[HN Gopher] A blue mineral that grows on buried bodies and confu...
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A blue mineral that grows on buried bodies and confuses
archaeologists (2016)
Author : mmastrac
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-05-02 02:35 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| gilleain wrote:
| So 'vivianite', or hydrated iron (II) phosphate -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivianite - which apparently
| undergoes 'internal oxidation' interestingly.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Funny, I figured the name would be derived from the Latin word
| for "life", but it's named after a person with the last name
| Vivian (which itself has roots in said Latin word).
| 1-more wrote:
| https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/
| msrenee wrote:
| It's a pretty cool mineral. I've got a chunk (not from a grave)
| that's such a dark green it looks black until you shine a light
| through it.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Finally, I came to the comments so I didn't have to read the
| article and all the comments are just about tracking cookies.
| mkl wrote:
| Neat, but I wouldn't call that "vivid".
| gilleain wrote:
| I suspect it's a pun on the mineral name ...
|
| (Incorrectly, I assumed that the name related to 'vital' - as
| in 'living' - but apparently not :
|
| "It was named by Abraham Gottlob Werner in 1817, the year of
| his death, after either John Henry Vivian (1785-1855), a Welsh-
| Cornish politician, mine owner and mineralogist living in
| Truro, Cornwall, England, or after Jeffrey G. Vivian, an
| English mineralogist."
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| That said the name Vivian does derive from the Latin name
| Vivianus, which comes from the Latin word vivus, meaning
| "alive"
| est wrote:
| IIRC there's a theory that blue paint is incredibly expensive
| in the past.
| gilleain wrote:
| So ultramarine blue
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine) is made from
| lapis lazuli which is a semi-precious stone. That was
| presumably quite expensive.
| philk10 wrote:
| Rivaled the price of gold and was used on the most
| important figures eg the Virgin Mary - until a reward was
| offered for a synthetic version -
| https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-a-brief-
| histor...
| QuercusMax wrote:
| TIL that the name "ultramarine" is because it came from
| "beyond the sea" (Afghanistan) from the perspective of
| Rome. I always figured it was because it's such a deep
| blue.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It gets darker with increased oxidation/time. It likely was
| very vivid at one point.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Soul crystals?
| deadbabe wrote:
| Would be a great alternative to cremation.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I think a company that makes diamonds from remains-based
| carbon already exist
| aargh_aargh wrote:
| Wow, I got two different cookie consent overlays on android
| chrome on top of each other. That's a first. They must REALLY
| care about my privacy.
| larodi wrote:
| Happily reader mode works just fine with this page.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| https://archive.is/l68pV
| muffles wrote:
| As each year goes by, I get more and more annoyed by the cookie
| consent pop-ups.
|
| Does U.S. law really require cookie pop-ups? And don't most
| websites store the cookies before consent is given anyways?
|
| https://olivergrimsley.com/2022/03/04/please-stop-putting-co...
| texuf wrote:
| 100%. This also bugs me: Why can't websites set a cookie that
| stores whether I've consented to the cookie pop up? On some
| sites I have to keep consenting over and over (IKEA comes to
| mind).
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Stack Exchange is downright malicious in having you click
| it on each subdomain.
|
| No, I don't care that one user created the Math forum and
| another created the Sysadmin forum, it's all run by you
| Jeff, that's who I am engaging when clicking the popup, not
| MathFan1982
| Sebb767 wrote:
| This is mostly malicious compliance - the law does not
| require these annoying popups, but the websites want them
| to a) make you dislike the law that prevents them from
| freely collecting your data and b) wearing you down, so you
| just accept instead of making the effort to go and deny the
| data collection. Also, at this point it's probably also a
| lot of cargo culting.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| It's mostly ignorance now. Most people don't know the law
| and don't know how to comply with it. If the popup method
| hasn't been invalidated by a court, why spend more on
| time, energy, and risk doing something different?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is there really much risk in just not tracking by
| default?
