This was my thought after getting through a few paragraphs as well. At first, I was thinking, this is interesting, maybe worth sharing with colleagues. But then it became too obvious it was AI written or "assisted". Can't take that seriously.
I am a pianist and have spent years trying to eliminate tension. It's a lifelong effort! But so worth it.
I recently saw a video of a concerto by cellist Bruno Philippe and was astonished to see how loosely he appeared to be holding the bow. It almost appeared that it would slip at any moment. Yet he was in total control and his tone was perfect!
There’s some overlap, but vectors are essential to the language. Every type of data in R is a vector. There are no scalars, just vectors of length 1. Instead of dictionaries, it’s idiomatic in R to use “lists”, which are vectors of vectors. Data frames are lists (vectors of vectors) constrained to have equal length element vectors (ie columns). Classes are defined as lists with some metadata (stored in a vector) to direct method dispatch.
It’s not just vectorizing mathematical operations a la numpy.
This is a common refrain but at the same time it seems to be the one substance commonly used across most of the world since ancient times. None of the other supposedly less harmful, banned drugs are so ubiquitous. Perhaps there's a good reason for this (besides varying availability of other substances)?
Nope, I'm quite convinced it's the varying availability of the other substances.
Coffee, tea, and tobacco, became at least as widespread once global trade made that possible. Coca was late to the party because it doesn't grow well outside of its native region.
Cannabis is an odd one, in that it was extremely widespread and making solid inroads in Europe and North America, when it became a weapon for United States racial policy, and a jobs program for federal police after the repeal of Prohibition. Coca and cocaine got caught up in the same dragnet.
Opium and its derivatives are genuinely pernicious and attempts to normalize their use outside of medicine have been resisted repeatedly throughout history.
Which leaves psychedelics, which are... weird, and also were largely unknown until some anthropologists in the 40s and 50s drew attention to them.
The history of 'modern' drug prohibition owes more to politics than the inherent properties of the substances in question.
You left out refined sugar in its many forms. In total deaths and disease as well as cost to society dwarfs everything. The combination of being legal, advertised, and by some measures as addictive as any others is tough to beat.
One good reason is because alcoholic beverages could be stored for long periods of time and be safe for drinking. Water can become contaminated over time if bacteria is allowed to grow while it’s being stored, so it has to be relatively fresh to drink. Other options like milk would spoil quickly. Alcohol generally didn’t have these issues, giving it some utility that outweighed its advantages.
In an age where other beverages are as easily accessible for people living in the modern world, it’s utility isn’t there any more and you are left with all the downsides.
is it plausible humans initially hated the taste of alcohol and suffered worse hangovers, but in a manner of a few thousand years descend from ancestors who selected for high euphoria and strong livers.... all because alcohol was healthier than water?
> None of the other supposedly less harmful, banned drugs are so ubiquitous
You get alcohol when fruit spoils. Our experience with it is quite literally as old as foraging. This doesn't tell us anything about how harmful or not harmful alcohol is.
As far as ubiquity, plant-based substances had to follow migration or trade routes to gain use outside of their native habitats. Alcohol was coextensive with any food .
The fact that alcohol has been a part of human existence for so long might support my hypothesis, if you believe that humans physiology is at least partly shaped by human dietary habits over many thousands of years.
Fermentation is a great way to store excess food, which is why there's a ton of fermented foods across cultures. For civilizations centered around cereal crops, it makes sense that you'd see a lot of fermented cereal crops such as beer.
You can definitely see the benefit for an ancient civilization, since you're able to store many more calories which allows you to grow a much larger population base. But like many things associated with the move to agrarian civilizations, being good for the civilization doesn't necessarilly correlate with being good for the individual.
I'm sorry, which pathogens are killed by imbibing alcohol? I've never heard of such a thing, even historically.
Edit: Next time I'll do a cursory googling before commenting. This is apparently an existing hypothesis for common types of bacteria such as e coli, salmonella, etc in the drink itself, not in the body.
This kind of supply destruction is going to be very bullish for oil prices and oil company stocks in countries not looking to handicap their own companies.
All metrics are gameable. I think I once saw a study that suggested that every metric applied to professionals ended up having a net negative effect on actual productivity - by and large people understand their job and want to do it well, and while a metric may incentivise the few that don't, it also ends up distracting the majority.
