And they can only really pay attention to a limited number of cell-phone calls. If you have nothing to hide, they really aren't interested and you don't particularly need to worry.
Not agreeing with a few of these items. Admittedly, I don't have piles of experience with interviewing, but I did manage to land a job last fall despite the economy, a slightly stale degree, and no work experience in my field. A pretty good job, one with nice pay, enjoyable people, interesting challenges, and mobility within the company.
In the interview, they didn't seem terribly interested in finding out if I would cause trouble.
Both hiring managers that have hired me (one in a different field in the past) have noted that they like to chat with interviewees about other hobbies. You are somewhat likely to have overlapping interests, or at least nearby interests, so talking about hobbies briefly (especially if they bring it up and draw you out) is not likely to bore them to tears. It also shows them that you have a little personality, and aren't a dull cardboard cut-out that won't interact with coworkers unless necessary (and maybe not even then). As a nice bonus, they get to see you talking about something that you are really interested in. It gives you a chance to show real enthusiasm for something, which should give the interviewer a positive impression. Yeah, just shy away from the dangerous / illegal / violent / socially frowned-upon hobbies.
If work/life balance is an issue for you, it's reasonable to bring it up in an open-ended sort of way. You can mention something about work/life balance, and let them fill in the details. Do this especially if the company you are interviewing has a reputation for problems in that area. A good employer / boss should understand your concerns that in this industry, you just can't tell what hours will be expected of you and thus you need to find out early. If they do strive to have good work/life balance, they will understand your concerns and reassure you. In fact, they will likely be glad that you asked, because it indicates that you will match the prevailing culture (or not, and then did you really want to work for them?).
Depending on the person, finding out about dress code might be really important. You may not even have to ask directly, since you can probably get a tour of your prospective work area upon request, and just notice what the norm is there. If you really just wouldn't cope well with a shirt-and-tie every day (and would have to go buy a whole new wardrobe to meet this request), then perhaps that will be a deciding factor for you. Of course if you happen to be in a portion of tech that generally requires that kind of dress, then perhaps you need a dose of reality. I know I wouldn't be pleased if told that I needed to be wearing skirts or dresses every day (yes I am female), and am quite happy to have found an office where people dress in everything from t-shirts with (non-offensive) words on them to button-down shirts (no ties), and some gals wear skirts. That I can wear sandals and not have a problem is very nice (I left a desk job at a utility where they later decided that everybody needed to wear closed-toe shoes, despite the fact that this back-office never ever saw customers). I don't think very well with hot feet, which I get if I have to wear shoes. That affects "doing my job", so it really does matter. I suspect that a surprising number of people are actually affected a lot by whether or not they are wearing the clothing they are used to, so I am probably not terribly unusual.
This isn't really a question to ask, but it's something useful to do.
Make sure you get a tour that includes your general working area. Most places should be fine with giving you a tour at some point before you commit, and one that doesn't should turn up some red flags right there. When you're on the tour, see if the other employees (especially your prospective coworkers) are smiling. If they are, it's a good sign that they have decently-balanced workloads, lives, opportunities, etc. If they aren't, be rather leery of the job, as it will likely turn you into a grump. Something is probably distinctly dysfunctional, and it may not be anything that you can find out by asking questions of the interviewers.
It seems so simple (and rather simplistic), but choosing jobs with happy coworkers, management, and other contacts really does make for a happier job and life.
The problem with trying to raise and test one of the wild cousins is that they don't really bond with humans. It's tricky to teach and test a creature that doesn't care much about you. The captive versions have been bred to interact with us as our children, which makes them so much easier to test.
For that matter, dogs are much easier to test than cats because they're mentally arranged to be social animals (so they live and play in groups all their lives) whereas cats don't really care about pleasing their friends. So you can convince a dog to learn things and do tricks because you are his buddy and playing with buddies and making them happy is fun. But you get the ". . . and so what's in it for me?" response from a cat, because hanging out with pals is not really a lifestyle he is wired for.
