I looked at the implementation of a linked list in the Python book above, there it's done with objects instead of pointers. To be honest, the idea of pointers seems to be more straightforward in this case: one node "points" to the next, while the idea of an object seems a little abstract to me. It took me a moment to understand that an object is just a memory location (pointer) to "something", and it's less clear what that "something" is. It probably took me just as long to see the relationships between a pointer and an array or a struct when I was learning C, but I'm afraid at this point, to understand Python data structures I have to mentally translate them to C data structures.
Weird thinking. While I agree that it's a sensible null hypothesis, I'm not sure I agree that the burden of evidence automatically should be on proponents of organic food.
"Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time. It'd make sense that you'd have to show that the alteration you're introducing to the natural state of affairs isn't detrimental to health of the consumer. I.e., I'm making the same argument as you, I just consider unaltered food to be the baseline.
Also, "organic" is a weird name. Organic as opposed to what? Bananas made out of mineral oil?
Selective breeding is a comparatively slow and safe process. You're altering a species within its own parameters. It has little resemblance to the frankensteining we're doing right now. I'm not against it, I'm just not sure we've a developed a proper test suite to secure the process.
Selective breeding has allowed humans to transform wolves into Chihuahuas, an inedible wild grass called Teosinte into Corn (Maize), and many other drastic modifications. But those aren't "frankensteining", apparently. To paraphrase Stewart Brand, inserting the DNA to express a protein that a mammal cell normally does into a plant cell does not mean it will be furry.
I took 'frankensteining' to mean a rapid progression and skip over many states which would have been encountered via selective breeding.
To take your example, the wolf -> chihuahua would have been frankensteining had it been over the course of a singular or very small amount of generations.
It's still comparatively slow and safe, however. Even though we make some really weird alterations that way to suit our needs (which is well and good in and of itself, why shouldn't we?), the time spans are usually waaay longer than what i refer to as "frankensteining". It's not like you have a wolf, then a chihuahua, and in step 3, all wolves are suddenly chihuahuas. But that is effectively what we can do when we use more artificial methods.
I take it you haven't listened to anyone pro-organic speak? Just a few short sentences with them and you would have been aware that they make outrageous claims regarding the health benefits of organic food. And it's precisely because of that that the onus is on them to prove it. And you can't just say "we don't have to prove it because we've always eaten organic and that's natural", err or whatever argument they use. That's a prime example fallacious logic.
> "Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time.
Actually, we have not been eating organic food since the beginning of time. Most of the crops we consume today have been developed fairly recently in evolutionary terms (farming began only 12,000 years ago). Humans did not evolve exposed to fruits and vegetables we see today. Any farmed crop is not natural.
I agree - the whole 'natural food' thing is a confused mess. Nothing natural about the foods we eat - and a good thing too! Nature doesn't care about our health. Organisms have been competing for millennia for advantages. If a tree's seed sprouted better from your warm dead body, then that tree would happily poison you.
In fact foods we eat in nature can be regarded as those that kill us too slowly to notice - we avoid the others.
And cultivated crops are those we've bred to have less and less of the undesirable parts. We've inserted ourselves into the plants' genetic path for mutual benefit - we plant millions of them, and they feed us.
To eat truly 'natural' you'd have to eat things like crab-apples (grainy and bad ph - eat more than one and get a stomach ache) or tiny barely-sweet melons etc. Melons a thousand years ago were barely larger than an orange, with a couple of tablespoons' worth of edible parts. Thank the Arabs for breeding the mutant freaks we enjoy today!
It is false to claim 'organic' food resembles what humans have been eating since the beginning of time. It bears little resemblence. That's kind of like saying maize and teosinte are the same plant.
It seems like the null hypothesis should be working in the opposite direction. Heavy use of pesticides and herbicides in "modern" farming are a few decades old, and some aspects of this trend, like "Roundup Ready(tm)" crops are very recent.
I'd rather be in the control group for this loosely organized experiment.
(responding to @dgesang here, because of max comment depth)
The conventionally-grown food looks similar, tastes similar, and people have been eating it for decades with no major, obvious consequences. So at first glance they are equivalent. So it seems reasonable that the burden would be on proving a difference, rather than an equivalence.
The dietary effects on health are poorly understood. Nutrition studies are fraught with difficulties and have spawned a resurgence in methodology concerning "measurement error" in the field of statistics. You don't really know how much pizza you ate last year, but the survey will ask you to estimate it somehow... and this kind of measurement is 'noisy'.
Conventionally-grown food looks like organically grown food on steroids, to me. I suppose from the outside a human on steroid may look healthy -- Mr Universe, even -- but we know all is not well inside.
I'm not saying that's really related, but there is substantial evidence for real differences in the makeup of food grown conventionally vs organically.
Citations 10-15 in the paper the original article pertain to this - protein expression differences across fertilization types.
"... The abundance of 111 protein spots varied significantly between fertilisation regimes. Flag leaf N and P composition were significant drivers of differences in protein spot abundance, including major proteins involved in nitrogen remobilisation, photosynthesis, metabolism and stress response."
