So this must be the cause of what's probably going to be the coolest August on record for Montana, where a couple weeks ago we got snow down as low as 5000 feet.
Selective breeding tends to relate to marketability. Did marijuana have much market value back before it was outlawed? Probably not, since it was just a common weed available to anyone who cared to pick it, and back in the day, opium was still legal too.
I would hazard that the pressure toward higher THC has come not only from buyers (after all a person could just consume more of the weaker stuff) but also from law enforcement -- since the larger the package, the more likely it is to be observed.
We should be glad that it's Microsoft, so it's someone with deep enough pockets to fight this as long as the courts allow. As you say, it would be a terrible precedent, and too easily extensible to anything a government wished to see (or seize) worldwide.
You can only judge by the samples you've got. I suspect they're pretty durn representative, and they seem to be reasonably consistent.
But if selective breeding works for other plants, why not for pot? Considering the variation known in marijuana, and that anyone can do a "smoke test" of their own crop, how difficult could it be to select toward higher THC content? Why wouldn't they, when it can be done rapidly and easily, and best of all increases your profits?
Somehow I'm reminded of how when the horseless carriage came along, in some towns they were required by law to be preceded by a man on foot, carrying a lantern or other form of warning to others.
I assume the medical pot folks have a clue, and they say it tests quite a lot stronger than in the past -- more than six times stronger on average:
http://medicalmarijuana.procon... ======== The average potency of all marijuana in the US, according to the UMPMC's Dec. 2008 â" Mar. 2009 quarterly report, was 8.52% (5.62% domestic and 9.57% nondomestic).
The highest tested sample had 22.04% THC (domestic) and 27.30% THC (nondomestic). The highest tested sample ever tested between 1975 and 2009 had 33.12% THC (domestic) and 37.20% THC (nondomestic).
For comparison, the national average of marijuana's THC content in 1978 was 1.37%, in 1988 it was 3.59%, in 1998 4.43%, and in 2008 8.49%. ======
They also point out that today's joints are typically smaller, so the total dosage may be about the same, or at least not much higher. However, that also means it may be harder for a novice to determine his limits -- kinda like being handed a bottle of vodka for your first drink.
A great deal of a PC's heat exchange happens through the case. Plastic shells are therefore not a good idea. (If you don't believe me, wrap your machine in a towel, leaving the front and back open, and watch the temperature go up.) And this one has less surface area. My guess is it will actually run hotter than the same equipment in a standard case.
As to Dell's engineering for temperature mitigation -- a few years ago someone gift me a top-of-the-line Dell that had a chronic overheating issue. It had the hood-and-distant-fan arrangement that OEMs seem to like, but no CPU fan and only the most minimal heatsink, like we mighta used on a 486. I removed the hood and the crappy heatsink, added a standard CPU heatsink/fan (nothing special, just a cheap stock model) and the machine's operating temperature dropped by 40F degrees (yes, FORTY degrees Fahrenheit).
So much for all the engineering that's supposed to enhance cooling, eh? This was when I concluded that, given that excess heat kills a machine in about 3 years, these damn things are *designed to die*.
A year or so ago an article on this very thing was discussed here on/. -- the upshot was that when you watch how kids behave, girls pack up as a dominant female, her immediate crony, and a bunch of hangers-on who are treated as underlings, while boys pack up as an amorphous group where all are more or less equal in status, despite one perhaps being the leader.
BTW it's pretty much the same with dogs, if you have enough to observe pack behavior.
Right now Walmart has 16GB Sandisk flash drives for $9 (look in the School Supplies section, same damn thing as in Electronics but in a garish case for half the money). Last year they had 64GB Sandisk flash drives for $8. Costco has 64GB drives right now for $24. This sort of pricing is tempting me away from DVDs as my backup medium, because flash is more reliable in long-term storage and takes up a lot less space. Yeah, DVDs are cheaper and faster to make, but reliability in storage isn't the best.
If you want to buy in real quantity, go to alibaba.com and you'll see what they really cost at wholesale.
As to old tech, I still have a machine with a 5" floppy and a QIC-80 tape drive. It often goes years unused, but when I need it, I'm glad to have it.
