271–280 of 344 posts
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Do you lot ever get tired of saying stuff like this? It’s not 2016 anymore, there’s no need for it.
You appear to lack the historical knowledge to appreciate the joke: The war on drugs was specifically designed to allow the government to go after the left and black people. Nixon's domestic policy chief said this in 1994: * https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminal...
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Do you lot ever get tired of saying stuff like this? It’s not 2016 anymore, there’s no need for it.
Buddy relax. It's a joke about the way the drug war has historically developed. You might get more out of it if you read some history about marijuana in the US
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BTW, Caffeine is also a naturally occurring insecticide, yet humans tend to repurpose and hack things.
Some argue that THC in cannabis actually works similarly because when herbivores regularly ingest it, they become lethargic and lazy, causing them struggle to survive in the world. Kinda like my roommate.
So, about one mushroom species in five is poisonous. Why is the ratio so low, why are there lots of edible ones? Without hard-shelled seeds to spread, why be eaten? And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse". Meanwhile three of the deadliest spe…
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Two things: 0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or…
Survival of the fittest is also a wrong way to think about evolution that leads many people to make assumptions that are backward. Selection doesn’t pick winners, it picks losers. But bad luck also picks losers, and good luck pick winners, so things with small negative or positive effects can be swamped, and anything neutral has no pressure to be phased out at all. So if being born with blue hair turns out not to hav…
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THC comes in a plant in the THCa form. CBD comes in CBDa form. Both are not bioactive by default in their natural form.
All I'll say is go spend a day picking hops without gloves. There are a large number of cannabinoids at play, some clearly (as in observably and demonstrably) are bioactive in their natural, unheated form. --- None of which is said to endorse the other theory. Just to point out that claiming heat is required is incorrect.
Any human-like animal with our receptors eating a large amount would get high as fuck, cooked or not. A ruminant eating pounds of the stuff raw, would not be that different from a human consuming an ounce of baked pot.
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Slightly related as mushrooms are closer to animal than to plants, as anyone in a grocery store would guess.
> anyone in a grocery store would guess. Actually, I'd challenge that particular point. Mushrooms seem to be found in the fresh fruit and vegetables area, rather than in the deli (meat and cheese), so that would probably point more towards them being considered "vegetables". Or fruit. ;)
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Slightly related as mushrooms are closer to animal than to plants, as anyone in a grocery store would guess.
> anyone in a grocery store would guess. Actually, I'd challenge that particular point. Mushrooms seem to be found in the fresh fruit and vegetables area, rather than in the deli (meat and cheese), so that would probably point more towards them being considered "vegetables". Or fruit. ;)
Reminds me of Lem's The Futurological Congress. Where drugs were speculated to be used in wars to make people imagine war machines. Much cheaper solution to make opponent imagine a bomber plane than actually to build enough of them...
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There is no broader context wherein natural selection can be considered to be an optimization process, that is a pernicious misconception of evolutionary theory. Fortunately, people with a computer science background have a distinct advantage towards correcting this fallacy, because their training affords them an understanding of information as a working concept that lay people rarely attain. The key insight is that…
> The key insight is that any algorithm implementation for a process which has an objective must, as an absolute minimal requirement, possess an encoding of that objective in its implementation. I don't agree with this in any way, or perhaps more accurately, I don't agree that we know (and perhaps could know) the scope of the implementation even if this claim was true, which I don't think it is. The idea that "people…
I’m not asking rhetorically, I’m truly interested in learning the flaws in my argument for why natural selection cannot be modelled as an optimization process. So if you have the time to reply with a more detailed rebuttal, I’d much appreciate it.
edit: Addendum: I recognize my claim that computer scientists might have an advantage in understanding this is contentious, and I was not implying that they (we) as a group have a better record of understanding evolution’s subtlety than biologists (which I studied in uni) or the average lay person. I just think they could have an advantage in understanding the version of the argument that I gave above, and I am interested in improving it for that purpose.