Huh, could be. There were definitely a couple dozen disks of it, but I suppose they could have been copies. I have no memory of the labeling on the disks, just that they were the 5.25" kind. It was my first exposure to computers, so nothing about the whole setup stood out as stranger than anything else. We were little kids, so I don't think we were told anything about where they actually got the software, it "just was". I never even thought about it before. Strange. Thank you:)
I had Apple IIe's at school in first and second grade. There were disks for several common games: Oregon Trail, EZLOGO (the the little programmable turtle), Lemonade Stand, and a card game with an Alice In Wonderland theme. I can't remember the name of that card game, and a list I found on Wikipedia didn't help. Anyway, I developed a habit of making really high scores, because I eventually figured out that the shuffles always went in the same order. No I didn't write them down, but I did watch my neighbor's screen until their shuffle looked like mine, then tracked half a turn behind them. I only used one or two computers, so I didn't max out the scores on the whole room, but I think one or two other kids were annoyed with me for it. I was quite pleased about figuring it out. Somebody please tell me the name of this game? I know, it's a cold thread now, so nobody is even listening:(.
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work doesn't make too many assumptions about you (it looks like there is another edition out which is probably identical except for the cover). And as a nice bonus, it's based on actual research, not useless psychobabble dreamed up by somebody based on theories that were based on theories by Freud. Freud's a bad foundation, almost anything built upon his work comes down in under three decades. Anyway, this book doesn't assume that you are stupid, willfully ignorant, a neanderthal, or any of that. Most of the stuff by John Gottman is good, it's all based from his love lab, an actual scientific setup where they study couples. Just as an example of how amazing they are, they have figured out how to predict the permanence of a marriage after watching one argument and interviewing the couple for about 15 minutes (!).
Sadly, the student debt program probably has her too deep in it for McDonald's to be a viable option. Student loan programs continue to have a hopelessly optimistic idea of what their customers will be worth after years of schooling and tens of thousands of dollars in loans. That's also part of the entitlement problem: "Oh, I guess you deserve it too, because just maybe the only thing holding you back in life is the rest of this fabulous education that you've botched so far but never mind that".
Also, in their culture the older folks feel very bad about imposing a burden on the younger folks. They don't want to be so much trouble as to get nursing care. But robots are the perfect solution, they are cool and fun and aren't a burden on anybody.
Hmmm, I suspect that you have to show up in order to get the verdict. Otherwise you just rack up naughty points in court. So put in the token appearance, but don't bother with an expensive lawyer. Probably you don't want to defend yourself, but just get a lawyer who understands what you are trying to do and is willing to play along for very little money at all.
Al: Uh-oh, quick! Should we use gnuke, knuke, or just bare-bones nuke?
Bob: Ah, definitely not knuke, it screws up at least half of the commands it sends to nuke. Maybe gnuke, it's at least a competent front-end, but it's missing a bunch of the functionality of nuke -- the dev got bored and was pulled onto another project. But the command-line for nuke is so obtuse that it will take two or three tries just to get the command right, and those first two bad commands might be worse than not using it at all. Of course, nobody has what you would call real-world experience with any of them . . .
Al: Ah sh*t, too late anyway.
Sorry, it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the gnuke tag on the story.
It should be perfectly safe to cloak all buildings. Buildings only absorb a tiny fraction of the shock of an earthquake; you don't need to have something man-made fall over just to keep the waves from going further. Now if you somehow made huge chunks of land cloaked to earthquakes, I would agree that the shaking may have to come out somewhere. But anyway at that point you're talking about making an isolated chunk of land whose borders crunch and stretch a lot more than everything else -- people wouldn't go for that. And I don't see how you'd do it anyway, you can't just seismically isolate a chunk of land.
Dreams! I have heard that one compelling theory for what's going on in dreams is random associations between the day's events and the existing memories. Today's events find places to live and connections to the rest of your reality kind of randomly, by brute-forcing lots of stuff while you sleep. This is why people go into random-association mode when they are highly sleep deprived; the brain is trying to just do the same work while you walk because it needs to every so often. We are good at making semi-random connections. And dreams (and dream-like states -- hellllooooo drugged writer/artist/seer) are a classic source of creativity.
