Nicotine as a useful stimulant - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine <comment><USER4> I can't imagine life without stimulants. I hope to move off into the woods one day and live a completely natural lifestyle for a while. Reset myself. No caffeine, no nicotine, no amphetamines. Just me, a dog, and a nice ranch property in the middle of nowhere.

Meanwhile, nicotine is a staple of my day-to-day. I quit smoking a long time ago, now I stick to Swedish snus and vaping. For a period I was chewing gum too. Definitely lots of ways to get it without smoking.

<comment><USER5> In an attempt to quit smoking I just discovered the vaporization method and WOW -- I'm so impressed. Its actually enjoyable in the way that smoking is enjoyable, and the stimulant kick is very real.

<comment><USER6> vaporized liquid nicotine ? Where do you get it ? in Europe e-cigarettes are under scrutiny because the sold product is not guaranteed to be clean of toxic substances, otherwise it would be pretty great I guess.

<comment><USER5> I bought the eGO-T (meant for vaporizing plant matter) with a secondary nicotine adapter. In the US you can find both products at nearly every smoke shop.

One thing that really makes a difference is that the vaporized nicotine is actually somewhat hot, like cigarette smoke, when you breathe it in. Standard pre-packaged e-cigarettes didn't cut it for me specifically for this reason.

<comment><USER6> And the nicotine refill are pure nicotine ? no weird additives ?

You mean pre-packaged e-cigs provide a bad user experience with 'cold' vapor ?

<comment><USER7> It's not pure nicotine, but a mixture of propylene glycol or vegetable glycol, flavoring, and then nicotine.

Some of the off the shelf disposable / prepackaged e-cigs aren't powerful enough to have a strong vaporization of the solution. When you're refilling yourself, it becomes substantially cheaper (maybe a few dollars for a month of heavy usage?), and with the higher end kits you can program your voltage / amperage settings on curves for your preference as you in inhale.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. It gives you a lot of control over the smoking experience, where the prepackaged ones don't. I was a heavy smoker and enjoyed really bad (cheap) cigarettes; with the eGO cig you can really create a terrible smoking setup if you so desire, which is exactly what I needed quit :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From anecdotal experience, nicotine has quite a similar effect to amphetamine (therapeutic dosing.. i.e. Adderall).

Nicotine, in low doses, by itself (i.e. outside of tobacco, which contains MAOIs, which potentiate nicotine's effects), is not terribly addictive. I'll occasionally supplement it for a few days at a time, then stop. I would caution anyone supplementing nicotine NEVER to smoke tobacco, at the same time.

Patches are the most healthy way to consume nicotine. Nicotine + gums = all kinds of bad stuff. Still, there's some slight carcinogenic risk with long- term use of the stuff, so it's not a miracle drug. :(

<comment><USER9> What kind of bad stuff with gum? After reading gwern i started trying out gum and it's nice. I have no cravings and never have to or want to consume more than a single gum per day. Most of the time it's a quarter or half a chiclet + headphones and a clean desk to get me into a 2-4 hour coding session.

I'm worried about if it will damage my oral health or anything though. Will it?

<comment><USER8> You can do a couple pieces of day, with no problem, IME. Chew it up well and let it sit in your lip for optimal absorption.

That said, when nicotine is exposed to oral tissues, it may be promoting:

-oral cancer

Source: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20338106](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20338106)

-gingivitis

Source: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20337880](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20337880)

-receding gums

Source: don't have a specific study handy, but this high-level review mentions it, and other issues: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933534/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933534/)

Keep in mind, these are all _slight_ chances. If you do this regularly for years, it may be of concern. Every once in a while? No biggie.

Patch will get you around all of these, specific issues at least. There's still that whole 'carcinogenic, overall' thing.

<comment><USER10> The first study doesn't say that it causes oral cancer, but can cause resistance to chemotherapy. Additionally, that study is of smokers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If nicotine is supposedly "not highly addictive," what heretofore obscure, hideous compounds are lurking in cigarettes that accounts for their legendary addictiveness?

MAOIs? True, they give withdrawal symptoms. But despite being a widely used pharmaceutical, to my knowledge no MAOI-only drug has seen anything resembling the abuse patterns of tobacco.

The hand-wavy "other compounds" that the article mentions and then doesn't describe? Anyone know what those would be?

So, sure- maybe nicotine isn't very addictive, yet it makes an otherwise non- addictive drug dreadfully addictive. Or perhaps the scientific truth of the matter, whatever it is, is simply complicated enough that someone who really wants one particular thing to be true can twist a bit of evidence around to support his case. Either way- stick to coffee.

<comment><USER12> I've never heard someone talk about MAOIs in isolation before. You do realize the point of these is to affect other drugs right?

<comment><USER13> I believe they _can_ be used in isolation, because by suppressing/slowing the oxidative metabolism of synaptic neurotransmitters, they can be used to compensate for low baseline levels by extending their active lifespan.

The main reason they're not used is that better & more selective releasing agent/reuptake inhibitors exist, and MAOIs have potentially fatal interactions with a huge variety of different substances (including some _cheeses_ , if memory serves)

We're definitely in agreement that MAOIs have a strong effect on the (heightened) levels of synaptic neurotransmitters (released by some nicotinic upstream signalling), giving a synergistic effect.

<comment><USER12> Right. I suppose I took it for granted that brains are big ol' drug factories and assumed everyone was on the same page. The point is the MAOI isn't a used as neurotransmitter, but to affect the metabolism of monoamine transmitters—now matter how they got there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 20+ years smoker, about 30 cigarettes a day mostly hand-rolled. I quit 6 months ago and despite vaping turned into a kind of zombie until I discovered snus.

Then I understood what I had missed all this time: I love nicotine, and the surprising thing is that without all the toxic stuff in cigarettes it's not as addictive as it's made out to be.

