An under-considered dilemma

There exists in this world, as far as I know, at least one small community of human beings still entirely isolated from contact with the rest of us. I think they're somewhere in the vicinity of the Amazon. Upon discovering the existence of such a group, the question arises of what to do about them? Should they be contacted, and introduced to the modern world, or left alone, as it is certain that to introduce them to our world would ultimately destroy theirs?

It occurred to me this morning (while reading a book about Hawaiian history) that this is not even the most important consideration, in some ways.

More of a problem would be: to introduce them to our world would probably kill almost all of them.

The net result of introducing people from the Eurasia/Africa set (seriously, world, Europe and Asia are one continent, and separating Africa is dubious; ditto the Americas) to the parts of the world that had been separate from that mass of humanity has been consistently this: they die of assorted plagues. The peoples of Polynesia, Australasia and the Americas weren't the descendents of survivors of smallpox and the like; they had no inherited resistance to it, and the new diseases were devastating.

How could you introduce an isolated people to the modern world without, essentially, murdering them?

Observations on the human face

So, of late I've picked up my vague artistic inclinations, doing more sketching and painting than I've done in forever.

And I've started trying to overcome my inability to draw faces. This is a challenging thing - faces are difficult, and getting *close* isn't enough - that just takes you into Uncanny Valley territory. So, I have many, many terrible portrait sketches to do before I reach "able to do it" status.

I'm making progress - currently my sketches have started to look like they're sketches of actual people, rather than :wrongness:, but they don't look like the people I sketched - they look like Random People. Which is potentially useful but not really what I'm going for.

Some notes:

- The hardest single feature to draw is the nose. Mouths are hard too. Eyes are tricky but not nearly as tricky as noses, because at least eyes have some clear lines about them to work from - noses have NOTHING.

- Epicanthic folds are actually extremely subtle.

The epicanthic fold is the arrangement of skin over an eyelid that, depending on your perspective, makes an otherwise-normal eye look Asian, or by its absence makes an otherwise-normal eye look non-Asian.

The difference, when you're looking closely, is ridiculously tiny. In fact, the distinctions in people's features, between "them" and "not them", are ridiculously small and subtle.

The fact that we can recognise people at a distance based only on appearance is *weird*.