This overall story makes me think this: Creative people have to get the spark from somewhere. The ideas are being generated, and appear for the inspection of and improvement by the person who gets them. This model suggests that in the same person, there is an actor that is creating ideas, and one that is "receiving" them -- and that sounds awfully schizo to me. Perhaps people who are crazy are those creative people who just can't deal with the incoming ideas from the idea generator. Or the idea generator is tuned wrong. And actually that makes a lot of sense, the same idea generator will not work for all time. There has to be a lot of variation because we need to invent new ideas all the time. Some people are ahead of the curve, some people behind, others at just the right spot right now. The really amazing ones are those who can see inventions that won't arrive for another century or more, and write out diagrams for how they should work. The trouble is, people who aren't tuned for the here-and-now, or at least near-future, are likely to go crazy from it.
There's one thing not mentioned in the summary that is really important. Only part of the problem is the added-up doses. The other part of the problem is that many of these drugs that have acetaminophen in them also have components that are highly addictive. So now you have people who are addicted to drugs with acetaminophen in them (Tylenol alone is not especially addictive), and they take larger and larger doses of the pills to get the same effect. Meanwhile, they're getting higher doses of acetaminophen. Plus, even if you don't up the dose over time, you are still likely to stay on the drug, which means lifetime consistent use of acetaminophen -- until your liver wears out. If you're going to get addicted to a drug, you should pick just one. Don't get addicted to a combination, it's likely to have un-researched problems.
Did google buy out the competition so they were #1? No.
Well . . . no they didn't buy out the competing companies. But what they did buy out is the people.
1. Start a company full of bright people doing neat stuff.
2. Hand out golden handcuffs to anybody who qualifies.
3. ??
4. Profit!
Google has had more people on staff than they strictly need for a long time now. Part of the reason Google hires them up is so that they won't be out loose thinking about starting a competitor to Google. Why let people spend 20% of their work time on projects of their choosing? Certainly most of those projects never pan out. The answer is two-fold: there isn't really enough work for everybody they want/need to hire, and getting to play with your own projects on work hours make the handcuffs even shinier.
I know, I have heard that working at Google has become less fun over the past few years. I don't know what effect that will have on the equation.
It's not the seeds. It's some sort of residue you get off the leaves. Also, (a) I can't imagine a small patch of live plants would be enough for a high and (b) it might only be a particular variety -- or only potent enough to matter in a particular variety. So probably the stuff you can grow from seeds packets won't do it for you either.
Apparently, some sort of tracer chemical does appear in the seeds, thus the questions about poppyseed consumption when you take a drug test. Except of course that people now know to just answer yes to that question, so it became moot and was removed.
No, then you switch to lots of fruits and veggies. They are good for you, and in enough quantity they will sustain you. Dark leafy greens have a surprising amount of protein in them (think chlorophyll). And you can also eat fish & fowl, both of which are more efficient ways of turning plants into protein. Yes, we do need to treat the chickens better too, so . . . repeat with the increased veggie count.
Why do we have a tradition of eating cows then? Because of the glory of the hunt. I've heard a story [citation needed] of some sort of aid group that was trying to help a tribe (I forget where) that had been minimally influenced by the modern world. Aid workers were teaching them to snare birds of various sorts to improve their nutrition. Ruminants are tasty and all, but they are not an efficient way to catch your protein. The tribe had eaten birds before, they just hadn't been very good at catching them. So their technique was improved through training, and the aid workers went away. Some time later these aid workers came back to see how the tribe was doing and . . . found that they were still doing just as miserably. Birds are practical food, but they don't lend glory to the man who catches them. He who catches the beef gets the honor, the women, and the new babies. No man was willing to give up these things, even if it meant feeding his existing children better. So no progress was made in the area of nutrition.
I lost my sense of smell as an infant, and I know that I miss a lot. Most herbs are pretty much bitter leaves to me, lots of spices are mostly a lost cause, and artificial fruit flavors in candy are pointless (I notice the different levels of sweet and tart, that's it). Texture does a lot for me. I have not bothered with alcohol because (a) I am a very grounded sort of person who likes to stay in touch with my senses and mental abilities and (b) it's pretty much just the alcohol flavor, the best stuff would probably just taste like nice fruit juice to me.
The sense of smell is a funny thing. Apparently people are likely to mentally "fill in the blank" for what they should be smelling when they have lost the sense. It is easy for it to be a phantom sense. You quite likely partially taste the subtleties and subconsciously fill in smells to go with them. But that's only because you know what to fill in. And not all people will do the fill-in job as well as you when the sense of smell leaves them.