I often go hours without a portion of snus and completely forget about it, while I could not stay away from cigarettes for more than a couple of hours without getting restless.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting, but there is no way in hell I'd risk nicotine addiction again, I quit smoking 4 years ago (it's hard but not as hard as many would have you believe).

Caffeine though you can prise from my cold dead mug.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm very sad this article doesn't mention the most interesting quality of nicotine: depending on how it is administered, it will act either as a sedative, or a stimulant!

There's not (m)any other molecules out there that do this, so it's quite a novel research target!

<comment><USER16> Which ROA causes it to act as a sedative? That's very curious, indeed!

<comment><USER8> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Psychoactive_effects](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Psychoactive_effects)

3rd paragaph

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've read about supposed benefits of nicotine a while ago and got myself an electronic cigarette. I have never smoked before.

Not sure if there are any mental benefits. I feel a bit more relaxed right after vaping. No ill effects whatsoever. I made a few week to month long breaks to see if there would be any addiction - there was none. I was able to stop at any time.

It's sort of like snacking for me, but without the calories. Definitely contributed to my weight loss.

<comment><USER18> So did I. As a non-smoker, I got an "e-cig" simply because it contains nicotine and no tar.

Two years of off-and-on "smoking" has revealed that this cigarette replacement causes no addiction whatsoever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know, but I think cigar and pipe smoking are a perfectly valid way to get nicotine on your own terms while avoiding addiction. I have never seen someone cowering in the rain cradling a big cigar to get their fix.

<comment><USER20> Cigar smoker here, and back when I had more time on my hands, I went through a pretty heavy cigar phase. Cigars are impractical as addictive agents, because they're very expensive and take a long time to consume. But they exhibit at least _some_ mildly to moderately addictive properties. Back in grad school I found myself moving up the ladder from the occasional cigar a week, to the cigar every day, to the two to three cigars a day. I wouldn't say I _needed_ them, or that the urge to smoke clawed at me every waking second. But I'd build my entire morning routine around the first cigar, my afternoon and evenings around the second and third, and so on. A day without a cigar left me pretty restless and unfocused. If that's not addiction, per se, it was something resembling dependence.

Cigarettes are more insidious tobacco delivery vehicles, but cigars aren't exactly health supplements.

Nicotine supplementation, absent the tobacco, is an interesting subject worth further study and consideration. On its own, given Gwern's and other research, it seems no more dangerous or addictive than caffeine (for example).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I vaped for a while on the strength of this analysis, but eventually concluded that stimulants weren't worth the blood pressure increase. I still vape zero nicotine ejuice though. That stuff is delicious.

<comment><USER22> i'm vaping and lowering my doses of nicotine while i go. hopefully, i can get to zero nicotine.

<comment><USER14> I did the same, then switched to snus and stopped vaping. I thought the important thing was having something my hand, and some smoke to blow, then I understood that I only care about nicotine. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A great quote from the appendix: "In philosophy, one is taught to not try to prove too much (inviting people to modus tollens your modus ponens), to not do more philosophy than one has to; in programming, you learn to not become an architecture astronaut solving some hugely abstract version of your actual problem - such overreach invites disaster."

</comment><comment><USER24> "Effects of nicotine on perceptual speed" [1] is behind a paywall, and I can't tell from the abstract whether the results also apply to non-smokers.

However, the abstract of another of the articles, "Effects of Cigarette Smoking on Performance in a Simulated Driving Task" [2] states that the effect was only measured on minimally abstinent smokers.

Are any of the other studies measuring the beneficial effects of nicotine on non-users (and non-users only)?

My anecdotal experience when I quit (the first 2 times, couple of months each) as well as the first time I smoked was that the first couple of cigarettes had absolutely no effects, whatsoever.

So the last time I quit (about 2 years ago), I just kept at it. After about 3 months any previously observable decline in performance and ability to focus was gone. Most of it was gone in the first 3 weeks actually, with only slight remains of increased irritability persisting for 2 more months.

That makes me suspect that nicotine only has a beneficial effects on nicotine users (instead, lack of nicotine is what causes the opposite of the measured effect for users).

But even if such benefits exist, I feel that the they aren't worth it. The inability to function without nicotine, the constant drive to get more - <USER2> feels like slavery, and I'll never go back to that.

And I cringe when I read things like:

        There is addiction but it's drastically overestimated by
        almost everyone and may been conflated with the habit-formation
        capability

Because in my experience its completely, totally wrong. I could clearly separate 2 phases that I went through when I quit:

1\. the nicotine desire phase - First 48 hours. Incredibly, painfully hard. Strong desire to place a sticker on me or just light a cigarette and make it all go away. _This_ is what kept me a user for 7 years and helped me come up with various excuses just to continue.

2\. The learning-to-live phase: A hard but somewhat joyful period where I would recognize the habitual desire to light up a cigarette associated with various activities.

The second phase had 3 different stages for every smoking habit I have developed. For example, at first I couldn't imagine drinking coffee without a cigarette.

Then after the first time it felt like I'm getting no joy from the coffee. The second time it felt okay, but slightly incomplete. Finally, the third time it was all good.

The awesome part was realizing that I just learned how to drink coffee without cigarettes. And it was super-easy: just do it 3 times. Joy! Repeat with all other problematic activities.

This happened with all activities that I associated with smoking. Removing the habits felt easy. Getting off the nicotine felt almost impossible. Luckily, the necessary time for the second one was much shorter (I still had tiny activity-induced cravings couple of months after I quit)

[1]: [http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/9/1990.abstract](http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/9/1990.abstract)

[2]: [http://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/119229](http://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/119229)

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Effects of nicotine on perceptual speed" [1] is behind a paywall, and I > can't tell from the abstract whether the results also apply to non-smokers.

I need to apologize a little bit here; I've been checking my article and it seems I inserted the wrong link for that citation. The one I actually wanted is [http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02245346](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02245346) 'Smoking and Raven IQ', Stough et al 1994. Also paywalled, but I'm working on getting them. (My university access doesn't cover SpringerLink so I need to ask other people to get them for me.)