Not only that, but modern Americans don't generally live in flea-infested houses anymore. Bubonic plague is endemic in the squirrel population in Los Angeles, yet everyone who goes to a park doesn't come down with it. We just don't have enough exposure to fleabites.
Most diet failures I've observed happen not because the diet doesn't work, but because once they reach their target weight, they revert to their old diet, and naturally revert to the old pattern of weight gain. This is regardless of lifestyle.
Fact is, you have to pick a diet you can live with the rest of your life. Cuz otherwise it will "fail" as soon as you stop following it.
If your brain is responding to sugar like cocaine, get your thyroid checked. That sort of response is very typical for insuffucient thyroid hormone -- the brain is always starved for glucose, so if you provide FREE SUGAR! it suddenly gets a boost, which lasts a couple hours or so.
Just because there's less or no marbling in wild game doesn't mean that "lean meat" was all they ate. Toward fall, wild game carry a lot of fat. And from what I've read, the fatty tissues were the most-prized portions, and consumed first -- being not only the most calorie-dense, but more prone to spoilage with time (fats go rancid, while meat can be preserved by drying).
Fortunate that you had another school to switch to. Many places, you have a choice of one.
And I'm with the other two replies... this was the time to start a rifle club!
I don't think it's coincidence that we also have the insanity of "trigger warnings" lest someone be traumatized anew by the mere mention of whatever evil befell them... in Another Forum[TM] I griped that soon mere breathing will require a 'trigger warning' lest it traumatize someone who once had a sip of water go down the wrong way.
Cuz, ya know, the mere mentioning of something (eg. a gun) is the same as doing horrible things with it.
"Unless kid #2 in fact had tried very hard but still failed, and says to himself, "Even my best attempt was not good enough. Next time I won't try so hard; that way, if I fail, I can just claim/believe it's because I didn't try my best."
THAT is what happens when no matter how hard you try, your best is never good enough. Parents, take heed: if you regard anything less than perfect success as "failure", you will raise a kid who is afraid to try.
Nope, we can't. But point was that circumstances might winnow the better or worse minds from the average, and if that's the basis of the population you've got available to test, you'll get skewed results.
Likely the spectrum of intelligence isn't so different, but the bumps in the curve are in different places.
There's also skew that happens other ways because, well, history. Frex, I'd hazard that Africans who got enslaved and shipped off to America were, as a group, not the brightest bulbs in their particular regional box -- cuz the brighter bulbs were doing the enslaving and selling of their unfortunate neighbors.
"This is how the PC establishment thinks. If there is a conceivable way to twist and distort what is said so that it can be labeled racist, they will do it."
Exactly. Which is why we make so little progress in treating genetic disease that happens to afflict mental processes. "Oh no, you couldn't have inherited that; someone must have done something to make you that way."
We select for personality traits, intelligence, etc. in animals... that's all genetics. Is it so hard to consider that different environments would have selected for different mental traits in humans, too? And that a physical or mental advantage in that environment might be a disadvantage elsewhere?
Frank Spinath (best known as the lead singer in Edge of Dawn, but a professor of psychology in his day job) published a paper a few years ago on the heritability of personality traits in humans. He found the heritability was around.3, which is actually very high for a trait that is subject to environmental influence.
(And all the breeders of performance animals are saying, "We told you so...")
Same principle applied to the Newcastle outbreak on chicken farms (mostly small producers) a few years ago. Inspectors dashed madly from farm to farm checking for infected chickens, spreading the virus as they went. Smart farmers locked the gate (the inspection was voluntary) and saved their chickens. (Smarter ones vaccinated, but I don't know how good the vaccine is. Tho it's useful for treating distemper in dogs.)
Since it's already happened in one form, it's not only not far-fetched, it's more likely than not, and we can't say what its effects would be (perhaps benign, perhaps even more lethal). So, yeah, by all means keep the damn thing contained as best we can.
I find it more likely that some microorganism will find a way to extract energy from the particles, if it's not already doing so. Which may produce the GP's possible state of equilibrium.
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So this must be the cause of what's probably going to be the coolest August on record for Montana, where a couple weeks ago we got snow down as low as 5000 feet.
Selective breeding tends to relate to marketability. Did marijuana have much market value back before it was outlawed? Probably not, since it was just a common weed available to anyone who cared to pick it, and back in the day, opium was still legal too.
