Um, tobacco was 'proven safe' for hundreds if not thousands of years before anyone suspected it of causing serious illness. Less than 100 years ago you could find doctors actually recommending light smoking (usually they didn't like heavy smoking, but then the default is to not like anything without moderation) as treatment for various illness. My own grandmother recommended it for treatment for a headache. Or maybe it was an earache, I forget.

Folk anecdotes does beat no testing, but only for immediate and strong effects. When it comes time to test it scientifically, you really need to isolate specific compounds. It's too hard to ensure the chemical composition is exactly the same from batch to batch, year to year.

I wager if you took the amount of cocaine contained in a single coca leaf and let it dissolve slowly under your tongue it too would also be a "mild stimulant barely more addictive than coffee." Do you know how many coca leaves you need to make a significant quantity of cocaine?

Fun fact #2: In refined form nicotine is a very mildly addctive, mildly-if-at-all carcinogenic substance with great potential for medical usage. It's only when it's combined with the other crap in tobacco it becomes a nightmare. Even if you take the combustion out of the equasion, chewing tobacco is still considerably more dangerous and addictive than nicotine gum.

In some cases of course the 'other junk' can have beneficial effects, but it could also harmful effects as well. There's no reason to assume one way or the other. With the refined chemical you at least know how much you're getting, whereas plant extracts often vary wildly.

It is perfectly rational to prefer a form and mixture that has proven safe for decades or centuries

hah. The problem with this is folk wisdom is, while sometimes right, often wrong. Sometimes tremendously wrong, especially if there are long term effects (negative or positive) involved. I think homeopathy alone demonstrates just how useless popular sentiment is, but for an even more fabuous example of this kind of folk 'wisdom' at work (though not directly connected to herbs or medicine), check out "male menstruation" on wikipedia. For every successful herb you can come up with that was validated by science, I can give you a hundred more that were proven not just useless, but actually harmful: laetrile, coffee enemas...

The best thing about Lisp IMO is the way it exposes the underlying mechanisms. This is most evident in its syntax and macro system, which makes you really think about scope and binding order and the full implications/uses/interactions between multiple lexical environments, but generic functions is another good example. Prior to Lisp I'd tinkered in C++ and Java and I'd always thought of methods as these vaguely functionlike things that were nonetheless quite different and inseparably tied to certain common OO paradigms. CLOS made me realize that a method is just a function that:

1. Is designed to always accept one object as an argument (silly and arbitrary limitation.)

2. Examines the type of its arguments to determine which version of the function to use. This is usually determined via a very rigid inheritence scheme, whereas CLOS treats everything as an object and allows you to specify completely arbitrary patterns to match, with the default behavior being to use the most "specific" (to the arguments' types) method available. Also, as I said before, you can chain together parent methods in arbitrary ways instead of having to choose to either overwrite or keep the parent method.

Regarding your question about the lack of Lisp dominance, the answer is both simple and sad. Programming language popularity is driven by a combination of novel coolness and the marketing powers that be, not merit. Also, "good enough" syndrome prevents many programming languages (and applications for that matter) from absorbing very minor, taken-for-granted features that newcomers will expect, so the learning curve becomes a lot steeper than it should be. In Lisp this takes the most obvious form of not giving noobs an easier sub-language that doesn't require constant use of parens. Lisp veterans recognize that explicit scoping is highly desirable in most cases and have trained themselves to read and type it easily, but this isn't of much consolation to a newcomer, especially if they are attempting to use an editor without proper paren matching or auto intendation.

You're probably right in Clojure being the future of Lisp, but this is a perfect (and very depressing) example of what I just explained. Clojure is inferior in every way to Scheme or Common Lisp except it runs on JVM and it has a few native concurrency features. The latter sounds nice but who the hell cares about native concurrency if your language is several orders of magnitude slower? Common Lisp has concurrency libraries. It is also a true compiled language and with proper declarations can made to run at around 50% the speed of well written C. The problem is, Lisp wasn't always so fast. It took decades to reach that point during a period when computers were really, really slow. (People actually needed hardware acceleration to run it at acceptable speeds: see "Lisp Machine") By the time it became fast enough, the cool kids had moved on, so the Lisp crowd had to sit back and watch the new generation painfully re-discover all of those amazing features like garbage collection, weak/optional strong typing, closures, etc. And they're still nowhere near where Lisp was a quarter century ago.

If you want to hear some more CL cheerleading and get a small taste of some of its powers that modern languages still can't touch, check out Paul Graham. His book On Lisp is available online now: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html . If you find that interesting, Let Over Lambda is a very smug little book almost guaranteed to blow your mind: http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/toc . Some of Hoyte's ideas seem demented, but others (especially regarding the role of syntax, referential transparency being overrated, and the right way to use lexical environments) are quite profound.

'Organic' goes beyond genetic modification though. It attempts to classify pesticides and herbicides into "natural" and "unnatural" categories without really trying to measure their effect on either the environment or (in residue) on humans.

Even more stupidly, it tries to do the same thing with fertilizer. This is very similar to herbalists who refuse to take chemical X but are happy to eat an unstudied plant extract that contains chemical X plus a whole lot of other unknown and untested junk. In the case of fertilizer, chemical X is nitrogen. Instead of focusing on the very real environmental (and health?) hazards of fertilization and designing an intelligent solution, certain methods are simply deemed unnatural and the downsides of fertilizing with manure (cost, carbon emissions, disease) are ignored.

The anti-GMO aspect of the organic movement is just a symptom of a larger neo-Luddite movement, which is being greatly helped by Monsanto continuing to be an asshole.

Super Troopers.

It will never work because its killer apps are directly related to doing illegal things with that anonymity, and this means it's not a matter of if the governments of the world step in, but when.