And organically-grown food have been eating it for EONS with no major, obvious consequences. 'Conventionally-grown food' have just been thrown on the market a few decades ago without knowing any long-term effects to humans eating them or to the environment they are grown in. I don't care about proof for equivalence or difference, I only care about safety. And any food should be proven to be safe BEFORE being released, not decades later.
Ha, yeah sure, we need to proof that natures goods are fine the way they are supposed to be, but highly manipulated goods don't. That kind of thinking is one of the reasons why so many people fear TTIP. Please stay on your side of the Atlantic.
Well, I didn't say that anything nature-related is ought to be good and desirable. What I meant is that 'conventional food' yet has to be proven to be equally safe as food that was not genetically tampered with, grown without using pesticides, etc. pp.
And quite honestly, I doubt that Moore had genetic engineering and todays massive (ab)use of pesticides in mind when he first stated that law. He might even have added an exception ...
I have a gpg encrypted file on a server that I manage manually - made slightly easier by the gpg plugin for vim. Not found a password manager with a UI that I get on with yet.
theoldreader seems to have died on my feed import to the best I can tell, anyone seen anything similar? It says it is still working in the background, but no update past the first 3 it imported...
I don't see a problem with using a regex to validate email, unless you get false negatives. Rejecting anything that could be a valid e-mail address is bad and will cause frustration for someone at some point.
I don't think allowing validly formed e-mail addresses that don't have corresponding accounts (or even domains - consider a web app working in offline mode) is a bad thing, especially when taken with point 1, as surely the point of client side validation is a heads up to the user that the data is wrong, rather than actual validation?
Say it's a signup form. Your validator lets a bad email through. The potential client/customer left. You can't email them to ask for correct email. They are gone. They may never come back (depends of what they were there for, right?). In that case I would want to do as much as might be reasonable in order to ensure that I capture someone who might eventually translate into revenue.
In other cases it might be just fine to store absolute gibberish and deal with it later. That said, if you have an incredibly popular site and are receiving thousands upon thousands of sign-ups per day, do you really want to store junk? Someone is going to have to go clean it up before it is of any use.
Anyhow, my main point, perhaps, is that one should understand what these magic regex email validators are and are not. That's all.
The reason I bring this up whenever relevant is because I have been bitten by this problem in the past. I only understood the problem when an existing customer informed me that they could not sign-up to receive info on a new product because my email validator was kicking them out. He just picked-up the phone and called me. I never did learn how many people I lost because of that damn regex I grabbed from an authoritative source on the 'net.
I think you are missing an important point. This isn't about email addresses that don't exist. You can't fix that. This is mostly about malformed or "illegal" addresses.
Scenario:
I somehow find myself at your landing page.
You have a single field for may email and a "Sign me up!" button.
I enter my email and sign up.
Your regex lies to you by thinking that the email is fine. In reality I made a mistake when I typed it in. I didn't notice it. Neither did your regex.
How are you going to contact me?
OK, if it is a small shop you can probably afford to have a human being review bounced emails and try to make some sense out of them. Well, what if you are signing up a thousand people a day?
Anyhow, the point is that a bad email addresses can cost you money both in customers that might never come back and also potentially in the manual work required to try to fix them manually.
As someone who recently installed GNOME on a Xubuntu system and then uninstalled it, I can say firsthand that that still leaves a bunch of cruft, does not cleanly remove all packages.
It's not GNOME's fault though -- it's an annoying issue with big metapackages. Same thing happened with XFCE on a stock Ubuntu install.
My wife has a horrible time with HSBC, and I always get a bit aggitated when I see people recommend them, so I'm glad to see other people sharing their horror stories about them.
Her situation is that she visits family in Canada once a year. They won't make a note of her being out of the country if she calls them beforehand. The fraud people then call her if she needs to use her card at unsociable (for Canada) hours and never leave answerphone messages. When they do get her, they require her to answer security questions without identifying themselves first. If she calls them, the person she speaks to has no way of knowning if anyone has been trying to call her for any reason.
The problem is that they all suck. In the UK, I've tried NatWest (RBS), Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC and so far, and HSBC are the least worst... they are by no means good, but they're better than many of the others. They still have numerous problems though: customer service agents that disagree with each other and provide inconsistent information, that annoying online banking dongle, payments being declined at random (particularly embarrassing in shops).
Still, at least unlike NatWest, it didn't take 3 weeks of dealing with different customer services staff to withdraw some cash, and I never got their online banking to work at all... after repeated attempts. Every customer service staff member would make excuses about not being able to help me due to their security restrictions.
HSBC is one of the only banks to have a section on their Online Banking where you can tell them your travel plans and which cards you will be taking. Has always prevented fraud calls for me.
I like the Barclays mobile app. You authenticate it once using a pin sentry device, and give it a pass code, and from then on you can just use that pass code to get your balance using the app. The app also acts as a pin sentry when you want to access your account using a computer.
That sounds like the same workflow as the HSBC app. I like it a lot and use it all the time to check my balance but it does not show many transactions, maybe ten only?
You don't have to worry about memory management, pointers and the like, and can just focus on the algorithms.
All that stuff it super important to also know, but probably easier to learn about them separately.