Things you may be filling in (reports of differences between what's described to me and what I get):
Is citrus zest anything more than bitter and perhaps a little hot? If so, you're filling in the gap.
Are cucumbers bland? If not, you're filling in the gap.
Is plain coffee just plain bitter? If not, you're filling in . . .
Are different candies just variations on sweet and sour? If not, then . . .
Do herb-infused oils do anything special for you? Is so, then . . .
I can't think of anything else now, but you get the idea. Smell is very closely linked with memory -- smells easily bring memories to mind and memories easily bring smells to mind.
That said, there is a lot to be enjoyed without the sense of smell. It's just a narrower field that probably takes some getting used to, and supportive friends and family will help.
Yes, people should stay home when sick. Yes, especially right now.
However, many of us were taught that we should only stay home from school if we really just couldn't learn that day. Otherwise, get out there and go to school or else your grades will slip, or you'll be given a failing grade anyway for lack of attendance (yes schools do this, even if you're doing fabulously, and the limit is very low these days), or the authorities will come down hard on you and/or your parents. It's stupid, but them's the rules because school is about forcing a babysitting service upon the children, not about teaching them to be good and responsible adults.
And many parents simply don't have the resources to do something responsible with their kids when they start to sniffle, sneeze, cough, get fevers, etc. Can't stay home with them (no sick days or you have to work this shift or face wrath of boss / peers), regular daycare is obviously not the answer, gotta send them to school unless they need to go to the ER instead.
Yes, you really shouldn't go on vacation when sick. But people do it all the time. It's the only chance they'll get to go this year, and they won't ruin the whole family vacation just because of an illness that will probably clear in a couple of days.
Yes, you probably shouldn't travel at all if you're sick -- even if you are already away from home. But it's horribly expensive to change plans for return flights. And you likely didn't leave much (any) extra vacation time in case of emergencies at the end of your trip; you have to get back home and get back to work. And even if you do have the contingency worked out right, do you really want to get sicker in a foreign city / country / continent, where your health insurance may not cover you, the doctor who knows you is unavailable, and you are stuck without your usual comfort food (oh yeah, every culture does have its food to feed the sick people, but it won't be your comfort food).
So yes, people should play the game right, but they have so much practice playing it wrong and so many reasons to think of themselves and not the group that . . . there will always be somebody who chooses the "wrong" way. We're animals, and we think even more like simple animals when we're sick.
A) Look at the other posts in this thread and see in what situations people saw the Milky Way. They weren't in the burbs. They weren't anywhere near where a train stops (maybe sort of near where on goes by at high speed). You have to take a weekend vacation (at least) to get to where you can see the stars. Starting from some extended metro areas (thankfully not mine), all you would get on that weekend is a lot of driving, some dinner, beautiful stars, some sleep, breakfast, and a lot of driving.
B) Light pollution happens in a bunch of ways. Car headlights are definitely one way, and they are an insidious way because they set the dilation of your eyes to a point where all other lights out there have to be a certain brightness just to keep up. If you are in the middle of nowhere and relying on a bright moon, you will see a lot more scenery (and stuff sneaking up on you) if you leave the flashlight off.
Another part of light pollution happens because City Light departments insist upon using street lights that cast light in more than just the down direction. There are light fixtures that only point light down, and plastic skirt-like thingies that fix up other lights to behave the same way. Cities are cheap as a rule though, so anything that reduces the amount of light that floods everywhere from a light, or makes the light more expensive, or might require maintenance (like the skirt thingies), won't fly. In my city, they got one lawsuit from someone who was attacked in a dark zone caused by a maladjusted streetlight skirt, and now the city has taken off all of the existing ones and won't put any on. Lights that shine sideways will shine in your windows and mess with most people's sleep (whether they know it or not), and lights that point partly up will light up the sky and reduce your star count pretty quickly.
C) More tech actually helps. Cities are cheap though. Work out the details so that your streetlights only light what they're supposed to, and the light will be a little more expensive and many cities won't buy. Improve the the tech some more so that it's cheaper (per well-lit area), and it will become the default for cities.