|
| I think ignorance is part of it, but also, they don't
| actually want to do what users want them do to, which is
| just not track unless the user goes looking for options
| that actually require tracking at a technical level.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > Is there really much risk in just not tracking by
| default?
|
| Let's see... I can't even stop Marketing from breaking
| our site with Google Tag Manager.
|
| A significant portion of our sales come from the ability
| to track users and email them useful product
| recommendations.
|
| We do not sell customer data and try to avoid vendors who
| do. It's only used internally.
| burnished wrote:
| Absolutely not. The people implementing know, and the
| people designing know. This represents intentionality.
| klyrs wrote:
| I always assume that they'd stop asking if and only if you
| say yes to all -- is that not the case?
| dv_dt wrote:
| IMHO it's because they can try to apply a dark pattern to
| have users accidentally consent to more tracking than they
| might normally agree to.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Having a pop up for only cookies is silly, but at least as
| often they're used for data processing consent and that makes
| more sense than putting the consent form on a splash screen
| or in the body of the page I guess.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I know this is a pretty unoriginal point, but I wish cookie
| consent could be a browser setting you set once and never have
| to deal with again unless you need to change it for a specific
| site. The nag screens have got to be the worst possible
| implementation, it's like none of the people who decided this
| was the way it ought to be done ever heard of alarm fatigue.
| fukusa wrote:
| Isn't this the Do Not Track (DNT) header?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
| genter wrote:
| It's malicious compliance. Websites are free to simply not
| track you.
| weberer wrote:
| Its also malicious legislation. The EU could have easily
| wrote a line in the GDPR requiring companies to respect the
| Do Not Track header. But they chose not to. They also
| included various loopholes such as "legitimate interest".
| The legislation was just enough that it looks like they're
| doing something, without actually hurting the surveillance
| industry's bottom line too much.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| The DNT header was devalued when Microsoft enabled it by-
| default in Internet Explorer, because it made it
| impossible for websites to determine if the DNT header
| was actually set by user-choice or not: any in-page
| cookie-consent popup that collected actual consent
| wouldn't change the DNT header sent by the browser, for
| example.
|
| I honestly don't know if Microsoft in 2011 was doing this
| for unsurprising business reasons (e.g. as a ploy to hurt
| Google (AdSense was still all-the-rage), because it's
| good PR, because they had any genuine concern for their
| users' privacy, and to do anything to win-back market-
| share from Chrome and Firefox) - or if it was an
| intentional move to torpoedo the DNT header by showing
| how useless it is but only because they implemented it
| precisely so that it would be useless... but Microsoft
| wouldn't benefit from user-tracking over the Internet
| anywhere near as much as Google did/does/would-do.
| squigz wrote:
| It should be the default. Maybe we could add a new 'Track
| Me Please' header that users can opt into
| devsda wrote:
| In that case just like anti ad-blockers, the first thing
| we see on a page will be a _very helpful_ guide to enable
| the opt-in header for that particular browser.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| When third-party cookies get blocked by-default this
| whole thing will be moot, imo.
| Sayrus wrote:
| DNT, if respected, also applied to first party cookies as
| well as other tracking mechanisms.
| naravara wrote:
| The EU is willing to force every user to go through an
| annoying browser ballot upon buying a new phone or
| computer, but can't force the browser to include a DNT
| prompt up front if it's that much of an issue?
|
| Plus it's not as if these companies weren't willing to
| assume consent in the absence of the DNT flag. It sounds
| like a bit of BS to suddenly worry about what consent
| really means when it goes against their bottom line. I
| don't see many hands being wrung about whether the user
| is meaningfully consenting when they click the easiest
| and most visible button to dismiss a banner that obscures
| a quarter of their screen.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > because it made it impossible for websites to determine
| if the DNT header was actually set by user-choice or not
|
| Somehow that never bothered sites when the default let
| them track users.
