I wasn't even sure "Scrum" was a real English word. Turns out it's some kind of sports metaphor for some sport we don't play around here. If I ever make a programming methodology fad, I'll name it broomstacking, and the leaders will be called drawmasters. Or maybe malletheads and flagmen.
(Disclosure: We use Scrum where I work. It's buzzwordiness is groan-worthy, but in practice it's mostly good common sense. It's also true what the article says, that there's little reason for using your most experienced developers as... let's just call them schedule handlers.)
On small (4-5 person) LAN parties back in the nineties, I knew a guy who shared his floppy drive under the name "porn". When somebody got too horny, their expectation of anonymity were ruined by the characteristic noise those drives make when they try to read from a non-existent floppy.
Well, I said you could get decent clothing out of it, if it is of high quality (most cotton products, especially jeans, aren't). And also, nobody ever said sackcloth wasn't durable.
But imagine for a moment a T-shirt made out of the same material as your old jeans. I guess it would be about as comfortable as a cotton T-shirt - out of denim. You can maybe make hemp slightly more smooth and flexible than those jeans - but not much, those jeans were already at the high end of smoothness and flexibility for hemp fibre.
Now compare that with the fair trade organic cotton T-shirts that they often sell in the very same shops. Go out there and buy one, or just touch one if you can't afford it (they're frightfully expensive, I know), and tell me hemp can compete!
The best hemp can hope for is a small niche between cotton and the extremely durable synthetics they currently make mail bags out of. Denim replacement, maybe. Cotton replacement? No way.
First, "Drug cartels" is not a monopoly. There are more than one.
Second, look at the tobacco industry. Tobacco has always been legal, but people who profit from human suffering at that scale have always been, and will always be, scum. Sure, legal drug cartels might finance fewer gangs, but they'd finance more lobbyists instead.
You know what they called hemp clothing in the old days? Sackcloth. As in sackcloth and ashes. Yes, you can get decent clothing out of it, but try cotton of the same fibre quality level as those trendy hemp clothes (for instance fair trade organic cotton, it's usually ridiculously high fibre quality) and tell me there would be competition. Hemp fibre would NOT kill cotton, any more than bloody terylene did. Lots of things you can blame cotton farmers for, banning cannabis isn't one of them.
"THC making someone violent makes no sense in any context. It's just not something the drug does."
True enough. But then, neither does alcohol. People are capable of interpreting their internal cues pretty far out.
I've read some of the things that local authorities near the mexican border, prison wardens etc. wrote. It may have become propaganda later, but at the time, they really believed it themselves. When politicians found out, they asked for professional opinions, and the medical authorities agreed after observing the new phenomenon (without any particular condemning tone) that yes, this "Indian hemp" stuff seems to work much like alcohol.
They also knew very well that it was hemp. They concluded it must be something different, since the observed effects were so dissimilar. This is a classic mistake people do when observing drug use in different cultures, concluding that there must be something different with the drug. It's probably what has given rise to the myths about different effects from tequila, vodka, absinthe, etc.
That's certainly true, but maybe not for the reason you think. Drugs mostly give an inner cue, that you interpret according to your experience and situation. There was a classic experiment where people were given nicotin acid (that's probably not the proper English word for it, sorry), which causes flushing and rapid heartbeat. Then they got to see a movie. If it was a horror movie, they reported being more afraid, if it was a porn movie they reported getting more excited... OK, so that was probably not exactly how the experiment went, I don't remember:-)
But the core of it is, our physical reactions are heavily subject to interpretation based on context. Back on topic, if you found some way of giving addicts cocaine or amphetamine blindly, I'm not sure they could even discern them better than wine experts distinguish wines (poorly) or people who claim to distinguish M&M colours (not at all).
What a drug "makes you do" varies greatly over time and locations. One of the original arguments for banning marijuana in the US was that it made its Mexican immigrant users so violent - and it's not impossible that it did, at the time.
Well, that won't work, will it? In this case, the problem is that there's useful information you won't find because some Wikipedia metagamer decided it couldn't possibly be useful since he'd never heard of it. Double checking does not help with that.
IMO, this is a far worse problem than a couple of errors here and there. I came across a case where maybe the world's foremost expert on Binary Coded Decimal was told he knew nothing about it, and got his contributions reverted by people who thought "BCD is useless! It's what they used in ENIAC's day, so it can't possibly matter!".