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And they can only really pay attention to a limited number of cell-phone calls. If you have nothing to hide, they really aren't interested and you don't particularly need to worry.
Good at a treating a pretty narrow range of maladies. Kind of mediocre at caring for infants, women, and the elderly.
Not agreeing with a few of these items. Admittedly, I don't have piles of experience with interviewing, but I did manage to land a job last fall despite the economy, a slightly stale degree, and no work experience in my field. A pretty good job, one with nice pay, enjoyable people, interesting challenges, and mobility within the company.
In the interview, they didn't seem terribly interested in finding out if I would cause trouble.
Both hiring managers that have hired me (one in a different field in the past) have noted that they like to chat with interviewees about other hobbies. You are somewhat likely to have overlapping interests, or at least nearby interests, so talking about hobbies briefly (especially if they bring it up and draw you out) is not likely to bore them to tears. It also shows them that you have a little personality, and aren't a dull cardboard cut-out that won't interact with coworkers unless necessary (and maybe not even then). As a nice bonus, they get to see you talking about something that you are really interested in. It gives you a chance to show real enthusiasm for something, which should give the interviewer a positive impression. Yeah, just shy away from the dangerous / illegal / violent / socially frowned-upon hobbies.
If work/life balance is an issue for you, it's reasonable to bring it up in an open-ended sort of way. You can mention something about work/life balance, and let them fill in the details. Do this especially if the company you are interviewing has a reputation for problems in that area. A good employer / boss should understand your concerns that in this industry, you just can't tell what hours will be expected of you and thus you need to find out early. If they do strive to have good work/life balance, they will understand your concerns and reassure you. In fact, they will likely be glad that you asked, because it indicates that you will match the prevailing culture (or not, and then did you really want to work for them?).
Depending on the person, finding out about dress code might be really important. You may not even have to ask directly, since you can probably get a tour of your prospective work area upon request, and just notice what the norm is there. If you really just wouldn't cope well with a shirt-and-tie every day (and would have to go buy a whole new wardrobe to meet this request), then perhaps that will be a deciding factor for you. Of course if you happen to be in a portion of tech that generally requires that kind of dress, then perhaps you need a dose of reality. I know I wouldn't be pleased if told that I needed to be wearing skirts or dresses every day (yes I am female), and am quite happy to have found an office where people dress in everything from t-shirts with (non-offensive) words on them to button-down shirts (no ties), and some gals wear skirts. That I can wear sandals and not have a problem is very nice (I left a desk job at a utility where they later decided that everybody needed to wear closed-toe shoes, despite the fact that this back-office never ever saw customers). I don't think very well with hot feet, which I get if I have to wear shoes. That affects "doing my job", so it really does matter. I suspect that a surprising number of people are actually affected a lot by whether or not they are wearing the clothing they are used to, so I am probably not terribly unusual.
I don't know, just my two cents.
This isn't really a question to ask, but it's something useful to do.
Make sure you get a tour that includes your general working area. Most places should be fine with giving you a tour at some point before you commit, and one that doesn't should turn up some red flags right there. When you're on the tour, see if the other employees (especially your prospective coworkers) are smiling. If they are, it's a good sign that they have decently-balanced workloads, lives, opportunities, etc. If they aren't, be rather leery of the job, as it will likely turn you into a grump. Something is probably distinctly dysfunctional, and it may not be anything that you can find out by asking questions of the interviewers.
It seems so simple (and rather simplistic), but choosing jobs with happy coworkers, management, and other contacts really does make for a happier job and life.
But how can you fund Political Action Committees on a 0% slice?
The problem with trying to raise and test one of the wild cousins is that they don't really bond with humans. It's tricky to teach and test a creature that doesn't care much about you. The captive versions have been bred to interact with us as our children, which makes them so much easier to test.
For that matter, dogs are much easier to test than cats because they're mentally arranged to be social animals (so they live and play in groups all their lives) whereas cats don't really care about pleasing their friends. So you can convince a dog to learn things and do tricks because you are his buddy and playing with buddies and making them happy is fun. But you get the ". . . and so what's in it for me?" response from a cat, because hanging out with pals is not really a lifestyle he is wired for.
