What I didn’t realize until a few months ago about writing, James summarized as
> while “writing a first draft” is intimidating, “reading through all your notes” or moving note cards around on a table, contemplating structure, is not. In fact these tasks are kind of delightful.
Thanks for that. I thought about giving lisp a try, lately. This tutorial/presentation has been very insightful and I will try out kons-9 to pick up some lisp.
Hold your horses. I think the title overstates the impact of those old wheat varieties. Yes, genetic diversity is high. But, the reason that today’s wheat is less diverse is only the side effect of one of the most astonishing feasts ever pulled off by a single human: Norman Borlaug. His breeding program in the 1940s was the start of the “Green Revolution“. He’s the guy who saved the billions from starvation.
For further reading about his story, I can highly recommend „The Wizard and the Prophet“ by Charles C. Mann [2].
Also made this exact association. My takeaway: when estimating unknown quantities in software development you can treat means as infinite thus making any project unestimatable (management hates this reasoning - a friend told me, pinky promise); otherwise assign some non-zero probability than any mean will be 10-100x of the estimate.
Current world-wide oil production is c. 83 million barrels per day [1]. With the estimated 511 billion barrels, about 2x of Saudi Arabia’s reserves (2005, [2]), that would last for about 15 years.
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