Maybe switch banks? My experience is I've had my account blocked exactly once - and that turned out to be actual identity theft. In the end, I didn't permanently lose any money thanks to the system working as intended. On one other occasion, I received a phone call from my bank inquiring about an unusual charge. I confirmed that this time it was a legitimate transaction I made and neither the account nor transaction were blocked.
Are you for real? It's hardly a bold claim that education helps spread and retain knowledge. This is well known and supported by numerous studies. We know that parents' economic and educational status correlates well with children's economic and educational status. Also, this area was more or less completely converted to Christianity. If everyone's Christian, that can hardly account for the fact that economic and educational status correlates with distance to these missions. The article also mentions that this same relationship did not hold for the Fransiscan missions, who similarly promoted Catholicism and belief in the Bible, but didn't focus as much on education. This is unexpected if Christianity by itself was the primary cause.
Also, I'm not an expert on the Guarani or Jesuit missions, but it seems that actually the natives were the ones who dictated how labor was to be organized: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614138 This says that they established a sort of proto-socialist system (my word, not theirs) of communal ownership and redistribution of food on mission lands by threatening to go on strike, essentially. Since the Jesuits were totally dependent on the Guarani as the primary labor force farming and feeding the missions, they couldn't impose the harsher labor regime they wanted. This doesn't sound like unenlightened Indians being taught the value of hard work by Jesus, it sounds like a well-organized group of people who knew the value of their own labor and took steps to ensure that they could benefit fairly from it.
All in all, if you want to claim that the power of Christian belief alone can account for these findings, I think the burden of proof is squarely on your shoulders.
This is called the black hole information paradox. Today most physicists believe that hawking radiation preserves quantum information. Hawking himself made a bet that it doesn’t, but by 2004 he had become convinced and conceded the bet. But as far as I know this is still an open question - we’ve never detected hawking radiation experimentally.
Sounds like typical anti-politician bullshit. Most adults have at least a passing familiarity with the rules of chess, I don't see any reason why world leaders would be any different. Bill Clinton was on his university's chess team. Obama is said to play chess, although he never played competitively. I suppose you don't count them as Western, but the Russians, of course, take chess extremely seriously. So seriously, in fact, that the new president of FIDE, Arkady Dvorkovich, was deputy prime minister of Russia until May of this year.
I did say passing familiarity, which is not a very high bar to clear. It's been my experience, and I don't travel much in rarefied intellectual circles.
I don't know, but if the standard of comparison is Napoleon he doesn't need to be particularly good. There's even a bad opening named after him because he was known to be a mediocre player.
My last game of chess was three weeks ago and I lost. This was after a 3-4 year break from the game as my chess buddy moved out of town. I know what it is to be rusty!
Due to an increase in world population it can be pedantically argued that chess is more popular now than it ever has been.
However, when The Turk existed people did not have video games to play. People had to make do with board games including chess. People also played card games such as Bridge, a game that is practically extinct in the current era.
A different level of concentration is required to play chess than that required for Fortnite, Candy Crush, Forza Horizon and other popular titles. Nowadays most people do not know how good their friends are at chess, in previous times people did know who was worth playing and who was not worth playing.
Everyone from the Baby Boomer generation should have some knowledge of chess as it was part of growing up, it is what people did at some stage of education if you were in the 'top sets'. However, playing chess at school or even university is a long time ago for Baby Boomer vintage politicians. Knowing how to play the game fifty years ago is not the same as being able to play today.
Bill Clinton is from a generation ago, he is not a current politician. As for Obama I am sure he can play chess but in his photo opportunities he spent his time playing golf, not chess. I am sure he knows the rules of the game and can play extremely competitively, however I doubt that he would be queuing up to take on The Turk or today's IBM chess monster equivalent.
So in today's crop of Western leaders there is The Donald. Casinos and golf, not chess. I am struggling to think of anyone in UK politics that is known for playing chess. It is not in their culture. David Cameron playing Candy Crush, that was a thing though.
As for Russia, the home of the game, Putin is not known for playing chess. He is known for judo, horse riding and many sports, not chess. I doubt you would have to go very far in his cabinet to find sharp players though.
You read in the Wikipedia page about how many powerful leaders sought out a game with the Turk. I am not politician bashing at all by my comment that the world has changed and that I can't imagine the current crop of Western leaders queuing up to take on The Turk.
> "Increase GABA" - I thought oral GABA supplements do not cross the blood-brain barrier?
Oral GABA doesn't cross the BBB in appreciable concentrations, but I assume they mean increase GABA neurotransmission, which can be done with any number of ligands that do cross into the brain. Probably not benzos, since long-term usage increases the risk of Alzheimer's (and cognitive impairment is an effect even in healthy individuals). But perhaps something like baclofen (chloro-phenyl-GABA) which was tested in a rat model here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29133125
I don't think Nim has one in the standard library, but people have built variations on it. Here's a couple:
* https://github.com/bluenote10/nim-stringinterpolation/blob/m... This one does string interpolation and a printf-like syntax with compile time type checking. It does call out to C but only after it's already parsed and validated and transformed the format string.