Apparently, just because you can convince IBM to include a decimal floating point unit in their processors, you can't therefore convince Joe Average Wikipedian.
C) A virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) and an old mite which is developing resistance to the treatments that have worked so far.. But healthy hives should be able to survive these things, and fungal infections too. There may be other factors influencing the immune response of the hive and the individual bees.
D) Yes there are. You're really swallowing propaganda if you're so naive to say there are no issues at all. The question is whether the tradeoffs are worth it, not if there are issues (when you splice a gene into a plant to make it produce its own pesticide, you certainly should consider whether it could harm pollinating insects)
According to this book I'm reading, ("A world without bees" by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum") they do have CCD in Britain, but the government is in denial about it. CCD is a controversial diagnosis... it could be caused by Varroa mites, Varroa mite treatment, Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, neonicotinoid pesticides (which some claim makes bees go senile long before lethal dose), or a combination. Even global warming may play a role.
A hive is a fragile place to live. Apparently worker bees die from exhaustion after a couple of weeks once they are old enough to leave the hive looking for food. But at least they get to boss the queen around!
You see some "anti-smoking crowd" which "hates nicotine" and can't stand the thought of it being useful for something. I don't. Where are they?
On the other hand, I remember a lot of pro-tobacco think tank spreading suggestive generalities like these, before the lawsuits uncovered their funding and the game was up.
With opiates, they'd get unbearable pain if they stopped, plus withdrawal symptoms from the opiates. Plus, opiates are now attractive to lots of people who don't have chronic pain, on account of drug culture. That opens all sorts of worm-cans, from false prescriptions to people breaking in and robbing ill people.
Point. I would think someone with serious schizophrenia would be less susceptible to the social pressure against smoking, and probably the science-based arguments against it, too.
Switching to smokeless tobacco is effective. The act of smoking may have pleasant sides they can't duplicate, but people can and do get by without these all the time - and it IS easier with some other source of nicotine.
Smoke too much marijuana and you will... die of lung cancer just like you would smoking anything.
Smoke in your lungs is not medicine. THC may be medicine - but strangely enough, it doesn't seem to have much therapeutic effect unless it's taken with the proper rituals, the one they use in drug culture (in other words, smoking it).
I wonder if red wine would have any measurable health benefit for people drinking it from disposable paper cups.
Are you sure musicians smoke more than everyone else? And are you sure they are more creative? The professional musicians I know spend too much time practicing to have much time left over for really creative pursuits.
However, I admit, it seems to me more singers and wind instrument players smoke. Maybe it's just seems that way because it stands out as a particularly stupid thing to do with that choice of career. Then again, it might be self-handicapping: It's awfully nice to have something to blame when you don't get as far you want.
Watt collected stories of weather stations being in supposedly hot places. But when asked for his data, so others could see if these stations really gave higher temperatures than they should, do you think he just handed it over? noooo!
Watt should be the last person to complain about access to data.
"Oh realclimate is run by climate scientists so they are the only place you can trust." No, that's not the case. Science doesn't work like that.
Well, that's not what I said. I said that they, being climate scientists, are part of the class that Watt and co. accuse of withholding and destroying evidence, and otherwise sinister behaviour. You got to hear what "their side" has to say against these accusations. I merely pointed out that the people behind RC, with their long track record of climate related papers accepted into top scientific journals (that's what makes me call them climate scientists, if you wonder), are excellent representatives of this side.
Anthony Watt is an ex-TV weatherman, but I haven't been able to find out if he's an actual meteorologist. If you can point me to documentation, I'd be grateful.
No, formal qualifications isn't everything, but you save a lot of time by using it as an initial guess of competence. The truth is, if me or you submitted a climate science paper to Nature, it probably wouldn't even get read... can you blame them for that?
If was going to disagree with the world's most famous matemathicians, I would want to look over my proofs again, get what I mean? I might be slightly less careful in correcting my child's elementary school teacher's mistakes.
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I wasn't even sure "Scrum" was a real English word. Turns out it's some kind of sports metaphor for some sport we don't play around here.
If I ever make a programming methodology fad, I'll name it broomstacking, and the leaders will be called drawmasters. Or maybe malletheads and flagmen.
(Disclosure: We use Scrum where I work. It's buzzwordiness is groan-worthy, but in practice it's mostly good common sense. It's also true what the article says, that there's little reason for using your most experienced developers as ... let's just call them schedule handlers.)
