Cannabis use down since legal change
British Crime Survey statistics showed that the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds using cannabis slumped from 28% a decade ago to 21% now, with its declining popularity accelerating after the decision to downgrade the drug to class C was announced in January 2004.
The Guardian — Why do people have such a hard time accepting reality? You bully someone and what happens? You get resistance. And what is ‘the war on drugs’ if not bullying?
World's hottest chile pepper discovered
Researchers at New Mexico State University recently discovered the world’s hottest chile pepper. Bhut Jolokia, a variety of chile pepper originating in Assam, India
EurekAlert — Ouch.
Nobel Prize Sees What Market-Fundamentalists Don’t
The reality-based community got a little boost recently with the announcement of the 2007 Nobel Prize in economics.
Three Americans, Eric Maskin, Roger Myerson and Leonid Hurwicz, shared the honor for their work in mechanism design theory, which studies under what conditions markets work well or don’t. Sneak preview: They do better with private than with public goods.
The very idea that markets are imperfect at some things may come as a shock - or even sacrilege -to true believers in the cult of the market god.
Rick Wilson, Sunday Gazette-Mail (Charleston, West Virginia) via CommonDreams
freeimage/image_science on leopard
Full installation instructions (full credit goes to: Michael Steinfeld for figuring this out)
Thomas Mango — Should you install Leopard, you will need this information if you are using Ruby’s imagescience gem or FreeImage.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: The Ars Technica Review
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has gestated longer than any release of Mac OS X (other than 10.0, that is). If I had high expectations for 10.5 back in 2005, they’ve only grown as the months and years have passed. Apple’s tantalizingly explicit withholding of information about Leopard just fanned the flames. My state of mind leading up to the release of Leopard probably matches that of a lot of Mac enthusiasts: this better be good.
Ars Technica — Nice review, 16 pages. I upgraded yesterday, despite planning on waiting for a month or so for things to settle down… don’t ask, I don’t want to talk about it. Leopard is nice. Took a while to get working, but I managed it.
