The GP is even more wrong than your citation suggests. What they're saying there is that the current worldwide power output of photovoltaics is equal to the worldwide power input for making new ones at the current rate. However, a panel lasts for years, and what the GP said was "it currently take more energy to make a solar panel than it can generate in it's lifespan". That's EROEI, which is currently 6.8 for photovoltaics. In other words, over its life a panel will produce 6.8x as much energy as it took to produce it. Even if all the energy used to produce it did come from fossil fuels, you'd still be way ahead.
The myth that the GP states is one of the great zombies of the Internet. Maybe it was true 20 years ago or something, but anybody who wants to say "them greenie wusses know nothing, solar is like so stupid" trots out the myth. For real cognitive dissonance, tell him that very few locomotives burn coal anymore.
Maybe we should write the "Slashdot Style Manual" (Creative Commons licensed 'natch). We could give the MLA some competition, and include useful modern usages such as "whooosh" and "IANAL".
which suggests that it specifically applies to the last word.
From the Wikipedia article you cited:
When placed within quoted material, square brackets are almost invariably used in modern U.S. usage: "[sic]". Traditionally the sic appears after the quote in parentheses (round brackets): "(sic)", especially when the error is obvious.
Furthermore, the asterisk should have appeared after the closing quotation mark.
Yep, its like genetics and intelligence, while no doubt they are correlated, someone who has the best genes in the world but does nothing but sleep, eat Cheetos and watch MTV is going to be less smart...
Or maybe he's very smart, and just doesn't give a damn what you think.
It isn't worth treating the cancer of a 70 y.o. so that they may live to 80 or more? Sorry, but I'm not in favor of putting grannie on an ice flow. And in all fairness to the Hudson's Bay Inuit, they only did that in times of severe crisis, when the survival of the entire group was at risk. That hardly describes our current society.
Nor is there anything illogical about it. You can only talk about whether something is logical or illogical with respect to a goal. You're assuming the goal is survival. You can argue that there is a survival instinct, but that's something you have in common with a paramecium.
Who vs. whom, what are you, British? While you're at it, why not complain using "you" instead of having the separate subject and object forms, thou and thee. Sorry, but subject/object forms in English have been dying for around 1000 years. It ain't German anymore. It's become an analytic rather than a synthetic language.
P.S. Couldn't help myself. Nothing more fun than outdoing the pedantry of someone else.
P.P.S. Next time let's discuss the singular "they", and how it was absurd to try and impose Latin rules on English.
"Without proper sanitation" being the key phrase. In other words it's known how to use it properly. Very few things are so idiot proof that they can't be used incorrectly.
As for "you see it every so often in leafy greens from California (and other places) when feces end up in the fields", the big problem there is human feces from harvesters who don't have a proper and convenient place to go. Yeah, somebody taking a dump on the veggies is a health hazard, but has nothing to do with the application of properly composted manure long before the harvest.
I'm not opposed to GMOs as such, because it is stupid to be opposed to an abstraction as diverse as "GMO"
A very sensible attitude, far from the usual unqualified pro or con.
But putting responsibility for GMOs into the hands of a small number of global agri-corps seems to me a fairly bad idea because they are going to downplay the risks posed by the genes getting loose, be more concerned with deploying organisms that are profitable rather than sustainable (Roundup Ready plants are a good example of something I'm very leery of.)
Gotta agree there too. Some things are potentially just too dangerous to be left to those whose only interest is making a buck in the short-term (and have a known history of being seriously sleazy bastards about it). Tetraethyl lead was introduced by people who knew damn well just how dangerous the stuff could be, but pulled all sorts of crap to hide that.
Manure acts on biological pathways we do not understand, and some of the ways it does act are known to be dangerous.
But whatever the supposed dangers of manure, it has been used for thousands of years without any observed significant ill effect. I'd call that a pretty solid testing period.
The headline says rice passes unexpected benefits to weeds. It does not say how or under what circumstances it passes them. You're making assumptions and reading something into the headline that isn't there.
It's assumed that the extra effort the plant puts into being glyphosate resistant (producing more of an enzyme known as EPSP synthase), which they assume serves no purpose in the wild (i.e. in the absence of glyphosate) would take away from some "effort" that the plant puts into being hardy under wild conditions. It's the same reason that cultivated fruit trees (e.g. oranges, apples) don't do as well in the wild as their native cousins. They've been breed to put "effort" into producing large fruits, which is great in the orchard, but is wasteful and evolutionarily disadvantageous in the wild.
Note that I used the word "assume" (in it's different forms) a number of times above. You know what they say about assumptions.
Just to emphasize your point, the weeds they're talking about are a "degenerated" subspecies of the cultivated rice. They're the same species, which makes it awfully easy to pass on the traits.
How far is it necessary to go before the "weedy" rice plants become a food source?
As far as they went to get the domesticated rice. Asian rice is Oryza sativa. The weedy rice they're talking about is a subspecies, Oryza sativa f. spontanea, that degenerated from the cultivated rice. So if you got the weedy rice to be a food source, all you'd get is what we already have as a food source.
Slashdot Mirror
The GP is even more wrong than your citation suggests. What they're saying there is that the current worldwide power output of photovoltaics is equal to the worldwide power input for making new ones at the current rate. However, a panel lasts for years, and what the GP said was "it currently take more energy to make a solar panel than it can generate in it's lifespan". That's EROEI, which is currently 6.8 for photovoltaics. In other words, over its life a panel will produce 6.8x as much energy as it took to produce it. Even if all the energy used to produce it did come from fossil fuels, you'd still be way ahead.
