We had, spread over the course of our 8th grade English class (Thanks Ms Wilson), about 500 greek and roman roots to memorize, and weekly quizzes. These were not graded curricula, they were for extra credit because it was the teacher's personal program. No grammar, no conjunctions or conjugations, no sentence construction, just the two biggest veins that PIE has contributed to English nouns and verbs. Rote memorization.
I found I already could guess about 2/3 of them from being a recreational reader, but it helped a good deal even so. With the combination of a few years of Spanish and random etymological crawls through Wikipedia, I'm firmly in the top few percentiles of English vocabulary competence.
That sounds great, and very different from what GP said ("make French/Spanish/etc the second foreign language they learn after Latin&Greek").
Edit: I will still say that Greek has little relevance to common English vocabulary, though it is very relevant to almost every scholarly domain. The same is true to some extent for Latin - as the vast majority of non-scholarly Latin words in English are actually borrowed from French, and have (Old) French spelling and pronunciation, not Latin ones.
The lipid pneumonia outbreak was a thing exclusively associated with THC vapes, which are an illegal but widespread cottage (garage) industry where one summer, one of the thousands of manufacturer-enthusiasts made a forum post about the innovation of maybe using vitamin E acetate as a thickener. Experiments were performed, positive results were obtained, and products went out to distributors. The hazard to heavy users (perhaps for manufacturers with poor blending practices, we don't know) who showed up in the ER, was recognized within a month or two, and everybody immediately stopped using vitamin E acetate as a thickener. It took most of a year of panic for the last of that summer's merchandise to percolate through the supply chain.
The outbreak was initially hard for users to trace in particular because of how brands worked in that (again, moderately illegal) industry - a "brand" was basically a paper label/bag production line shipped in the clear from a printer, to hundreds of individual manufacturers, who negotiated their own distribution. Conclusions like "Mellow Mallow Blurple is a safe brand, I tested it" ended up being invalid.
There was a lot of fog of war at the time, and a lot of things were reported in the media that were inaccurate (or reported to doctors that were inaccurate, this being documentation of illegal drug use). This is my conclusion about what actually went on, aides by a number of articles in the tech, health, and especially cannabis media. Eg:
All you need to defend a Wikipedia claim staying in the article is a journalist writing something, and journalists with zero idea of what they were talking about outnumbered informed writers a thousand to one.
Spitting was necessary because swallowing tobacco represents an immediate, acute food poisoning issue due to the other chemicals present. It's also all sorts of cancerous, including to the mouth, also due to those other chemicals.
We developed, in Snus, an apparently cancer-free chewing tobacco. We developed, in Zyn, a cancer-free, hygienic chewing tobacco with fewer GI issues. We developed, in e-cigarettes / vapes, a cancer-free, COPD-free, carbon monoxide free cigarette.
These should be regarded as public health miracles even if there remain some symptoms of partaking. If 80% of the population is addicted to Zyn or vapes but there are no smokers, you get far better health outcomes than a situation where 20% of the population are smoking and 5% are chewing.
Contrarily, you can interpret the doom pitches as a necessary political backlash whose degree of panic and whose quantity prevented the change from ending up as a fait accompli.
Public decisionmakers do this sort of thing all the time. They "float an idea", "test the waters", "put up a trial balloon". They see what they can get away with. When the decisionmaker has a strong desire for the change, it may only get rolled back if powerful and widespread public dissent makes itself known, as it did in this case. When they don't really care about the issue, they might cancel it at the first sign that anyone has an issue. We can't know their degree of insistence just based on outcomes in these cases.
> the doom pitches as a necessary political backlash
It was totally misinformed, came well after the public-comment period had ended and had zero net effect other than maybe generating some commissions and management fees for rando managers.
There is bona fide hatred for these companies and their managers. Influencers twisted the facts to channel that for views.
The new thing lately is ETFs that are "Whole-Market minus Microsoft" or "Whole-Market Minus Magnificent Seven". You can achieve similar ends by combining a whole market fund with direct short positions if you're an institutional investor, but it gets a little needy of your attention and your calculator and your fees to maintain those positions as a low-cap retail investor (just buy a put a day or something?).
They mention that the ears have gone non-bilateral to achieve better 3d sound localization.
It brings to mind the question of why nothing seems to have evolved two pairs of ears with separate openings; We're all working with varying degrees of spectrum shaping to achieve up-down sound localization. If you wanted to design a robot that can perform sound localization, the obvious answer for that extra dimension would be to just double up on the microphones.
What do ears do? Transduce pressure vibrations into intelligible signals. If this is our understanding of an 'ear', we never really need more than two but instead need either binaural or non-binaural/decoupled. Beyond that, what does having more openings grant us that we're not getting with all the other pressure-sensitive organs we have? (namely all of our skin, some specialized tissues in other animals)
Some of the arguments would imply that we should only really have the one ear, since you can do it all with complex spectrum shaping.
But binaural gives us a dramatically easier grasp of left-right localization. For a lot of things, that's all you need!
But the animal kingdom is large and diverse, and high-fidelity up-down-left-right localization would be similarly valuable in numerous places. It is a little bizarre to me that there's no freaky bat or something out there that evolved an extra molar into its own little secondary sonar sensor, with a centimeter of baseline from the normal set. Because with robotic sensors it wouldn't even be a question what to do.
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