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bdevine

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Ok, I have a dumb question about this sort of technology. Aren't these devices essentially just borrowing from tomorrow by capturing moisture that would have eventually collected as clouds? Are there any long-term ramifications to using these?

Up voted for this:

"If you do not understand every single command in this thing, you should avoid it, and if you understand every single command in this, you don't need it."

It's so universally applicable!

From the abstract: "This article argues that there is a 50-square-mile swath of Idaho in which one can commit felonies with impunity. This is because of the intersection of a poorly drafted statute with a clear but neglected constitutional provision: the Sixth Amendment's Vicinage Clause."

Mods: The title "The Perfect Crime" seemed insufficiently descriptive, so I took the liberty of augmenting the title.

I'm completely unfamiliar with this stuff, but from the article:

"In risk individuals, a thymine (T) is replaced by a cytosine (C) nucleobase, which disrupts repression of the control region and turns on IRX3 and IRX5. This then turns off thermogenesis, leading to lipid accumulation and ultimately obesity... Switching the C to a T in risk individuals turned off IRX3 and IRX5, restored thermogenesis to non-risk levels, and switched off lipid storage genes."

So yes, CC is taken to mean "risk" and CT is likewise "non-risk".

As always, one finding doesn't indicate ultimate truth, so take this all with a grain of salt (or not, depending on what 23andMe has to say about your sodium intake).

I've felt more or less the same as you and recently I've found Test-Driven Development with Python[0] to be a really nice resource. It is first and foremost a TDD book, which I certainly appreciate, but it takes you through creating an app in a (to my eyes at least) fairly rigorous way. It probably shouldn't serve as an introduction to Django but for someone who has a basic idea of how a project is put together but has never connected those dots, it might be really helpful.

[0] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/mobile/0636920029533.do

Wallace Stevens is a favorite of mine. His work has been described as "rigorous", which I would agree with. He is an inspiration to me due to his ability to straddle two worlds: his day job was mainly as an insurance executive, but he flowered late and won a Pulitzer for his poetry. I particularly like "The Emperor of Ice Cream":

  Call the roller of big cigars,
  The muscular one, and bid him whip
  In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
  Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
  As they are used to wear, and let the boys
  Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
  Let be be finale of seem.
  The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

  Take from the dresser of deal,
  Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
  On which she embroidered fantails once
  And spread it so as to cover her face.
  If her horny feet protrude, they come
  To show how cold she is, and dumb.
  Let the lamp affix its beam.
  The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

It's not clear from the article that that's a smoking gun. Just prior to that point, we see:

"Elevated levels of radon and carbon monoxide were detected but later ruled out as a cause.", with a link to a Russian page that, Google Translated, seems to actually indicate that CO is still a leading suspect. However, the article immediately goes on to apparently quote from the same Russian page that

"...some of houses (sic) of the affected residents had carbon monoxide levels that were ten times higher than recommended. This... could have caused similar symptoms to the “sleeping sickness”."

So the article itself seems a little sloppy. Beyond that, I wonder what the sickness relationship is between high-CO houses and all inhabitants of them, given that at least one inhabitant per house has experienced the sickness. Is there a correlation? Also, is the social structure of the village such that there are frequent visitations to most or every home? If so, then one might expect to experience the sickness even if one's own house doesn't have high CO.

Your "bid data" typo seems like a nice little Freudian slip!

As far as your second point though: although it's not ideal, don't virtualenvs do the trick? If you really needed to, you could even set up a workflow of different sandboxes to pass data through. If the alternative to relying on frameworks is rolling your own, frankly I would probably choose the former, but that's just me.

Ah! Thanks for the correction. Somewhere along the way I picked up the belief that in addition to the file-closing aspect, "with" ensured a line-at-a-time iterator, akin to adding on "for line in f:".

I'm not sure I understand your third comment though. As I understand it, iterables have an __iter__ method. __iter__ methods return iterators. So an iterator for the iterable f traverses f and sends f's values to, in this case, set(). I believe we agree there. My initial concern was simply that the statement could be read "The iterator, set(), uses f.", and I don't see where the disagreement arises.

I think you may have gotten ahead of yourself in your explanation, but to be clear, it's the "with" statement that causes the line iteration that then feeds into set(f). To say that "set(f) uses f as an iterator" might imply to some that set() is causing the iteration, which isn't true.

ETA: See raymondh's post below.