The myth that the GP states is one of the great zombies of the Internet. Maybe it was true 20 years ago or something, but anybody who wants to say "them greenie wusses know nothing, solar is like so stupid" trots out the myth. For real cognitive dissonance, tell him that very few locomotives burn coal anymore.
Maybe we should write the "Slashdot Style Manual" (Creative Commons licensed 'natch). We could give the MLA some competition, and include useful modern usages such as "whooosh" and "IANAL".
I was referring to a real language like 'merican English, not that foreign gibberish you're spouting. I may be a pedant, but I'm an American pedant.
Do your other six personalities agree?
But the OP placed it within the quotation marks.
“It’s a very complex behaviour (sic*).”
He should have written it
“It’s a very complex behaviour." (sic)
Or as I advised
“It’s a very complex behaviour [sic]."
which suggests that it specifically applies to the last word.
From the Wikipedia article you cited:
When placed within quoted material, square brackets are almost invariably used in modern U.S. usage: "[sic]". Traditionally the sic appears after the quote in parentheses (round brackets): "(sic)", especially when the error is obvious.
Furthermore, the asterisk should have appeared after the closing quotation mark.
OK, since this is the pedantic thread, they can make sense, but have to mean something different than the literal meaning.
Nope. See definitions 1 and 3: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiom
In other words, English is a crap language
What language isn't crap? (let's leave the spelling thing out of this though - there is no excuse for English there).
Idioms don't have to make sense when taken literally.
It's supposed to be "[sic]", not "(sic)".
Pedants of the world, challenge each other!
Yep, its like genetics and intelligence, while no doubt they are correlated, someone who has the best genes in the world but does nothing but sleep, eat Cheetos and watch MTV is going to be less smart ...
Or maybe he's very smart, and just doesn't give a damn what you think.
It will certainly help lots of people but of course opens up some interesting containers of slimy invertebrates (ie, politicians).
They can always be euthanized.
It isn't worth treating the cancer of a 70 y.o. so that they may live to 80 or more? Sorry, but I'm not in favor of putting grannie on an ice flow. And in all fairness to the Hudson's Bay Inuit, they only did that in times of severe crisis, when the survival of the entire group was at risk. That hardly describes our current society.
There really is nothing logical about suicide.
Nor is there anything illogical about it. You can only talk about whether something is logical or illogical with respect to a goal. You're assuming the goal is survival. You can argue that there is a survival instinct, but that's something you have in common with a paramecium.
You wouldn't say that if you understood English. From our good friends, Mssrs. Merriam & Webster:
Suicidal: marked by an impulse to commit suicide.
To whom are you addressing that remark?
Who vs. whom, what are you, British? While you're at it, why not complain using "you" instead of having the separate subject and object forms, thou and thee. Sorry, but subject/object forms in English have been dying for around 1000 years. It ain't German anymore. It's become an analytic rather than a synthetic language.
P.S. Couldn't help myself. Nothing more fun than outdoing the pedantry of someone else.
P.P.S. Next time let's discuss the singular "they", and how it was absurd to try and impose Latin rules on English.
You mean like France, Italy, Spain and Greece, all of which traditionally use manure as fertilizer and have lots of raw vegetables in their foods?
"Without proper sanitation" being the key phrase. In other words it's known how to use it properly. Very few things are so idiot proof that they can't be used incorrectly.
As for "you see it every so often in leafy greens from California (and other places) when feces end up in the fields", the big problem there is human feces from harvesters who don't have a proper and convenient place to go. Yeah, somebody taking a dump on the veggies is a health hazard, but has nothing to do with the application of properly composted manure long before the harvest.
I'm not opposed to GMOs as such, because it is stupid to be opposed to an abstraction as diverse as "GMO"
A very sensible attitude, far from the usual unqualified pro or con.
But putting responsibility for GMOs into the hands of a small number of global agri-corps seems to me a fairly bad idea because they are going to downplay the risks posed by the genes getting loose, be more concerned with deploying organisms that are profitable rather than sustainable (Roundup Ready plants are a good example of something I'm very leery of.)
Gotta agree there too. Some things are potentially just too dangerous to be left to those whose only interest is making a buck in the short-term (and have a known history of being seriously sleazy bastards about it). Tetraethyl lead was introduced by people who knew damn well just how dangerous the stuff could be, but pulled all sorts of crap to hide that.
Manure acts on biological pathways we do not understand, and some of the ways it does act are known to be dangerous.
But whatever the supposed dangers of manure, it has been used for thousands of years without any observed significant ill effect. I'd call that a pretty solid testing period.
And they'd win too, but I'd like to see them collect.
The headline says rice passes unexpected benefits to weeds. It does not say how or under what circumstances it passes them. You're making assumptions and reading something into the headline that isn't there.
It's assumed that the extra effort the plant puts into being glyphosate resistant (producing more of an enzyme known as EPSP synthase), which they assume serves no purpose in the wild (i.e. in the absence of glyphosate) would take away from some "effort" that the plant puts into being hardy under wild conditions. It's the same reason that cultivated fruit trees (e.g. oranges, apples) don't do as well in the wild as their native cousins. They've been breed to put "effort" into producing large fruits, which is great in the orchard, but is wasteful and evolutionarily disadvantageous in the wild.
Note that I used the word "assume" (in it's different forms) a number of times above. You know what they say about assumptions.
Just to emphasize your point, the weeds they're talking about are a "degenerated" subspecies of the cultivated rice. They're the same species, which makes it awfully easy to pass on the traits.
How far is it necessary to go before the "weedy" rice plants become a food source?
As far as they went to get the domesticated rice. Asian rice is Oryza sativa. The weedy rice they're talking about is a subspecies, Oryza sativa f. spontanea, that degenerated from the cultivated rice. So if you got the weedy rice to be a food source, all you'd get is what we already have as a food source.