> Because in my experience its completely, totally wrong. I could clearly > separate 2 phases that I went through when I quit:

Let me point out that your subsequent lines indicate you are talking about your addiction to _tobacco_ , not to nicotine.

<comment><USER25> What in tobacco is addictive other than nicotine?

<comment><USER26> Good question. Artile suggests that there is something. MAOI perhaps? Whatever that is...

<comment><USER27> Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor(s). Many antidepressants fall into this category. MAOI's inhibit the enzyme that cleans up several endogenous molecules, like serotonin, and some drugs, like the amphetamines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone have any notion of the size of the IQ boost suggested by the link to a paywalled paper?

<comment><USER29> So far the IQ boost from any known drug intervention is very modest. All of the possible environmental interventions on IQ combined appear, from longitudinal studies of IQ in national populations, to have a fairly strong effect, but many of those environmental influences are still very poorly understood. A recent review article,

Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: new findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67(2), 130.

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Nisbett\(2012\)%20.pdf)

by a group of all-star IQ researchers who on the whole are optimistic about environmental interventions, lays out some of the current research and shows what is still unknown.

<comment><AUTHOR> > So far the IQ boost from any known drug intervention is very modest.

Absolutely; if you look at some of my other pages, you can see for yourself how little I think of most claims to improve intelligence...

I take this unreplicated study as being more evidence for the stimulating effect of nicotine rather than any genuine peak intelligence boost, in the same way that monetary payment can increase peoples' scores on IQ tests - <USER3> wouldn't say 'the promise of money makes people smarter', but rather, 'the promise of money "enables" people to work harder'.

FWIW, I think the Nisbett review is drastically optimistic in some areas (I've criticized it on HN in the past, although I can't quite seem to find a link to my old comment in Google), so the true picture for IQ interventions is worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was never into real cigarettes, but it is handy to have an e-cig around to hackathons and other events where you need to stay up and concentrate :)

<comment><USER31> Oh balls, don't let the anti-ecig crowd hear you say that one, please! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Never smoked, but for people who have smoked and quit- Would short term stimulant usage (eg Adderall) for a few weeks have helped quit smoking?

It seems possible that stimulant medication could prevent common symptoms like weight gain, problems concentrating, and help ignore physical cravings for the first two or three weeks of quitting smoking.

Edit: sorry, somewhat off-topic.

<comment><USER33> Complete opposite effect, you smoke a lot more on stimulants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This triggered some research, which linked me back to:

[http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#nicotine](http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#nicotine)

Where you seem to suggest that actually you experienced no measurable benefit from nicotine, but the placebo affect was strong. Have I read that correctly?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm a non-smoker who bought an e-cigarette to try to use it as a stimulant. It's pretty meh. The buzz doesn't later very long, significantly shorter than caffeine, which itself is pretty lame. If you want to really boost performance amphetamines are your best bet by a lot.

</comment><comment><USER36> Nicotine is an excellent salve for ugh fields, if you aren't addicted. Once you're addicted, it's an OK salve.

</comment><comment><USER24> To the OP: curious to know, are you a user? Have you been off nicotine longer than 2 months in the past year?

<comment><AUTHOR> > To the OP: curious to know, are you a user?

Yes. Reading the literature, I found no reason to not try out nicotine. I discuss my personal experiences in [http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#nicotine](http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#nicotine)

> Have you been off nicotine longer than 2 months in the past year?

Why would I do that if I find it useful, as I do? But I have been keeping a log of nicotine use since June (to use it as a covariate in other self- experiments), which indicates I easily skip it for long periods: 03, 07 June 2013: 4mg gum; 22 June 2013: 2mg gum; 24 June 2013: 2mg gum; 1 July: 2mg gum; 9 July, 2mg gum; 20 July, 2mg gum; 20 August, 3mg gum; 5, 6 September, 1mg gum; 20 Sept, 1mg gum.

More generally, I received my current batch of nicotine gum (96x4mg) back on 28 December 2011, or 640 days ago; I still have 2 pieces left over, so that means I've been using the nicotine at an average rate of (94 * 4) / 640 = 0.6mg/day. (This includes the August-November 2012 period where I was taking gum every other day for a dual n-back experiment.)

<comment><USER24> Ah, so basically, about 20 times less than an average smoker (compared to your calculated average), and about 4-5 times less for the peak days, if I'm calculating correctly?

That is, assuming a 1-pack-a-day smoker of a 0.6mg / cigarette brand ...

Okay, I guess - I wish you the best of luck, and your usage seems well controlled. Though, the withdrawal I went through when I quit - I wouldn't wish it to my worst enemy. So I hope you don't mind if I say "be careful" (even though I can already see that you are :)

<comment><AUTHOR> > That is, assuming a 1-pack-a-day smoker of a 0.6mg / cigarette brand ...

IIRC, the effective dose of a smoker is going to be both quantitatively larger due to more efficient absorption through the lungs and also qualitatively different due to the much faster absorption.

Also, I should mention that in the experiment, half the days were placebos, so that's at least 5 pieces of gum which were allowed to dry out, reducing the average a little bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Ah stimulants, a modern application of game theory with our health put on the line.

</comment><comment><USER38> You don't need nicotine under any form, believe me. Just stay away from it.

It's not healthy, it's filthy.

<comment><USER39> A) Why should I believe you?, and B) Is this some metaphorical or religious uncleanliness you mean when you say filthy?

These issues fixed, you might have presented coherent argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I LOVE NICOTINE!!!!

</comment><comment><USER41> Once demonization has eradicated tobacco from the public's grasp, these benefits may be sold back in pill form for an even greater margin of profit. Yay Capitalism!

<comment><USER42> You should read the article. He prices out nicotene for you. It's... not going to make anyone wildly rich the way cigarettes did.