I would hazard that the pressure toward higher THC has come not only from buyers (after all a person could just consume more of the weaker stuff) but also from law enforcement -- since the larger the package, the more likely it is to be observed.
We should be glad that it's Microsoft, so it's someone with deep enough pockets to fight this as long as the courts allow. As you say, it would be a terrible precedent, and too easily extensible to anything a government wished to see (or seize) worldwide.
You can only judge by the samples you've got. I suspect they're pretty durn representative, and they seem to be reasonably consistent.
But if selective breeding works for other plants, why not for pot? Considering the variation known in marijuana, and that anyone can do a "smoke test" of their own crop, how difficult could it be to select toward higher THC content? Why wouldn't they, when it can be done rapidly and easily, and best of all increases your profits?
Somehow I'm reminded of how when the horseless carriage came along, in some towns they were required by law to be preceded by a man on foot, carrying a lantern or other form of warning to others.
Being able to prescribe a set dosage in a pill one gets from the pharmacy would do a lot to dispel the perception of OMG DRUGS.
(I don't use, but I'm all for legalization if only to kill the 'war on drugs'.)
I assume the medical pot folks have a clue, and they say it tests quite a lot stronger than in the past -- more than six times stronger on average:
http://medicalmarijuana.procon...
========
The average potency of all marijuana in the US, according to the UMPMC's Dec. 2008 â" Mar. 2009 quarterly report, was 8.52% (5.62% domestic and 9.57% nondomestic).
The highest tested sample had 22.04% THC (domestic) and 27.30% THC (nondomestic). The highest tested sample ever tested between 1975 and 2009 had 33.12% THC (domestic) and 37.20% THC (nondomestic).
For comparison, the national average of marijuana's THC content in 1978 was 1.37%, in 1988 it was 3.59%, in 1998 4.43%, and in 2008 8.49%.
======
They also point out that today's joints are typically smaller, so the total dosage may be about the same, or at least not much higher. However, that also means it may be harder for a novice to determine his limits -- kinda like being handed a bottle of vodka for your first drink.
A great deal of a PC's heat exchange happens through the case. Plastic shells are therefore not a good idea. (If you don't believe me, wrap your machine in a towel, leaving the front and back open, and watch the temperature go up.) And this one has less surface area. My guess is it will actually run hotter than the same equipment in a standard case.
As to Dell's engineering for temperature mitigation -- a few years ago someone gift me a top-of-the-line Dell that had a chronic overheating issue. It had the hood-and-distant-fan arrangement that OEMs seem to like, but no CPU fan and only the most minimal heatsink, like we mighta used on a 486. I removed the hood and the crappy heatsink, added a standard CPU heatsink/fan (nothing special, just a cheap stock model) and the machine's operating temperature dropped by 40F degrees (yes, FORTY degrees Fahrenheit).
So much for all the engineering that's supposed to enhance cooling, eh? This was when I concluded that, given that excess heat kills a machine in about 3 years, these damn things are *designed to die*.
It was supposed to be 12 monkeys. Idiots!
A year or so ago an article on this very thing was discussed here on /. -- the upshot was that when you watch how kids behave, girls pack up as a dominant female, her immediate crony, and a bunch of hangers-on who are treated as underlings, while boys pack up as an amorphous group where all are more or less equal in status, despite one perhaps being the leader.
BTW it's pretty much the same with dogs, if you have enough to observe pack behavior.
Right now Walmart has 16GB Sandisk flash drives for $9 (look in the School Supplies section, same damn thing as in Electronics but in a garish case for half the money). Last year they had 64GB Sandisk flash drives for $8. Costco has 64GB drives right now for $24. This sort of pricing is tempting me away from DVDs as my backup medium, because flash is more reliable in long-term storage and takes up a lot less space. Yeah, DVDs are cheaper and faster to make, but reliability in storage isn't the best.
If you want to buy in real quantity, go to alibaba.com and you'll see what they really cost at wholesale.
As to old tech, I still have a machine with a 5" floppy and a QIC-80 tape drive. It often goes years unused, but when I need it, I'm glad to have it.