Huh, could be. There were definitely a couple dozen disks of it, but I suppose they could have been copies. I have no memory of the labeling on the disks, just that they were the 5.25" kind. It was my first exposure to computers, so nothing about the whole setup stood out as stranger than anything else. We were little kids, so I don't think we were told anything about where they actually got the software, it "just was". I never even thought about it before. Strange. Thank you :)
I had Apple IIe's at school in first and second grade. There were disks for several common games: Oregon Trail, EZLOGO (the the little programmable turtle), Lemonade Stand, and a card game with an Alice In Wonderland theme. I can't remember the name of that card game, and a list I found on Wikipedia didn't help. Anyway, I developed a habit of making really high scores, because I eventually figured out that the shuffles always went in the same order. No I didn't write them down, but I did watch my neighbor's screen until their shuffle looked like mine, then tracked half a turn behind them. I only used one or two computers, so I didn't max out the scores on the whole room, but I think one or two other kids were annoyed with me for it. I was quite pleased about figuring it out. Somebody please tell me the name of this game? I know, it's a cold thread now, so nobody is even listening :(.
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work doesn't make too many assumptions about you (it looks like there is another edition out which is probably identical except for the cover). And as a nice bonus, it's based on actual research, not useless psychobabble dreamed up by somebody based on theories that were based on theories by Freud. Freud's a bad foundation, almost anything built upon his work comes down in under three decades. Anyway, this book doesn't assume that you are stupid, willfully ignorant, a neanderthal, or any of that. Most of the stuff by John Gottman is good, it's all based from his love lab, an actual scientific setup where they study couples. Just as an example of how amazing they are, they have figured out how to predict the permanence of a marriage after watching one argument and interviewing the couple for about 15 minutes (!).
Three-quarters of the joke. Go re-read the archives.
Sadly, the student debt program probably has her too deep in it for McDonald's to be a viable option. Student loan programs continue to have a hopelessly optimistic idea of what their customers will be worth after years of schooling and tens of thousands of dollars in loans. That's also part of the entitlement problem: "Oh, I guess you deserve it too, because just maybe the only thing holding you back in life is the rest of this fabulous education that you've botched so far but never mind that".
Also, in their culture the older folks feel very bad about imposing a burden on the younger folks. They don't want to be so much trouble as to get nursing care. But robots are the perfect solution, they are cool and fun and aren't a burden on anybody.
Hmmm, I suspect that you have to show up in order to get the verdict. Otherwise you just rack up naughty points in court. So put in the token appearance, but don't bother with an expensive lawyer. Probably you don't want to defend yourself, but just get a lawyer who understands what you are trying to do and is willing to play along for very little money at all.
Al: Uh-oh, quick! Should we use gnuke, knuke, or just bare-bones nuke?
Bob: Ah, definitely not knuke, it screws up at least half of the commands it sends to nuke. Maybe gnuke, it's at least a competent front-end, but it's missing a bunch of the functionality of nuke -- the dev got bored and was pulled onto another project. But the command-line for nuke is so obtuse that it will take two or three tries just to get the command right, and those first two bad commands might be worse than not using it at all. Of course, nobody has what you would call real-world experience with any of them . . .
Al: Ah sh*t, too late anyway.
Sorry, it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the gnuke tag on the story.
It should be perfectly safe to cloak all buildings. Buildings only absorb a tiny fraction of the shock of an earthquake; you don't need to have something man-made fall over just to keep the waves from going further. Now if you somehow made huge chunks of land cloaked to earthquakes, I would agree that the shaking may have to come out somewhere. But anyway at that point you're talking about making an isolated chunk of land whose borders crunch and stretch a lot more than everything else -- people wouldn't go for that. And I don't see how you'd do it anyway, you can't just seismically isolate a chunk of land.
Dreams! I have heard that one compelling theory for what's going on in dreams is random associations between the day's events and the existing memories. Today's events find places to live and connections to the rest of your reality kind of randomly, by brute-forcing lots of stuff while you sleep. This is why people go into random-association mode when they are highly sleep deprived; the brain is trying to just do the same work while you walk because it needs to every so often. We are good at making semi-random connections. And dreams (and dream-like states -- hellllooooo drugged writer/artist/seer) are a classic source of creativity.