<comment><USER43> Unless 'someone' gets smart to the system and starts adding tax to the quit smoking products, of course.

I think we're seeing some of this now, with the greater attention being paid to e-cig products.</comment></comment></comment>


Rocket Internet's Marc Samwer On Cloning - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/28/rocket-internets-marc-samwer-on-cloning-we-make-business-models-better-because-we-localize-them/

<comment><USER2> Being a tech-guy from Berlin, i am ashamed that the Samwer brothers come from here... I never understood how they can so shamelessly copy others ideas and get through with it.</comment>


English speakers should learn math instead of a second language - <AUTHOR> https://leosstemhacks.wordpress.com/2019/06/13/learn-math-not-mandarin/ <comment><USER2> You want to learn Mandarin to talk to people who cannot speak the languages you know, or because you're interested in Chinese culture/history.

You learn math because you want to be able to quantify scientific questions, or because you want to dig deep into quantitative logic for its own sake.

But what if you want to do something else? Such as getting to know your spouse, children or friends better. What if you simply want to make music?

I would say, then do that instead of learning math!

All this blog post highlights is that you should have a strong and clear learning goal, because if you're learning Mandarin because it might seem useful on vacation to China, you might be spending your time inefficiently.

The idea of teaching children math as a language from day one is an interesting concept though. But even that still comes down to: start giving your kids amazing skills that you think will give them a fulfilling and good life from day one. Well yea, of course.

<comment><USER3> > start giving your kids amazing skills that you think will give them a > fulfilling and good life from day one. Well yea, of course.

You'd think "well yea, of course" but man do I feel parents rarely do that. The majority, and I really do think the majority, seem to be content just doing nothing with the most valuable years of the childs life.

Perhaps I take that too seriously, but I don't think so. I feel that is one of our largest failings as a society. That and failing to encourage learning, lessons from past mistakes, self growth, etc etc.

<comment><USER4> > just doing nothing with the most valuable years of the childs life

I was pushed pretty hard as a kid and I'm not a very happy adult even though I excelled academically and have a lot of "skills". All of that pushing made me constantly criticize myself and I still push myself way too hard and feel like I'm never good enough.

As a parent, sometimes I think it's best to do "nothing" and let my kid enjoy her childhood and do childish things without an enormous amount of pressure to develop all of these skills and "get ahead". Kids need time to have a carefree life for awhile without adults constantly dumping pressure on them to be prepared for adult life by the time they are five years old.

<comment><USER5> I definitely agree that having too many "skills" pushed on someone earlier can sometimes lead to self-criticism and other maladaptive behaviors.

I tend to think that parents should present to their children as many different potential things to learn and excel at, but allow the children to drive themselves towards what interests them. Parents can then guide them accordingly. But the child should still feel themselves in control. Sort of like when Tibetan Buddhists find the next Lama- they have the candidate choose an item from the predecessor's possessions.

<comment><USER6> Present to them a buffet and see what they come back with on their second trip through the line.

<comment><USER7> I know what my kids would do. They would take nothing but Jello, play with the ice cubes in their water glass for the remainder of their mealtime and then later they will lose their shit because they feel hungry.

<comment><USER5> I'm not surprised that they would, sounds like what most kids would do. That's why the buffet has to be curated, so that the easiest way out / path of least resistance isn't just "empty calories". So limit the offerings. And maybe use approaches like the Maya Method [0] to "trick" them into thinking what's commonly regarded as work or chores, to be fun. It's not easy, but it can at least be tried.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17905657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17905657)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From article: "So, really, there are only five global languages: English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic."

I would call all these "big" languages, but I would not call Mandarin, Hindi or Arabic "global" languages. There may be over 700M speakers of Hindi/Urdu, but they live mostly on the Indian subcontinent and Hindi is not really a language of global business or education.

Spanish, and outside the above list, French, are more "global" languages in the sense that the language is a majority-dominant and/or significant language of business on several continents.

(FWIW I do know English as second language and understand a few words of French and Spanish, and can get along with everyday things in Mandarin, though I am more fluent in a couple of other small languages (Swedish and German). I am certainly not belittling the mentioned big languages, I just do not think they are truly "global".)

<comment><USER9> I don't know man?

Having worked with Halliburton a while back it certainly seemed like Arabic was a global language to me. Many nations where you just have to speak it when interacting with people below the C level. There's also a lot of business you have to do in Arabic, and a lot of times when the expertise you may need is really only available from Arabic speakers. Like if you want a half way accurate estimate of how much oil Cuba likely has in the North Cuba Basin for instance. They have tools and techniques that others just haven't developed. (Or hadn't at the time.)

But I do think that when we are not so dependent on fossil fuels, Arabic will become a VERY unimportant language. I'm just not sure when that will be?

Oh, also, I'd imagine Mandarin is important too. A lot people who dealt with the Chinese on the "gotta get shit done" level used it all the time there. Also a lot of traders downtown were using that all the time when I lived in Houston. You kind of just had to when you were dealing with things in China because for many people in those sorts of positions, a lot of stuff is just moving way too fast to not be able to find the chase and cut to it faster than the next guy.

Or it was anyway? I don't know if business with China from the US is slowing because of the Trade War? Been out of that game for a while now.

<comment><USER10> can sympathize here. not sure where outside of France + former colonies French is used for "business", but we were throwing around $400-$600/hr for two native English + North African Arabic speakers (who also had expertise in other Arabic dialects) for logistics work in MENA years ago. was basically impossible to get anything done without those 2 guys.

Arabic also suffers from serious fragmentation: we would need help even between people Morroco, Tunisia, and Algeria even though they're basically neighbors. i think they are the same "language" in name only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another compelling point is that high school foreign language students almost never gain meaningful competence in the language they study: [https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/08/the_marginal_pr.htm...](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/08/the_marginal_pr.html)

Math courses have a much better track record of actually teaching their students something.