I quite enjoy ranting about things that Cannot Be but even I never saw the point is waxing poetic about Bitcoins. It's just not going to happen. Terrorism, pedophiles, hard drugs, money laundering, tax evasion, 100% anonymous gun sales... pretty much every political boogyman in existence will be inexorably drawn to Bitcoin because it's just so damn useful for selling things the government (and most of the citzens) don't want you selling. Right now these uses might be overshadowed by excited geeks and excited speculators and maybe the odd technologically proficient Tea Partier, but when the hype begins to die down and Joe Sixpack realizes there's no advantage at all (to him), who is left? The people who NEED that anonymity. The criminals. And the governments of the world won't stand for it, and their citizens by and large will support them.

On principle I sympathize a great deal with the libertarian cheerleaders in projects like these, but this isn't encryption or Freenet or Tor or anything else that boils down to shoving mostly harmless bits around. This is anonymous money with instantaneous worldwide reach. If some Saudi prince feels like giving some random crazed Muslim a few thousand bucks to build a bomb, he can and he will and there is no way to stop him without governments forcibly taking away the things that make Bitcoin democratic and interesting.

It IS a joke. At best. At worst, it's something that is going usher in a new wave of sweeping Big Brother type bills. I wish it would go away, not because I disagree with any of the utopian ideals or technological fundamentals, but because I KNOW it's going to bring nothing but trouble.

Common Lisp has strong typing, it just isn't turned on by default.

The list of features Common Lisp lacks that other commonly used languages have is very short indeed, it's just that they aren't commonly needed. Full blown OO, for instance, is rarely needed if you understand how to use a closure, but if you do need it CLOS is more powerful than the vast majority of OO schemes: generic functions are strictly more powerful than message passing paradigm while also being more intuitive... they're just regular functions with pattern matching on the arguments. Also, new methods can be built on top of, underneath or around inherited methods (instead of simply overriding them.)

I understand that when working on large projects, especially with mediocre programmers, you may want to restrict the number of tools available. That's fine; but that belongs in your firm's coding guidelines, not the language spec. If they can't or won't follow those guidelines, then either fire them or write a tool to automatically catch disallowed constructs.

Forcing all programmers to do extra work to minimize the damage done by incompetents is a horrible, horrible paradigm and keeps us locked into the vicious cycle of minimalistic==>expressive==>minimalistic-again programming languages.

Mods: how was my post (gp of this one) offtopic? The issue everyone is discussing is whether this is a political issue of free speech or "simply a mental health issue."

You could argue he wasn't threatening assassination but how can you spin the "...or dead" bit as not implying some kind of violent action on his part? Either a suicidal attack against some government forces or actual suicide, those are the only two possibilities I can see.

I agree you can view Palin's words as being essentially metaphorical. Just like you can view this guy's words as being the same. He was quoting a song for crying out loud! The point I was making is the typically right-leaning authorities don't usually mind arguably-violent rhetoric unless/until you imply they might be the bad guys.

I don't watch MSNBC. And how about you address my examples of Ted Nugent or Palin instead of dodging the question? Potentially violent left wingers are treated much rougher than potentially violent right wingers. Witness the reaction to the Occupy movement.

If you don't think they were actual threats, why would you agree with detaining him? The thing is, if you classify these statements as mentally ill and potentially dangerous (and look around: the severing heads comment was actually a song quotation) then you also have to classify a good 15-25% of Tea Partiers as mentally ill and similarly dangerous. As I've posted elsewhere under this story, Ted Nugent is a fabulous example of this. Threatens suicide and presendential assassination in the same breath and no one hassles him in the least.

I'm posting the same basic reply over and over for this story, but only because people are using the same defense over and over and being moderated up for it.

Take a look at Ted Nugent. Pubically claimed he would be "either dead or in prison" if Obama was reelected. That is threat both of suicide and a threat of presidential assassination. Reaction: he was allowed to attend a state of the union address.

Take a look at Palin. Completely detached from reality, seriously delusional, tells followers "don't retreat, reload." What's a more credible threat/incitement: a public comment telling the favorite party of gun nuts to "reload" or a private FB wall post from a non-public figure quoting a song lyric about severing heads with an axe?

It's not about celebrity, either. Spend ten minutes reading typical Tea Party rantings and you will find similar vaguely threatening violent comments. The difference is, those are rightwing, pro-"real" America, jingoistic nutjobs. Whereas the content of this guy's posts make him sound like a leftwing nutjob.

I don't have a problem with treating this guy as a credible threat, but only if they do the same for at least a few hundred thousand of the worst, most violent-sounding Tea Partiers.

Go look at what your average tea party supporters have to say and you'll easily find a similar level of vague violent threats. And you'll certainly see the same level of paranoid rantings You can essentially threaten to kill the president (see: Ted Nugent) and so long as you're a pro-American / pro-Republican nutjob (instead of an apparently left leaning nutjob like this guy), they not only won't arrest you but they'll let you attend a State of the Union address!

I'm all for taking reasonable, proactive steps against nutjobs, but not if there's a much stricter set of standards for leftwing nutjobs vs. rightwing.

Has Ted Nugent been detained for his comments about being "either dead or arrested" if Obama was reelected? Because that's a much more credible threat than this. Has Palin been detained for spouting demented conspiracy theories and talking shit about "don't retreat, reload" ?

No, because those are jingoistic nutjobs. Pro-government nutjobs. This is *absolutely* a political issue, as proven by the selective enforcement.

I'm all for taking preventative steps to prevent disaster, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that pro-American Government nutjobs are getting a free pass for similarly "violent" speech.

Example: Palin is just as nutty, and I would argue that the phrase "don't retreat, reload" is a much more credible threat (or incitement) than any flowery talk about head-severing axes.