This overall story makes me think this: Creative people have to get the spark from somewhere. The ideas are being generated, and appear for the inspection of and improvement by the person who gets them. This model suggests that in the same person, there is an actor that is creating ideas, and one that is "receiving" them -- and that sounds awfully schizo to me. Perhaps people who are crazy are those creative people who just can't deal with the incoming ideas from the idea generator. Or the idea generator is tuned wrong. And actually that makes a lot of sense, the same idea generator will not work for all time. There has to be a lot of variation because we need to invent new ideas all the time. Some people are ahead of the curve, some people behind, others at just the right spot right now. The really amazing ones are those who can see inventions that won't arrive for another century or more, and write out diagrams for how they should work. The trouble is, people who aren't tuned for the here-and-now, or at least near-future, are likely to go crazy from it.
"Organic sea salt, purified by cute widdle genetically modified ocean organisms".
There, fixed that . . . ah whatever, anyway it will be banned in Europe.
Quite possibly Sir_Lewk will provide a lot of that warning though, since he's been modded 5.
There's one thing not mentioned in the summary that is really important. Only part of the problem is the added-up doses. The other part of the problem is that many of these drugs that have acetaminophen in them also have components that are highly addictive. So now you have people who are addicted to drugs with acetaminophen in them (Tylenol alone is not especially addictive), and they take larger and larger doses of the pills to get the same effect. Meanwhile, they're getting higher doses of acetaminophen. Plus, even if you don't up the dose over time, you are still likely to stay on the drug, which means lifetime consistent use of acetaminophen -- until your liver wears out. If you're going to get addicted to a drug, you should pick just one. Don't get addicted to a combination, it's likely to have un-researched problems.
Did google buy out the competition so they were #1? No.
Well . . . no they didn't buy out the competing companies. But what they did buy out is the people.
1. Start a company full of bright people doing neat stuff.
2. Hand out golden handcuffs to anybody who qualifies.
3. ??
4. Profit!
Google has had more people on staff than they strictly need for a long time now. Part of the reason Google hires them up is so that they won't be out loose thinking about starting a competitor to Google. Why let people spend 20% of their work time on projects of their choosing? Certainly most of those projects never pan out. The answer is two-fold: there isn't really enough work for everybody they want/need to hire, and getting to play with your own projects on work hours make the handcuffs even shinier.
I know, I have heard that working at Google has become less fun over the past few years. I don't know what effect that will have on the equation.
It's not the seeds. It's some sort of residue you get off the leaves. Also, (a) I can't imagine a small patch of live plants would be enough for a high and (b) it might only be a particular variety -- or only potent enough to matter in a particular variety. So probably the stuff you can grow from seeds packets won't do it for you either.
Apparently, some sort of tracer chemical does appear in the seeds, thus the questions about poppyseed consumption when you take a drug test. Except of course that people now know to just answer yes to that question, so it became moot and was removed.
No, then you switch to lots of fruits and veggies. They are good for you, and in enough quantity they will sustain you. Dark leafy greens have a surprising amount of protein in them (think chlorophyll). And you can also eat fish & fowl, both of which are more efficient ways of turning plants into protein. Yes, we do need to treat the chickens better too, so . . . repeat with the increased veggie count.
Why do we have a tradition of eating cows then? Because of the glory of the hunt. I've heard a story [citation needed] of some sort of aid group that was trying to help a tribe (I forget where) that had been minimally influenced by the modern world. Aid workers were teaching them to snare birds of various sorts to improve their nutrition. Ruminants are tasty and all, but they are not an efficient way to catch your protein. The tribe had eaten birds before, they just hadn't been very good at catching them. So their technique was improved through training, and the aid workers went away. Some time later these aid workers came back to see how the tribe was doing and . . . found that they were still doing just as miserably. Birds are practical food, but they don't lend glory to the man who catches them. He who catches the beef gets the honor, the women, and the new babies. No man was willing to give up these things, even if it meant feeding his existing children better. So no progress was made in the area of nutrition.
The sense of smell is a funny thing. Apparently people are likely to mentally "fill in the blank" for what they should be smelling when they have lost the sense. It is easy for it to be a phantom sense. You quite likely partially taste the subtleties and subconsciously fill in smells to go with them. But that's only because you know what to fill in. And not all people will do the fill-in job as well as you when the sense of smell leaves them.