However, I think individual students should still take foreign languages in high school to fulfill college application requirements. On a societal level, though, those requirements are a massive waste of time and money.

<comment><USER12> As far as the U.S. goes, I doubt students remember much of the math they learn, or gain much more competency in math than they would via a language course.

<comment><USER11> There are lots of standardized tests that evaluate students' math proficiency, and lots of research examining specifically how much math proficiency students gain from each year of school. Learning and retention could definitely be improved, but I've never seen research that claims it's as low as it apparently is for foreign languages.

<comment><USER13> Standardised tests are pretty terrible at measuring actual competency. Standardised testing is one of the reasons _why_ the US's school system is so poor. And I say this as someone who generally excels at these kind of arbitrary tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone who lived in China for 10 years, they aren't wrong if we are just talking about earning potential. The number of bilinguals is pretty high, you would make more than a couple of thousand RMB a month if you knew English in addition to a native mandarin. On the other hand, a machine learning expert would easily start around 60k RMB/month.

From a personal perspective, knowing another language is enriching, but don't do it purely for the earnings gain.

<comment><USER12> If you're living in a country where you don't speak the mainstream language, living there is more than reason enough by itself to learn it.

<comment><USER14> A lot of foreigners working in China get by with only basic daily life mandarin. Mine was better than most, but no where useable for work.

Again, don't learn mandarin just for the money. English is much more important, even in a country like China, at the upper tech echelon.

<comment><USER12> It's pretty embarrassing to live in a country for 10 years and not being able to use it for work.

<comment><USER15> You'd be amazed at the bubbles expats can live in, especially high-value personnel like embassy staff, executives or subject matter experts. I've heard of people with english-speaking house staff (who also do all shopping), driver, everyone at the office, personal secretary who organises absolutely everything, doctors, schools - and a 24-hour phone number to dial if there's any difficulties outside that. People can go for years without ever actually having to talk to a local in their own language.

Plus, there can be weird dynamics at work. Some people will actually look down on you as having somehow debased yourself for making too much effort to study the local language, both fellow foreigners and the locals themselves. As best as I can understand, they think it comes across as too eager to please, or an attempt to ingratiate, or that you obviously don't love your own culture enough, or that you evidently have too much time and thus can't be all that important... have heard some variation on all of them.

Especially in Asia, there's a kind of stereotype of the Big Important Foreigner who has been Appointed to this Developing Country to do Important Things. Suddenly breaking into fluent $LOCALDIALECT kind of shatters that illusion and raises all sorts of questions. Sounds strange, but it's a thing.

<comment><USER16> That attitude is definitely not a Chinese thing though.

In China, it's the reverse. They think foreigners aren't smart enough to learn Chinese. That's why they are always amazed when some expat can speak even the most basic phrases.

The scary thing is that's it's often these "expat bubble" executives that are making decisions. No wonder foreign companies in China get taken to the cleaners.

<comment><USER14> That really isn't always true though. There was a solid glass ceiling for non Chinese speaking managers at the senior level, and well, it was really just Chinese (even 大山 wouldn't be Chinese enough for promo).

A senior Chinese manager in America is much more normalized than a senior western manager in China, (the former is an immigrant and has a green card, the latter is an expat and will go back next year after their assignment is done).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article reads a bit like a rather long way for the author to excuse avoid learning a few of the natural languages of which it seems he would have much use. (Like French that they mention half their family speaking, or Mandarin with which they say they have a fascination..)

But also predicating all learning on its "objective usefulness" (however way you try to quantify this) seems short-sighted, what's the fun in learning something you know is useful but don't enjoy?

Somewhere there's a balance surely..

</comment><comment><USER18> That's like saying "learn to play an instrument, not cooking". Everyone has different tastes/needs.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why not learn multiple? Why make a false dichotomy? Math, programming languages, and alternative spoken languages are distinct useful things you can learn.

Otherwise what if someone said, don't learn Math, learn Modula-2?

<comment><USER20> I've always had a suspicion that one person can't be a master of all things due to the physical limitations of human memory. Isn't that why we specialize?

<comment><USER21> More like the physical limitations on lifespan.

<comment><USER22> But probably memory as well. If I start specializing elsewhere I'll forget the intricate details of the thing I'm already specialized in.

<comment><USER23> Don't think it works like that.

Rather, it's that you have only so much time to dedicate to things... if you're focusing very much on one, then you're not spending time with the other -- and overtime, you'll lose that other thing. If you can manage to spend a good amount of time on two things (let's say, learning a new instrument and learning a language) everyday, consistently, then you will get both.

<comment><USER24> It does work like that. As you get older your ability to retain information wanes.

<comment><USER5> That could be physical degradation from age, not necessarily the "running out of disk space".

<comment><USER24> Why does the cause matter?

<comment><USER5> Because if it's simply because of physical degradation, that means someone can keep on learning and not worry about running out of memory.

<comment><USER24> If your memory doesn't work, what does it matter how much you have?

You can create ungrounded abstractions all you you want, but as an older person who has commiserated with other older people, the common conception that it's harder to learn and retain things in older age is a real thing

<comment><USER5> Sure, but what you're describing is the difficulty of learning as age sets in. That's very different from the original assertion- "If I start specializing elsewhere I'll forget the intricate details of the thing I'm already specialized in." \- unless that person was describing themselves as older.

<comment><USER24> If you wish to exclude more than half the population from your statement be explicit about it.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps fixing degradation will prove to be a less difficult task than increasing memory, as the growth of new neurons is still a very newly-studied phenomenon compared to treatment into neurodegenerative processes, and soon medical science will benefit the learning of all demographics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Just as natural languages derive directly from our needs to do things with, > and communicate about, things in, and state of in the real world, such as > running away from lions, attracting mates, and (more recently) engaging in > commerce, mathematics derives directly from our needs to do the exact same > sorts of things: count chickens (or the number of lions you are running away > from), mark time, distance, and rate (as you run from them) and their > relationships, and so on.

