a correlation between situs inversus presence and left-handedness.
In the end I don’t believe either the argument or the hypothesis hold even as much water as I can in either hand.
I’ve wondered ever since fourth grade (where an anatomical model in a corner of the classroom always made it clear that the heart is centrally located) how the vernacular conception of the heart as located on the left originated and persisted.
Your post finally made it click for me – the aorta extending to the left gives the superficial impression of that being the heart’s location because it’s easier to feel the heartbeat through the skin, versus the more deeply embedded vena cava on the right.
Presumably this means, evolutionarily, greater vulnerability on the left, predisposing the left hand to shielding duties, leaving the right to more dexterous tasks like spearing. The cardiological hypothesis of right-handedness holds!
It might be hard to eliminate confounding factors depending on when the research was done. A lot of people in my generation were still dissuaded pretty heavily from writing with their left hands. I'm not entirely convinced anymore as a lay person that "handedness" is a real, distinct phenomenon that's primarily genetically determined or a result of the organization of the brain. It's equally possible that it's a learned preference and that the way the brain organizes around it is as a result of the preference's impact on how you have to solve problems with your preferred hand in a society that preferences right-handedness.
Not disagreeing that handedness is probably unrelated to heart position.
But why would situs inversus somehow be tied to this at all? If there's a gene that favors right-handedness, it's not like it would somehow "choose" left-handedness because the individual has their internal organs flipped.
Genes don’t favor (or not favor), but if a natural selection bias for precise dexterity exists AND heart lateral orientation affects dexterity precision THEN those with flipped lateral orientation should exhibit more dexterity in the left hand, thus they should be naturally selected for because of the same bias.
Now, I’d seriously doubt there’s any evidence whatsoever for the assumed selection bias in the first place, never mind any causal relationship between fine motor control and heart asymmetry, but the selection bias should apply to both flips of the anatomical mirror.
The heart is asymmetrical, but it’s in roughly the center of the chest. The left auricle and ventricle are larger muscles because they’re pumping through the descending aorta to the extremities, that’s the systemic circulatory branch, the plumbing for which is also largely to the right, while the right are pumping into the lungs alone as part of the pulmonary circulatory branch. The left lung (right on those with situs inversus) has two lobes and basically accommodates the extra muscle mass on its side of the heart, but if you really want to kill someone you stab them through the sternum, kind of dead center, not where they hold their hand when performing patriotism.
even this is wrong, a penetrating weapon aimed for the heart is applied below the sternum at roughly the positionof the 3rd shirt button, and thrust upward at shallow angle topass behind the manubrium, and is then levered into a pommel upward position so as to lacerate the heart
First, that’s because you want to keep your weapon, which implies you don’t really want to kill the killee. I’m assuming a half inch drill, and I’m leaving it powered up and spinning.
Second, note that what you don’t do when trying to hit the heart is aim left.
not only smaller but having 2 lobes rather than 3, the left lung is possessed of a featureknown as the cardiac "notch" an involution of the lobe that corresponds to the larger left ventricle of the heart.
Wikipedia on Situs Inversus (visceral organs are mirrored, heart on the right, liver on left) [0], mentions mixed results regarding handedness. There would be a load of other confounding factors here and I know nothing about medicine.
Situs inversus ("dextrocardia") is a rare disorder. What I postulated is a (very) small selective advantage leading to a neurological mechanism evolving over generations, not a direct line from the heart to handedness during development. Anyway, the effect would be very slight, and even if it did exist, it could have gone away later, but dexterity would have been baked in at that point (see also the ocular blind spot).
That's a long time hypothesis of mine as well, but I think it stems from being stung or bitten by venom. If venom is injected into the bloodstream, it is desirable to be injected as far away from the heart as possible.
Some centimeters might not sound much, but over millions of years, the cumulative effect might be that 1% of human population every 10.000 years gets genetically optimized to hold their heart at a more protective spot.
Handedness is probably not (often) captured in healthcare records, but I'm wondering if epidemiologists could mine insurance claims (or some other data rich resource) to see if there's a correlation with serious outcomes (death, hospitalization, etc.) from venom and handedness.
That's a good idea, a very good idea actually, but I wonder about it's effectiveness due to a very small total number of snake bites nowadays, compared to the past.
Hundreds of thousands years in the past, hominids lived into much more tropical areas than today and there are a lot more spiders, scorpions, lizards and snakes in these warm places. It makes sense that insects and especially reptiles pushed the evolution of mammals in certain directions and the positioning of the heart in the human body might be one of them.
Today people live a much different lifestyle than having to deal with insects and reptiles all day long. I don't know if it is possible to decipher the past from today's data.
There is also a bias for how babies are held [1]. It holds even with left-handers. Holding a baby's head near the mother's heart helps the baby get to sleep. Which means the baby doesn't cry (and attract predators) and also gives the parents more time to sleep at night.
It also allows right-handed mothers to do something with their dominant hand while cradling the baby in that position.
I wonder why you're getting downvoted? Even if it turns out you're completely wrong it's still an interesting point and something I never even considered before.