Things you may be filling in (reports of differences between what's described to me and what I get):
Is citrus zest anything more than bitter and perhaps a little hot? If so, you're filling in the gap.
Are cucumbers bland? If not, you're filling in the gap.
Is plain coffee just plain bitter? If not, you're filling in . . .
Are different candies just variations on sweet and sour? If not, then . . .
Do herb-infused oils do anything special for you? Is so, then . . .
I can't think of anything else now, but you get the idea. Smell is very closely linked with memory -- smells easily bring memories to mind and memories easily bring smells to mind.
That said, there is a lot to be enjoyed without the sense of smell. It's just a narrower field that probably takes some getting used to, and supportive friends and family will help.
Yes, people should stay home when sick. Yes, especially right now.
However, many of us were taught that we should only stay home from school if we really just couldn't learn that day. Otherwise, get out there and go to school or else your grades will slip, or you'll be given a failing grade anyway for lack of attendance (yes schools do this, even if you're doing fabulously, and the limit is very low these days), or the authorities will come down hard on you and/or your parents. It's stupid, but them's the rules because school is about forcing a babysitting service upon the children, not about teaching them to be good and responsible adults.
And many parents simply don't have the resources to do something responsible with their kids when they start to sniffle, sneeze, cough, get fevers, etc. Can't stay home with them (no sick days or you have to work this shift or face wrath of boss / peers), regular daycare is obviously not the answer, gotta send them to school unless they need to go to the ER instead.
Yes, you really shouldn't go on vacation when sick. But people do it all the time. It's the only chance they'll get to go this year, and they won't ruin the whole family vacation just because of an illness that will probably clear in a couple of days.
Yes, you probably shouldn't travel at all if you're sick -- even if you are already away from home. But it's horribly expensive to change plans for return flights. And you likely didn't leave much (any) extra vacation time in case of emergencies at the end of your trip; you have to get back home and get back to work. And even if you do have the contingency worked out right, do you really want to get sicker in a foreign city / country / continent, where your health insurance may not cover you, the doctor who knows you is unavailable, and you are stuck without your usual comfort food (oh yeah, every culture does have its food to feed the sick people, but it won't be your comfort food).
So yes, people should play the game right, but they have so much practice playing it wrong and so many reasons to think of themselves and not the group that . . . there will always be somebody who chooses the "wrong" way. We're animals, and we think even more like simple animals when we're sick.
A) Look at the other posts in this thread and see in what situations people saw the Milky Way. They weren't in the burbs. They weren't anywhere near where a train stops (maybe sort of near where on goes by at high speed). You have to take a weekend vacation (at least) to get to where you can see the stars. Starting from some extended metro areas (thankfully not mine), all you would get on that weekend is a lot of driving, some dinner, beautiful stars, some sleep, breakfast, and a lot of driving.
B) Light pollution happens in a bunch of ways. Car headlights are definitely one way, and they are an insidious way because they set the dilation of your eyes to a point where all other lights out there have to be a certain brightness just to keep up. If you are in the middle of nowhere and relying on a bright moon, you will see a lot more scenery (and stuff sneaking up on you) if you leave the flashlight off.
Another part of light pollution happens because City Light departments insist upon using street lights that cast light in more than just the down direction. There are light fixtures that only point light down, and plastic skirt-like thingies that fix up other lights to behave the same way. Cities are cheap as a rule though, so anything that reduces the amount of light that floods everywhere from a light, or makes the light more expensive, or might require maintenance (like the skirt thingies), won't fly. In my city, they got one lawsuit from someone who was attacked in a dark zone caused by a maladjusted streetlight skirt, and now the city has taken off all of the existing ones and won't put any on. Lights that shine sideways will shine in your windows and mess with most people's sleep (whether they know it or not), and lights that point partly up will light up the sky and reduce your star count pretty quickly.
C) More tech actually helps. Cities are cheap though. Work out the details so that your streetlights only light what they're supposed to, and the light will be a little more expensive and many cities won't buy. Improve the the tech some more so that it's cheaper (per well-lit area), and it will become the default for cities.