This is a pretty half-baked comparison. Math is great for describing things which can be defined precisely and their interactions. Numbers, physical systems, economics, etc.

Human language can be (and is) used for these purposes as well, but more broadly is useful for an entirely different purpose: expressing emotions, sussing out the meaning of things, developing relationships, providing a voice for the human condition. Mathematics is ill-suited at best for these purposes. Both language paradigms may be able to quantify how fast one has to run to get away from a lion. Only one of them can express why you'd want to, or the terror you'd feel trying to do so.

</comment><comment><USER26> «there are no studies that suggest that learning math as a "native speaker" does not have at least the same, and perhaps even more benefit», this reasoning is so flawed.

</comment><comment><USER27> Basic math is _really_ important, and not uniformly taught well. Stuff like understanding compound interest would help a _lot_ of people avoid poverty or financial hardship. What's surprising to me is that mathematics education (in many places) emphasizes things that are rarely useful _in daily life_ while ignoring things that are actually critical in many situations.

<comment><USER28> > Basic math is _really_ important, and not uniformly taught well. Stuff like > understanding compound interest would help a _lot_ of people avoid poverty > or financial hardship. What's surprising to me is that mathematics education > (in many places) emphasizes things that are rarely useful _in daily life_ > while ignoring things that are actually critical in many situations.

Agreed. I remember asking in high school what the material we studied was helpful for as I was struggling with motivation -- I was told to help shape my brain which is the blanket reasoning used from everything from Latin to music.

I think in addition to the important areas you highlighted, statistics is so fundamental to understanding the world around us and should be emphasized alongside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would argue that an individual (and in turn, the entire world) would be benefit more from learning the "languages" of, or getting a good grounding in, logic and epistemology.

Logic, so you can think straight, and epistemology, so you are able to recognize when _your axioms are not actually hard facts_ , which is where a lot of complicated fuzzy-logic style disagreements (anything related to complex systems (weather, economics, government), culture, gender, sexuality, etc) break down even between two people who have highly advanced logical capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER30> I am sad I am not seeing a strong cultural push towards everyone learning a single common language (which, for historical reasons, could well be English) at least as a well-acquired second language. Instead, the received present-day norm is to insist on cultural and linguistic diversity. Learn Spanish. Learn Mandarin. Learn German. Learn French. Oh, and while you are at it, learn Welsh or Irish too... It's bewildering. And those enormous corps of translators seem like such a wasted effort!

<comment><USER31> Y Gymraeg is a lovely language. Music to my ears.

There have been several pushes for common languages. Latin once dominated at least the sciences and clergy. French was the literal lingua franca for a good while in various contexts. English has kind of taken over that role at the moment. But those languages are all a bit shitty when it comes to ease-of- learning. French with its complex grammar. English with its spelling oddities and its absolutely mind-bogglingly vast vocabulary. Latin, well, who even speaks Latin anymore.

Artificial languages like Esperanto are allegedly easier to learn, but they've never taken off.

I've long held the belief that the EU should make English a mandatory second language across all its member states. It's easily the most spoken second language in the EU already, but there are _huge_ differences in proficiencies across countries/regions.

<comment><USER30> > But those languages are all a bit shitty when it comes to ease-of-learning. > French with its complex grammar. English with its spelling oddities and its > absolutely mind-bogglingly vast vocabulary.

Well, every natural language that developed organically and was not artificially created will, by necessity, have its quirks. But if it is learned early enough in life and actually used on a daily basis, people will overcome these quirks.

Latin's use as an international language of religion, scholarship and science occurred during the time when it was already all but dead. Only a tiny minority of the population knew it; and there was neither a universal system of education to teach it, nor mass media to provide continuous examples of its usage. When French and German were tried as international languages, the situation was somewhat better in the sense that they both were living languages; but still there was no infrastructure in place to teach it to large segments of the population. Now, I feel, the situation is very different. A huge proportion of population receives primary and secondary education, which offers a great opportunity to teach a common second language. A massive amount of films, books, or radio programs offer examples of oral and written English usage; and the Internet is connecting people at a previously unimaginable scale. Now, I feel, we have a fighting chance of finally getting a common language.

Of course, I understand that a language becomes international not only due to its linguistic merits, but in a large respect due to the political and economic power of the countries where it is spoken. And since China is on the rise and the West is somewhat in decline, I fear that English may lose its momentum, and we may lose our chance to have it as a truly universal language.

<comment><USER32> That English is extremely difficult to write is a serious issue, though. A very large portion of English speakers are functionally illiterate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There is a lot of unique content in Chinese already, and the number will grow substantially in the upcoming years. It includes scientific and not-scientific content. So I wouldn't call learning Mandarin a "waste of time".

<comment><USER34> >It includes scientific

Chinese is rife with misinformation, alternative facts, sophistry and pure garbage, any thing scientific is either translated to English already or tranlated from English and other languages.

>and not-scientific content.

It's OK if you major in Asian studies or something, for an average guy the overall quality of Chinese content is just not worth you time. Not to mention modern Chinese only existed little more than a century.

I repeat what I said, I oppose spending too much time (more than dabbling) on Chinese by any average person or student, Chinese is a very messy language, for the people worth your time talking to they most likely already know basic English.

<comment><USER35> With that mentality I doubt that you speak a foreign language. If that's the case, of course you think that everything "important" is translated for you already - it's not going to show up on Google if you don't search it in its published language. Considering your tone I doubt I can convince you, so all I will say is that you don't know what you're missing.

<comment><USER36> Please don't cross into personal attack on HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER35> Personal attack? How fitting on a post about languages that people can't seem to read.