* https://github.com/kaushalmodi/strfmt/blob/master/strfmt.nim This one implements a more complex string formatting syntax with lots of convenience functions. It's more complex but provides a lot more functionality than the previous one without relying on FFI.
I'm not a Nim programmer but I imagine those two demonstrate how Nim metaprogramming works even if neither exactly duplicates the behavior of printf.
It doesn't translate to wasm text format, but to wasm binary format. The walt-compiler (https://github.com/ballercat/walt/tree/master/packages/walt-...) readme shows how to use it to compile text into a a buffer which you can write to disk or instantiate into a webassembly module.
It doesn't translate to wasm text format,
but to wasm binary format.
Oh, ok. That is interesting too. But I would have liked to build a tool where I type Walt on the left and see the resulting WASMtext on the right. So this seems to not be a solution for that.
I sympathize with you, I really do. I've had some similar experiences. But you're overstating the case. Numerous meta-analyses have found that antidepressants do work for people with severe depression, much better than placebo. Unfortunately there's many people for whom they don't work, and even when they work you may have to try many different kinds to find the right one(s). The state of depression treatment is sadly not very good right now, everyone knows this. But it's just not true that there's not "a single shred of proof that these medicines work".
Depression treatment doesn't depend on "chemical imbalance" as an explanation either. Research on whether antidepressants work proceeds alongside research on why they work, if they do--usually studies on the efficacy of drugs are completely independent of mechanism. They study clinical outcomes, not neurochemical or larger structural brain issues.
So even if we had no idea why antidepressants (potentially) work, we could still know that they do work based on clinical outcomes. And it's not exactly true that we have no clue at all. The past 20 or so years the monoamine hypothesis hasn't been the main avenue of research into the neurobiology of depression. These days, it's at best considered one possible factor, not the defining and only factor. There's a lot of research into the structural changes that follow depression and recovery. For instance it's now known that serotonin helps regulate the expression of BDNF, which in turn regulates the growth and repair of brain cells and synapses. So it may well be that serotonin triggers large-scale "repairs" in the brain in areas related to emotional processing, such as the amygdala. Here you can see that the focus isn't so much on individual levels of "chemicals" in the brain as on the structure of the brain and how different natural and exogenous factors affect that.
just because it works better than placebo doesn't make it the best treatment.
all over the world, terapies works better than antidepressants, with infinitely less undesirable side effects for patient and society. yet in the US it is very common to treat depression (and many other conditions) with drugs alone.
arguments against drugs is not favor of "don't do anything". that argument would be extremely dumb.
just to give some perspective on how badly interpreted the data is in your argument: brain-splitting surgery, which is still used for epilepsy, also shows a cure for several other conditions, yet nowadays you would be a criminal for even suggesting it for things it was widely used 20 years ago.
As far as I'm aware therapy and antidepressants are equally effective, in the studies that have actually compared them such as this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3683266/ However that is only true in aggregate and obviously not necessarily true of any given individual.
I'm really reluctant to get into any further discussion though because it seems like you're arguing against things I never said, and bringing up irrelevant, but extremely invasive and side-effect prone procedures like hemispherectomy as if that proves that data about antidepressants is bunk, which is just a complete non sequitur. It would be like bringing up bloodletting or lobotomy as if that proves that the data about modern vaccines NOT causing autism is bunk. Just a complete logical disconnect.
You could be standing on top of an archeological site and never know it. Many of the features discovered by lidar are very very hard to spot from the ground. The kinds of people who have the expertise to spot them tend not to be tomb raiders.
You're going to use a mythological figure to prove that cannabis makes you think more clearly? I think you've smoked a bit much there, buddy.
If we look at the scientific research, certain studies have claimed that aspects of creativity could be enhanced with cannabis (often based on self-reports rather than objective measurements), but those results are inconclusive at best. Cognitive impairments due to both acute and chronic cannabis use are much more well-documented. Here is a review of executive function deficits due to cannabis use:
If you want to argue that cannabis should be legal, I have no issue with that. But the way to go isn't to say "it's a cognitive enhancer", which it is not to the best of our scientific understanding.
I wouldn't call it a cognitive enhancer. It enhances some processes while inhibiting others. Cannabis can help people make breakthroughs in certain things like yoga and music. It really puts you in touch with your feelings, both bodily and emotional. There's a reason it's insanely popular with hindu mystics and musicians...
About Adiyogi being a myth, we've established archeological proof of the sites, so it's not simply a myth, it's debatable.
What should i read from the link you posted, if it's you reading that text and accepting it as 'truth' then let me tell you, it's nothing more than your belief (ground for a shared madness or religious maybe?). It's not science, I've experience in academia, i already know how the data is cherry picked to match the narrative of the person or whoever is paying for the study. I won't accept it.
As for me, I've been using Cannabis for years, i already know what it has changed in my life. It's all positive.