Not only that, but modern Americans don't generally live in flea-infested houses anymore. Bubonic plague is endemic in the squirrel population in Los Angeles, yet everyone who goes to a park doesn't come down with it. We just don't have enough exposure to fleabites.
That too, tho some seem to overdo it after they revert and reach another level of, um, stability.
Most diet failures I've observed happen not because the diet doesn't work, but because once they reach their target weight, they revert to their old diet, and naturally revert to the old pattern of weight gain. This is regardless of lifestyle.
Fact is, you have to pick a diet you can live with the rest of your life. Cuz otherwise it will "fail" as soon as you stop following it.
If your brain is responding to sugar like cocaine, get your thyroid checked. That sort of response is very typical for insuffucient thyroid hormone -- the brain is always starved for glucose, so if you provide FREE SUGAR! it suddenly gets a boost, which lasts a couple hours or so.
Just because there's less or no marbling in wild game doesn't mean that "lean meat" was all they ate. Toward fall, wild game carry a lot of fat. And from what I've read, the fatty tissues were the most-prized portions, and consumed first -- being not only the most calorie-dense, but more prone to spoilage with time (fats go rancid, while meat can be preserved by drying).
Fortunate that you had another school to switch to. Many places, you have a choice of one.
And I'm with the other two replies... this was the time to start a rifle club!
I don't think it's coincidence that we also have the insanity of "trigger warnings" lest someone be traumatized anew by the mere mention of whatever evil befell them... in Another Forum[TM] I griped that soon mere breathing will require a 'trigger warning' lest it traumatize someone who once had a sip of water go down the wrong way.
Cuz, ya know, the mere mentioning of something (eg. a gun) is the same as doing horrible things with it.
Because if it's running longer, it's probably using more power.
Which is more efficient, passing over the cat hair with the 2200W once, or with the 1600W five times?
"Unless kid #2 in fact had tried very hard but still failed, and says to himself, "Even my best attempt was not good enough. Next time I won't try so hard; that way, if I fail, I can just claim/believe it's because I didn't try my best."
THAT is what happens when no matter how hard you try, your best is never good enough. Parents, take heed: if you regard anything less than perfect success as "failure", you will raise a kid who is afraid to try.
Nope, we can't. But point was that circumstances might winnow the better or worse minds from the average, and if that's the basis of the population you've got available to test, you'll get skewed results.
Likely the spectrum of intelligence isn't so different, but the bumps in the curve are in different places.
There's also skew that happens other ways because, well, history. Frex, I'd hazard that Africans who got enslaved and shipped off to America were, as a group, not the brightest bulbs in their particular regional box -- cuz the brighter bulbs were doing the enslaving and selling of their unfortunate neighbors.
"This is how the PC establishment thinks. If there is a conceivable way to twist and distort what is said so that it can be labeled racist, they will do it."
Exactly. Which is why we make so little progress in treating genetic disease that happens to afflict mental processes. "Oh no, you couldn't have inherited that; someone must have done something to make you that way."
We select for personality traits, intelligence, etc. in animals... that's all genetics. Is it so hard to consider that different environments would have selected for different mental traits in humans, too? And that a physical or mental advantage in that environment might be a disadvantage elsewhere?
Frank Spinath (best known as the lead singer in Edge of Dawn, but a professor of psychology in his day job) published a paper a few years ago on the heritability of personality traits in humans. He found the heritability was around .3, which is actually very high for a trait that is subject to environmental influence.
(And all the breeders of performance animals are saying, "We told you so...")
Same principle applied to the Newcastle outbreak on chicken farms (mostly small producers) a few years ago. Inspectors dashed madly from farm to farm checking for infected chickens, spreading the virus as they went. Smart farmers locked the gate (the inspection was voluntary) and saved their chickens. (Smarter ones vaccinated, but I don't know how good the vaccine is. Tho it's useful for treating distemper in dogs.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Since it's already happened in one form, it's not only not far-fetched, it's more likely than not, and we can't say what its effects would be (perhaps benign, perhaps even more lethal). So, yeah, by all means keep the damn thing contained as best we can.
This game video done by a friend is interesting from a modern-vectors standpoint:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I find it more likely that some microorganism will find a way to extract energy from the particles, if it's not already doing so. Which may produce the GP's possible state of equilibrium.