Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2024 March 10

= March 10 =

Could humans and any kind of farm herbivore live on the same diet for a year?
What about with added vitamins and minerals but not added essential amino or fatty acids? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:22, 10 March 2024 (UTC) Same percent of each food but obviously the big species will eat a lot more kg per month. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:26, 10 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Humans and Pigs could probably live on the same foods for extended periods, even it it would not necessarily be optimum for both. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.186.221 (talk) 20:32, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * What about non-omnivores like cows, sheep, goats and horses? Could they live on like grains and the less disgusting fruits and vegetables like legumes with a little oil and sea salt or would they need lots of sucky food like spinach or raw salad? A surprising number of specific vegetables seem to be bad for horses. As is too much bread or horse treats like apples. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:55, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Is there some human staple that's less bad than others? Maybe undried corn kernels cause it's kind of vegetably? There's so many that aren't common in the West like millet and quinoa. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:59, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * ". . . less disgusting fruits and vegetables . . .", ". . . sucky food like spinach or raw salad . . ." – you seem to have some peculiar attitudes towards conventional foodstuffs (he says, having just enjoyed a salad.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.186.221 (talk) 02:28, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I wonder if he's strong to the finach. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:15, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Blargh salad! According to supertaster ~25% of humans are supertasters and ~25% are insensitive. Thus the bitter vegetables and sour fruits suck, the rest are okay to delicious. Orange juice: the lite version of the few times I threw a vinegar capful down my throat as fast as I could in 5th grade. Sweet, salty or moderately spicy usually good though, and bitter food can be worse than "glue" liquor, cause evolution wants humans to die? Also Brits say Hershey's® milk chocolate has a strong vomit note not in European chocolate and I don't know what they're talking about, it's barely worse than a delicious imported Icelandic chocolate. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 07:45, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Icelanders also eat fermented Greenland shark, so their chocolate may not be typical of European chocolate generally. As a Brit who has taken an advanced tasting course (for Real ale, as it happens, including taste traces caused by things not right, like stale hops), I agree that US chocolate has a noticable vomit note. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.186.221 (talk) 09:10, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The rancid note in Hershey bars is supposed to be due to butyric acid. catslash (talk) 16:51, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * In Britain I think they don't add butyric acid to Hershey's® or Hershey's® With Almonds. In America they must add it on purpose to increase profit or they wouldn't keep doing it. Cilantro tastes like soap to 20% of humans. The bitter vegetables are some of the most healthy foods and the tasty junk foods some of the worst. These things don't always make sense. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:45, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * More precisely, I'd say cilantro tastes like metal foil soaked in soap. —Tamfang (talk) 20:41, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm not recommending this nothing but-potatoes-for-a-year diet, but it seemed to work for him. -- Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  06:38, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I suspect that a strictly adhered-to nothing-but-beer diet would also work. --Lambiam 16:52, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * 3650 bottles of beer on the wall, 3650 bottles of beer ... Clarityfiend (talk) 23:11, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Back in the day, there was a popular idea (I suppose we would now call it a meme) that one could live sustainably on a diet of two (I think) crates of Guinness (i.e. 24 pint bottles) and a loaf of bread per week. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.186.221 (talk) 23:32, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The Sumerian staple only diet modern version? Sounds a bit fat-deficient? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:39, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Such a diet would be deficient in Vitamin B12, but if you ate some insects on your plant matter, you may get some. Eating most kinds of grass would have too much fibre and not enough nutrition, but if you stuck to grass seeds and the juicy part of the stalk, not so bad. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 03:30, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Unicode CLDR for filtering mixed scripts
The last time I checked the English Wikipedia's regex filters for page titles, a lot of them were designed to prevent mixing of more than one non-Latin script. Could this be done more efficiently by a MediaWiki function that would look up each character's script in the Unicode CLDR and reject the title if more than one non-Latin language-specific script was found this way, or if a Latin and a non-Latin letter were in the same word (delimited by a normal space (\x20) or a printable punctuation mark)? Neon Merlin  21:57, 10 March 2024 (UTC)


 * It can probably be done more efficiently than it is done now, which is true for a lot of functionality. Whether it is worth adding this to Wikipedia's annual wish list for new MediaWiki functionality is better discussed at WP:VPR. Mixing Latin-alphabet and non-Latin-alphabet letters in, for example, a user name (I am not User:Lambiаm) is IMO much more suspect than using two different language-specific non-Latin scripts. --Lambiam 10:01, 11 March 2024 (UTC)