On small (4-5 person) LAN parties back in the nineties, I knew a guy who shared his floppy drive under the name "porn". When somebody got too horny, their expectation of anonymity were ruined by the characteristic noise those drives make when they try to read from a non-existent floppy.
Well, I said you could get decent clothing out of it, if it is of high quality (most cotton products, especially jeans, aren't). And also, nobody ever said sackcloth wasn't durable.
But imagine for a moment a T-shirt made out of the same material as your old jeans. I guess it would be about as comfortable as a cotton T-shirt - out of denim. You can maybe make hemp slightly more smooth and flexible than those jeans - but not much, those jeans were already at the high end of smoothness and flexibility for hemp fibre.
Now compare that with the fair trade organic cotton T-shirts that they often sell in the very same shops. Go out there and buy one, or just touch one if you can't afford it (they're frightfully expensive, I know), and tell me hemp can compete!
The best hemp can hope for is a small niche between cotton and the extremely durable synthetics they currently make mail bags out of. Denim replacement, maybe. Cotton replacement? No way.
I don't know why I bother replying, but...
First, "Drug cartels" is not a monopoly. There are more than one.
Second, look at the tobacco industry. Tobacco has always been legal, but people who profit from human suffering at that scale have always been, and will always be, scum. Sure, legal drug cartels might finance fewer gangs, but they'd finance more lobbyists instead.
You know what they called hemp clothing in the old days? Sackcloth. As in sackcloth and ashes. Yes, you can get decent clothing out of it, but try cotton of the same fibre quality level as those trendy hemp clothes (for instance fair trade organic cotton, it's usually ridiculously high fibre quality) and tell me there would be competition.
Hemp fibre would NOT kill cotton, any more than bloody terylene did. Lots of things you can blame cotton farmers for, banning cannabis isn't one of them.
"THC making someone violent makes no sense in any context. It's just not something the drug does."
True enough. But then, neither does alcohol. People are capable of interpreting their internal cues pretty far out.
I've read some of the things that local authorities near the mexican border, prison wardens etc. wrote. It may have become propaganda later, but at the time, they really believed it themselves. When politicians found out, they asked for professional opinions, and the medical authorities agreed after observing the new phenomenon (without any particular condemning tone) that yes, this "Indian hemp" stuff seems to work much like alcohol.
They also knew very well that it was hemp. They concluded it must be something different, since the observed effects were so dissimilar. This is a classic mistake people do when observing drug use in different cultures, concluding that there must be something different with the drug. It's probably what has given rise to the myths about different effects from tequila, vodka, absinthe, etc.
My Perl colleagues are swooning at Moose. It certainly seems like something to take note of, if you're into that sort of thing (Perl, that is).
That's certainly true, but maybe not for the reason you think. Drugs mostly give an inner cue, that you interpret according to your experience and situation. There was a classic experiment where people were given nicotin acid (that's probably not the proper English word for it, sorry), which causes flushing and rapid heartbeat. Then they got to see a movie. If it was a horror movie, they reported being more afraid, if it was a porn movie they reported getting more excited ... OK, so that was probably not exactly how the experiment went, I don't remember :-)
But the core of it is, our physical reactions are heavily subject to interpretation based on context. Back on topic, if you found some way of giving addicts cocaine or amphetamine blindly, I'm not sure they could even discern them better than wine experts distinguish wines (poorly) or people who claim to distinguish M&M colours (not at all).
What a drug "makes you do" varies greatly over time and locations. One of the original arguments for banning marijuana in the US was that it made its Mexican immigrant users so violent - and it's not impossible that it did, at the time.
I suppose you meant this:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/voila
and not this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola
Well, that won't work, will it? In this case, the problem is that there's useful information you won't find because some Wikipedia metagamer decided it couldn't possibly be useful since he'd never heard of it. Double checking does not help with that.
IMO, this is a far worse problem than a couple of errors here and there. I came across a case where maybe the world's foremost expert on Binary Coded Decimal was told he knew nothing about it, and got his contributions reverted by people who thought "BCD is useless! It's what they used in ENIAC's day, so it can't possibly matter!".
Apparently, just because you can convince IBM to include a decimal floating point unit in their processors, you can't therefore convince Joe Average Wikipedian.
"Precisely. But that's fine, I mean there are wikis for many other subjects so that you can delve into those subjects in much more detail."