<comment><USER36> Yes, seven "you"'s in a row coupled with negative statements crosses into personal attack. Please follow the site guidelines so we don't have to ban you again.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The author raises a good point that I agree with: math provides more direct value than learning a foreign language to native English speakers. The author talks about what children should be learning and I don't know enough about children's education to disagree, but if you're an adult, I think it's a good idea to learn at least one second language.

Language study and math are not mutually exclusive for me.

When I've learned math it's through focused effort, sitting down and doing math problems, thinking really hard, and talking to people with a whiteboard.

When I start study languages I'm mostly filling time, things like listening to podcasts in the language, going through Anki flashcards while waiting in line or on the subway, or reading things about the language.

Learning the foundations of a foreign language is closer to brushing my teeth or going to the gym than it is to learning math. You just do some mundane things every day for a long time and suddenly you wake up with new skills.

Once you have a solid foundation, then it's closer to having fun than studying. You just chat with people or read things you're interested in, the same as you probably already do for fun in your first languages.

Anyways, my point is that if you have even a little free time or some downtime (like a commute), you can probably fit in time to learn a new language and not take anything away from your other pursuits like actively studying.

That said, I don't think learning a new language is easy, but it's rewarding and the improved cultural understanding, of both your target language and culture and your first culture and languages, it brings makes it worth it to people who live in a globally connected society.

</comment><comment><USER38> Someone who's studying these as a hobby is likely going to run into more uses for Mandarin in their day to day life than, say, Calculus. You're more likely going to run into a situation where you're saying "I wish I could talk to that person" or "I wish I knew what that said" than you are going to run into a situation where you go "I wish I could calculate the second derivative of that formula." And though I doubt self-studying either of those is going to boost your career much, self-studying Mandarin is probably going to be more beneficial (it makes sense to stick "I speak Mandarin" on more resumes than "I know calculus").

In the end, though, you're best off either studying something to reach a specific goal (learning the math that engineers need in order to become an engineer) or studying something that interests you.

<comment><USER39> Sure, you don't run into situations requiring math. Instead existing everyday situations are perceived in new ways because you understand calculus.

<comment><USER38> Can you give an example? I can't think of any everyday situation that most people would run into where calculus comes in handy. It's definitely necessary for certain specific applications, but not ones I'd call everyday situations.

<comment><USER40> A lot of things are governed by differential equations, so understanding how they behave is helpful. Financial models, physics models, biology models commonly use them.

<comment><USER38> > Financial models, physics models, biology models commonly use them.

In what specific everyday situations would most people find these useful? It's not like it's common for people run into situations where they say "if only I could calculate the predator prey systems" or "if only I could calculate radioactive decay." I've studied these, and I don't think I've ever run into some everyday situation where I've said "Man, I'm really glad I can apply my differential equations/vector calculus/etc. here." Even in the rare situation where I want to calculate compound interest I opt to just use a interest calculator since it's quicker and less error prone than doing it by hand.

<comment><USER40> > I don't trust the experts, if only I could build my own disease spread model > with partial vaccination - then I could compute the nash equilibrium > strategy for the vaccinate-don't vaccinate game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> My read on this is pretty complex. On the one hand, my verbal ability is off the charts - I never scored lower than an 800 on a PSAT or SAT. My math ability is good but not great. For some time I've felt I'd have been better served by being the worst math or CS student at my college rather than one of the best foreign language students.

The reason is, our society has a number of clear paths for people with highly developed M ability, but fewer viable paths for highly developed V ability. Basically just law school, and that isn't what it used to be. I think that's a problem for us as a society, but it's not going away soon. I'm advising my son to major in something quantitative.

That being said, the author's apparent advice not to take fl at all is insane. Especially for high school students. If you are not MIT/CalTech material, Ivies like to see foreign languages.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, even for state schools there is often a foreign language requirement. For example, University of Maryland requires applicants to have taken at least 2 years of foreign language courses[1]. If you decide not to check those boxes, you're just making the college application process unnecessarily difficult for yourself. Take 4 years of Spanish or whatever else and move on.

[1] [https://admissions.umd.edu/apply/requirements/freshman](https://admissions.umd.edu/apply/requirements/freshman)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel like it's much easier to start learning Mandarin than Maths. I can't really put into words _why_ I feel this way, given that there are great resources like Khan Academy out there. Maybe it's easier to gauge fluency in a language than it is in maths? When do you stop learning? Maybe you're proficient enough when you can order from an all-Mandarin menu? As soon as you can't read a bit on a menu, you know what you need to work on next. But what about maths? I know how to add and divide. I'm fluent at trig and pretty good at some bits of algebra. Pretty rusty in calculus and OK at stats. I'm sure having this knowledge makes parts of my job easier. But maths is such a huge and diverse field.

Not knowing what I don't know, I find it very difficult to gauge whether I'd benefit from learning more, if that makes sense.

</comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi I don't get the point they're trying to make.

I think the analogy between math and a language that you can learn as "native language" is quite far-fetched and flawed, but let's accept it for the sake of argument.

Then, I'd say that in most developed societies, we already learn math as a native language since birth. Many toys for babies are focused on counting (among other skills, like recognizing colors, shapes and basic words). Parents routinely ask their kids to count things, just as they help them learn the language. Then, once you go to preschool and then school, there are always math lessons alongside the language lessons.

So in my view, what they're advocating already happens, so I'm not sure what change they're proposing.

</comment><comment><USER42> I like learning languages because I like learning. There doesn't need to be a reason. This is a very engineery perspective, I don't like it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Actually, math is not an universal language. There are several different languages within math, see [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER44> Note that the Wikipedia claim about total speakers, the Wiki page notes that "Speaker totals are generally not reliable because they sum estimates from different dates and sources, usually uncited."

</comment><comment><USER45> From my experience (and I emphasize on that) I can tell you from us (I'm from East Africa, speaking English, Swahili, French and two other natives languages) being proficient in at least English/French is an existential question. I really understand why a US citizen may think twice before starting learning a new language. For us, if you want a "normal" life, you do have to learn other 2 languages. We do not have that luxury.

