One of the most mind-bending papers on this topic is William Cook’s On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisitedhttps://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf
“Object interfaces are essentially higher-order types, in the same sense that passing functions as values is higher-order. Any time an object is passed as a value, or returned as a value, the object-oriented program is passing functions as values and returning functions as values. The fact that the functions are collected into records and called methods is irrelevant. As a result, the typical object-oriented program makes far more use of higher-order values than many functional programs.“
This reminds me of this article: "The visitor pattern is essentially the same thing as Church Encoding" [0], although I think this comment [1] and this one [2] on HN explain it better. The article is written in Haskell, but it's basically saying that, because object-oriented programming languages lacked sum types, the visitor pattern makes the transform from
(a | b | c) -> T
to
(a -> T, b -> T, c -> T) -> T
where (a | b | c) is a sum type saying "it can be either a of type a, type b, or type c", and (a -> T, b-> T, c -> T) is a stand-in for a record of functions (i.e. the v-table of an instance of a visitor class).
I think the best example of this is the strategy pattern. In that way, strategy classes are really just a wrapper around a function and its persistent, mutable internal data/state.
Whenever there's another interminable thread about, like, what is OO really and how thoroughly does it suck? I wish everyone knew this short paper as background.
Teaser: the first OO language was Church's lambda calculus.
But OO does suck, not because it is fundamentally different from the lambda calculus, but because it puts a kludgy set of handles that makes it easy to make bad decisions in front of a good, sound computational core. Of course, just like any advanced tool, an advanced practitioner can use traditional OO languages well, but the paradigm makes it just as easy for noobies to fall into pitfalls as does classical imperative programming, if not more so.
At the end of the day, all languages that are turing complete are the same language and the only differences lie in the kind of front end we provide. Unfortunately, we basically still have a single frontend, called C and every subsequent programming language has essentially just taken the C frontend and restricted or expanded it in small ways. We still ultimately work in terms of records, contiguous arrays and pointers. You can think of basically any more "advanced" construct in terms of pointers and it will make perfect sense nearly every time.
"Clinically, trauma-exposed victims often experience acute insomnia, indicating that such insomnia might provide prophylactic benefits in reducing the development of posttraumatic stress disorder via extinction of the fear-magnifying effects of memory."
I found this book, which traces the surprisingly long and fascinating history of using immunotherapy to treat cancer up to the present day, well, fascinating:
My uncle died of a glioblastoma, and shortly after I read this book, I was myself diagnosed with cancer (treated conventionally, hopefully cured). Immunotherapies like mRNA vaccines seem to be our best hope for finding reliable, permanent cures for a lot of different cancers. I am sorry that for many of our loved ones, a cure will have come too late.
> the surprisingly long and fascinating history of using immunotherapy to treat cancer
Well yeah, it has been known for a long time that cancer can do what it does because of the immune system's failure to eliminate the "defective" cells. Also, there are the rare "spontaneous remissions" where, for some reason, the immune system eventually catches up and manages to destroy the cancer. So there have been many attempts to harness the immune system in cancer treatment. Glad to see that all that work is finally bearing fruit (fingers crossed)...
I don't think it is that difficult or expensive to control knotweed using modern methods, at least on a small scale. I started investigating this in order to control a persistent patch of knotweed at my parents' home, but unfortunately, the patch was cut down before I could implement what I think is the most safe and sustainable method, at least for isolated patches: stem-injection or hack-and-squirt with the herbicide imazapyr.
Imazapyr is slower-acting but more effective than other herbicides. As you can see in this study, which compared several herbicides applied with spraying, the imazapyr formulation performed worse than all others for up to 58 days, but after 333 days, the knotweed was 95% gone, better than any others, even the formulation that mixed imazapyr with glyphosate.
Here’s another study - 96% of imazapyr-treated trees were in the highest defoliation class vs. 62% for glyphosate:
Efficacy of ‘hack and squirt’ application of imazapyr, triclopyr, and glyphosate to control the invasive tree species Chinese tallowtree | US Forest Service Research and Development
"These results indicate that imazapyr can be used to eradicate Chinese tallowtree by ‘hack and squirt’ injection without short-term (12 months) damage to dominant live oak trees."
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Controlling Knotweed in the Pacific Northwest (this mentions stem injection using glyphosate)
"Although time-consuming, not only does this approach essentially eliminate drift, but Clark County (WA) Weed Management reports obtaining 100% control in one treatment by injecting 5 ml of 100% Aquamaster or Round Up Pro into each stem of a given clump. More than 20 patches were so treated"
"If 38 of 50 canes are injected, expect the twelve that were NOT injected to survive and reproduce. EACH CANE HAS ITS OWN SEPARATE RHIZOME SYSTEM. Even though the injection process is initially time consuming, it is more cost-effective than several trips to the same site for foliar applications made over years with minimum results."
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None of these studies mention the specific technique of using stem injection with imazapyr, which I think is likely to be the most effective method. Although I haven't yet tried imazapyr on knotweed myself, I used an extremely minimal amount to kill several different species of obnoxious shrubs.
I used it to kill:
- Japanese barberry
- Sumac
- Elm saplings
- Fox grape
All these had been growing from the base of the external walls of my parents' house and had been uncontrolled for decades despite (probably-not-frequent-enough) cutting.
The amount I used was maybe a fluid oz. in total for all of these, and that was probably overkill. I just cut a flap into the bark in such a way as to maximally expose the cambium, then applied a few drops and tied the flap closed with some string. I did this to some sumac suckers right in the middle of a bunch of my mother’s day lilies and my stepfather’s blueberries and they weren’t affected at all.
In the case of the sumac and others, it took a couple weeks before the plant was visibly wilting, but after a while, even untreated suckers several yards away died. The fox grape didn’t show signs of wilting at first, but was dead by the following spring (I treated in early July, which is actually less than optimal. Late summer is recommended because of the predominant direction of sap flow at that time - from the leaves to the roots)
I have a meat syringe which I plan to use to inject knotweed when the opportunity arises.
I think it's broadly considered acceptable because insulting your boss is an aggresive behavior directed at a colleague. Simply stating an opinion is not.
Of course! The problem is that when laypeople buy veterinary doses (because you can't get a package of human pills for a decent price), it's very easy to underestimate the effective concentration of the medicine. There's also a risk that the material the effective ingredient is wrapped in (flavouring, gelling agents, etc.) doesn't go down well with the human body, or that the higher concentration has an effect on the human body.
If you compensate for the body weight and ensure that the gel agent the animal medicine comes in doesn't have any adverse effects on the human body (it probably doesn't) then consuming animal medicine can be an excellent way to treat parasitic infections if you're awfully poor and don't qualify for any insurance. Consuming any chemical not made for human consumption is dangerous, but if you don't have another option, it's better than doing nothing.
People ridicule the whole horse dewormer story, but it's no secret that people around the world have turned to animal medicine out of necessity due to prices of medication.
I think "these new patients" refers to patients who came to the clinic after a certain point in time, not with a certain quality. Google tells me that about 3/4 of children with (real) Tourette's are boys - so a sudden change to 1/2 indicates that this is a problem primarily affecting girls. In any case, the writing should have been clearer.
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