And what do you know, Wales' for-profit company Wikia offers those!
C) A virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) and an old mite which is developing resistance to the treatments that have worked so far.. But healthy hives should be able to survive these things, and fungal infections too. There may be other factors influencing the immune response of the hive and the individual bees.
D) Yes there are. You're really swallowing propaganda if you're so naive to say there are no issues at all. The question is whether the tradeoffs are worth it, not if there are issues (when you splice a gene into a plant to make it produce its own pesticide, you certainly should consider whether it could harm pollinating insects)
According to this book I'm reading, ("A world without bees" by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum") they do have CCD in Britain, but the government is in denial about it. CCD is a controversial diagnosis... it could be caused by Varroa mites, Varroa mite treatment, Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, neonicotinoid pesticides (which some claim makes bees go senile long before lethal dose), or a combination. Even global warming may play a role.
A hive is a fragile place to live. Apparently worker bees die from exhaustion after a couple of weeks once they are old enough to leave the hive looking for food. But at least they get to boss the queen around!
You see some "anti-smoking crowd" which "hates nicotine" and can't stand the thought of it being useful for something. I don't. Where are they?
On the other hand, I remember a lot of pro-tobacco think tank spreading suggestive generalities like these, before the lawsuits uncovered their funding and the game was up.
With opiates, they'd get unbearable pain if they stopped, plus withdrawal symptoms from the opiates. Plus, opiates are now attractive to lots of people who don't have chronic pain, on account of drug culture. That opens all sorts of worm-cans, from false prescriptions to people breaking in and robbing ill people.
Point. I would think someone with serious schizophrenia would be less susceptible to the social pressure against smoking, and probably the science-based arguments against it, too.
Point. Whether it's God or just Dumb Ol' Mother Nature who did it, it looks like nicotine was intended to be a pesticide.
Switching to smokeless tobacco is effective. The act of smoking may have pleasant sides they can't duplicate, but people can and do get by without these all the time - and it IS easier with some other source of nicotine.
Smoke too much marijuana and you will... die of lung cancer just like you would smoking anything.
Smoke in your lungs is not medicine. THC may be medicine - but strangely enough, it doesn't seem to have much therapeutic effect unless it's taken with the proper rituals, the one they use in drug culture (in other words, smoking it).
I wonder if red wine would have any measurable health benefit for people drinking it from disposable paper cups.
If we're talking about the cheap natural solution called nicotine, then it's very profitable indeed.
Are you sure musicians smoke more than everyone else? And are you sure they are more creative? The professional musicians I know spend too much time practicing to have much time left over for really creative pursuits.
However, I admit, it seems to me more singers and wind instrument players smoke. Maybe it's just seems that way because it stands out as a particularly stupid thing to do with that choice of career. Then again, it might be self-handicapping: It's awfully nice to have something to blame when you don't get as far you want.
"Quiting smoking is easier than quitting Caffeine"
Translation: For me, it appeared that quitting smoking was easier than quitting caffeine.
I'll be generous, and assume that's what you wanted to say. If not, you'd better show us some better evidence.
Ah, that's a funny accusation in this context.
Watt collected stories of weather stations being in supposedly hot places. But when asked for his data, so others could see if these stations really gave higher temperatures than they should, do you think he just handed it over? noooo!
Watt should be the last person to complain about access to data.
"Oh realclimate is run by climate scientists so they are the only place you can trust." No, that's not the case. Science doesn't work like that.
Well, that's not what I said. I said that they, being climate scientists, are part of the class that Watt and co. accuse of withholding and destroying evidence, and otherwise sinister behaviour. You got to hear what "their side" has to say against these accusations. I merely pointed out that the people behind RC, with their long track record of climate related papers accepted into top scientific journals (that's what makes me call them climate scientists, if you wonder), are excellent representatives of this side.
Anthony Watt is an ex-TV weatherman, but I haven't been able to find out if he's an actual meteorologist. If you can point me to documentation, I'd be grateful.
No, formal qualifications isn't everything, but you save a lot of time by using it as an initial guess of competence. The truth is, if me or you submitted a climate science paper to Nature, it probably wouldn't even get read... can you blame them for that?
If was going to disagree with the world's most famous matemathicians, I would want to look over my proofs again, get what I mean? I might be slightly less careful in correcting my child's elementary school teacher's mistakes.