| chronogram wrote:
| If it was a browser setting, which already exists but gets
| ignored, it would get ignored and would throw up a popup
| anyway. You can use Consent-O-Matic[0] though, you can even
| select the types of tracking you do want.
|
| 0: https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic
| thwarted wrote:
| P3P looked so hopeful, but died long before the legal
| requirements were there.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
| razakel wrote:
| That's exactly the point: it's to make people angry at the
| "stupid politicians" instead of the data thieves.
| Suppafly wrote:
| No sites want that though because everyone would either check
| 'no cookies' or 'only necessary cookies' which would ruin
| their ability to make money off the vast majority of visitors
| to their sites.
| kingspact wrote:
| What is it? Cloudflare's "protection" has blocked me from being
| able to see half the Internet lately.
| ta988 wrote:
| Welcome to cloudflare internet. Where one company can decide
| voluntarily or not what one gets to see.
| mhuffman wrote:
| Careful! When you mention Cloudflare in anything other than
| glowing terms, a random stranger will often show up, begin to
| have a tough but good natured debate with you, then near then
| end say "full disclosure, I work at Cloudflare". This has
| happened to me more than once on HN.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Can you link these? This kind of comment can mean anything
| from "6 years ago I was constantly commenting against
| something they were doing and it kinda happened twice with
| some employees that are HN regulars and had it in their
| bios but didn't feel the need to disclose in the first
| message" to "It's a regular occurrence even despite the
| number of threads about Cloudflare here and they are often
| done with freshly created company accounts" or anything in-
| between. This makes it hard for one to judge for themselves
| how much of a real issue this has been vs a personal grudge
| someone might hold against the company.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't have a damn thing to do with Cloudflare
| :).
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Is that...bad? You don't make it sound unreasonable.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| If I was going to argue/debate positively for my employer
| I'd say that up front
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Do you work for Cloudflare?
| VagabundoP wrote:
| A Cloudflare employee has got to tell you if they are a
| Cloudflare employee
| lupusreal wrote:
| *unilaterally
| dylan604 wrote:
| yeah, voluntarily felt odd being used in that manner
| nkotov wrote:
| Vivianite
| Delumine wrote:
| I know this isn't in the best taste, but a ring made from this
| material would definitely give mystical vibes.
| oooyay wrote:
| Of course, Etsy has a market for this:
| https://www.etsy.com/market/vivianite_jewelry
| hinkley wrote:
| Okay, but those aren't made of people, right?
|
| ...
|
| They're not made of people, right?
| msrenee wrote:
| Not made of people. Vivianite forms plenty of other ways
| too.
| ch33zer wrote:
| Don't believe the inners, it's clearly protomolecule:
|
| https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Protomolecule
| prox wrote:
| Ha my first response when I read the title!
| corysama wrote:
| I was thinking https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Bluegleam
| devsda wrote:
| It's a magicule ore. Probably magisteel.
|
| https://tensura.fandom.com/wiki/Magicule
| hinkley wrote:
| Can't take the Razorback
| nailer wrote:
| Flashbacks to Upsteam Color (if anyone hasn't seen it, it's the
| other film from the creator of Primer).
| tleilaxu wrote:
| I adore that film. It is nuts, but has a dreamy metaphysical
| quality to it that I love.
| hn72774 wrote:
| There's a "blue babe" mammoth specimen at the UAF museum. It was
| preserved in permafrost. Same chemistry.
|
| https://www.uaf.edu/museum/press/spotlight/blue-babe/
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/morbid-monday-fisk-mum...
|
| AO article on the briefly mentioned cast-iron coffin with face
| window, in case anyone else was curious as I was
| accrual wrote:
| Tangentially related - the low-poly retro horror game Cave
| Crawler (2023) touches on this concept (minerals growing on
| bodies). It's currently $1.99 USD and I thoroughly enjoyed a
| playthrough.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/2282480/Cave_Crawler
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(page generated 2024-05-02 23:01 UTC)