Sometimes I think people downvote me because they're frustrated that I didn't engage further. After twenty years of Internet discussions, I'm a little burned out and I tend to fire and forget.
I would think right-handedness is largely reinforced through learning gross motor skills as an infant. If you always use your right, your brain optimises for that.
I wonder whether something simple like being allowed to select and use an object with either hand rather than having it offered to your right hand retains ambidextrous by the time handedness became fixed in the brain around age 4-6.
Drop the "every" part and you can see the word that needs to be agreed with.
"One is supposed to do such and such."
"Everyone is supposed to do such and such."
"They are supposed to do such and such."
"People are supposed to do such and such."
I think that's the case for all the "every <noun>". "Every human is a person", for example. This would make sense, to put it in programming terms - the verb applies to an element in an array of people, not the array itself (which would be plural): for every single human, that human is a person.
You can. It just means that the customer has to do the proper analyses and risk evaluation for their own SOC2 (or ISO 27001 or whatever) certification.
Just focus on providing a good value application and be frank about what you do, why you can't get certification for something like that, but that you can answer any questions they might have for their own certification process.
If the potential customer makes 'has SOC2' a requirement, than that is not a customer for you, in the same way that 'has more than 20 employees' rules you out.
The name ShinyHunters is currently quite well-known due to a number of high-profile hacks (Odido in the Netherlands this year was huge). Their brand has a significant value right now.
Because ShinyHunters published they hacked Canvas on their own website.
They also redirected the canvas login pages to a ShinyHunters message, whilst this could be done by another group/person, its unlikely.
You can also validate PGP keys and TOX accounts, etc via their website.
This happens every day, and there doesn't seem to be anything interesting about this case. It's how most situations are resolved. There are money transmitters that specialize in ransoms. They "do" sanctions checks that are about as good as you suspect they are.
Like other commenters have pointed out, it's literally a business. Most trade on reputation, so there actually is an incentive for them to take their money and abide by their agreements. Otherwise, they would have to start from scratch with a fresh identity and rebuild the rep to command their prices.
The same group has a reputation to uphold (i.e., that of 'honourable' criminals), so they just move on to the next target, who will, incidentally, know that they are absolutely true to their word. (This is why paying off ransomware hackers is being made illegal in a number of countries.)
A different group? Certainly. I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the infosec guys at Canvas right now.
Sure. In all likelihood ShinyHunters will 'gracefully' point out the weak spots leveraged in the system of the 'customer' upon receiving payment to prevent this happening again next week.
They have a rather strong incentive to keep this a happily-ever-after ending for Instructure and any other target who pays up. It's all taught in Maffia 101.
They can always just hack them again but with a different method this time.
The ransom doesn't bind them from hacking the company multiple times. It just obligates them to destroy the data they collected from this attack.
As a matter of kindness and good business they'll probably wait a few months or a year or so before poking around again but they'll almost certainly continue poking at Instructure's systems.
Data exfil ransom attacks are a business first and foremost. They don't permanently halt or destroy the original infra and their goal is to get a payout for their labor and move on. Maybe the come back around in the future with another, different attack, maybe they don't.
They made their money and made it big in the news as having complied with the ransom payout, no reason to hurt their reputation trying to double dip. Plenty of other soft targets to poke.
On the one side you have white hat hackers and pen-testers who you pay a contract or salary to prod your system. If you really piss them off (i.e. by stiffing them of their pay) some might just steal your data and threaten to leak it unless you pay them.
On the other side are black hat hackers who will drive by your system and if they find a way to break in they'll offer to keep your data private for a ransom fee. And maybe if you have some charisma, decent pay, and/or a good repertoire you might recruit them on/convert them into white hats for your org.
It sounds a bit like the Dutch Tikkie with the QR codes and instant transfer. Of course, in the EU most bank wires are already free when using SEPA, and often nearly instant as well. This Tikkie thing is a way to easily create a payment request for people who can't be arsed to simply carry cash (and raise the country's resilience to system failure in the process).
Brazilian living in NL, experienced in both. I think biggest difference is Tikkie doesn't give you an easy identifier. Great for privacy, but being able to send money to your email/phone number makes a difference for some real time use cases. QR code helps, but it is not the same.
Since last year, all EU banks have to support SEPA Instant Transfer, both receiving & sending, at the same price as a usual transfer (Instant Payments Regulation 2024/886)
If only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code supported a sepa instant bit so that one could just show a qr code, scan it with whatever payer banking app and authorize the sepa instant payment.
This is what Ideal/Wero does. Because this is the standard for webshops in the Netherlands (and rapidly expanding to the whole EU) the only gap left to fill was that of consumer-to-consumer transfers with just a QR code to scan. Tikkie I mentioned above solves that well enough in the Netherlands, although that bank-run app is horribly laden with stupid ads and deals you can't seem to turn off.
Sure, the LACK coffee table is recycled honeycombed cardboard. That's on purpose, and totally fine. I hope people don't eat their dinner of those outside of student life though.
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