</comment><comment><USER46> The author's argument immediately fails at the fact that math papers are written in natural language and you'll have no chance of understanding the paper if you don't speak that language.

Just because I can read a math paper written in English or German I don't harbor any illusions I'll be able to understand one written in Mandarin.

On top of that there's that mathematical notation really isn't as standardized as one would hope. Neither is basic terminology (which already isn't consistent between different disciplines/schools within the same language).

So unless a Chinese mathematician deigns to translate the paper into a language I understand, I'll just be screwed.

The underlying concepts may be universal, but the language and notation of mathematics today just isn't.

Edit: For those who want to have a taste of what mathematics in a foreign language is like, have a look at this Chinese Wikipedia article on a very basic topic: [https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BF%9E%E7%BB%AD%E5%87%BD%E6...](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BF%9E%E7%BB%AD%E5%87%BD%E6%95%B0)

</comment><comment><USER47> I collect math, machine learning, statistics, etc urls. The ones discussed on HN have the HN discussion below the article:

[https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/blob/master/m...](https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/blob/master/math.md)

[https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/tree/master/s...](https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/tree/master/statistics)

[https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/blob/master/m...](https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/blob/master/machine_learning.md)

This recent HN was interesting, for example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811715)

</comment><comment><USER48> Learning other languages has absolutely improved my life and changed the way I think, just as much as learning mathematics. It has opened my eyes to the world that exists outside the anglosphere.

Just make sure that you have native speakers to talk to, the benefit of learning a language is being able to talk to people!

</comment><comment><USER49> Why are they mutually exclusive?

If you don't know any maths there are things that are hard to describe or even conceptualise.

If you know only one language there are assumptions you make and things you don't know that you don't even know you don't know.

</comment><comment><USER50> Can't disagree more. Learning a spoken language is much more than picking-up a communication tool - it opens a world of culture and thought that is bigger than the language itself. Yes, the same can be said of mathematics, and both are as valuable.

I'm European, speak 3 languages and use math every day, professionally. I've studied, lived and worked in the US for many years and am often shocked at some of my American friends' lack of perspective on international affairs.... keep-up with the math education but don't do it at the cost of languages... you can't afford to.

<comment><USER51> Totally agree. A second language expands your world dramatically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> There's no shortage of Math advocates, one of you needs to put together the Math equivalent of DuoLingo. A math textbook isn't the only way to work on math daily.

</comment><comment><USER53> Fun fact: more people speak English in China than in North America.

\- - - -

In re: teaching math ASAP see Iconic Math [http://iconicmath.com/](http://iconicmath.com/) and (the general idea of) "Proofs without words" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_without_words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_without_words)

<comment><USER54> Having lived in China for several years, it's very important to stress that the average English level of those "English speakers" is lower than that of your average American toddler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> What you should learn depends on your interests. Curious about metallurgy? Then German holds a great reservoir of hard won knowledge. Culture, aesthetics, and hard math? There French has profound influence. And so on. Buddhist wisdom is scribed in Sanskrit, Hindi, Chinese, and many others. Extend and spread your knowledge using whatever language and idioms are most appropriate and useful.

</comment><comment><USER56> This sounds like wonderful advice to me. If you are an English speaker, I frankly don't see the return on the immense investment of time and energy learning a language requires unless you will eg live there or do much business there. Unfortunately for the average person I'd imagine learning math might not be extraordinarily useful either.

</comment><comment><USER57> The author makes a good point of course.

But I'd add that, for native English speakers writing to a broad audience, they should spend a little time learning how non-native speakers use and understand the language.

A few changes in word choice, sentences structure and idioms can make informal communication significantly clearer.

</comment><comment><USER58> Before one has learned a foreign language one has not a deep understanding of their first language at all.

</comment><comment><USER59> Maybe he should try studying math _in_ Mandarin. It doesn't have to be so zero-sum...

<comment><USER60> haha that's very optimistic! I'm thinking about getting into gymnastics and also maybe skiing, a cork 720 backflip seems like a good first step!

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I like the comparison between learning the language of math and learning a foreign language. In both cases, learning the language gives you increased access to more culture, history, knowledge, and means to express yourself. This is a good way to answer "Why do need to learn math?" which people often ask me. As in "What am-I going to use this for?"

I don't like the idea of learning math INSTEAD of a foreign language, since both are meaningful and interesting for different reasons.

In writing math books I often had to come up with various analogies to try to motivate readers to invest the time---look, if you get through these hairy equations you'll have access to powerful math modelling skills and be able to read Wikipedia pages that have equations in them without going into panic. I'll add the "learn a new language for the culture/history" angle too, not sure which is more convincing...

</comment><comment><USER62> Languages are overrated.I was born in a country with population of only 3M people,so I had no choice but to learn English.Later on in life I also learned Russian,because I ended up living with Russians for more than a year.Yes, it's great to go out there and be able to talk to people but that's about where it ends. That's why, unless one has some useful skills(IT, engineering, plumbing,etc.), knowing languages won't take you very far.In my previous company most people spoke at least 4 languages.And what? Everybody was on crappy salaries,even though most were very well educated but very few could do anything outside linguistics sector.In business, languages help, however I'm yet to see any jobs that'd pay more just because one can speak German and Italian...

</comment><comment><USER63> So is there a better way to learn math now? I haven't taken a course in over a decade and would love to understand proofs. I admittedly memorized a lot to get through math during K-12 and most of Uni.

</comment><comment><USER64> The math in high school was more relevant 50 years ago than now, though. Most students who learn calculus will never, ever, integrate a function again in their life. Most people who don't learn statistics will get bombarded with arguments based on statistical analysis, often done sloppily but only obvious to someone with training in the subject.

So, if your choice is between calculus or Spanish, Spanish might be the better choice.

<comment><USER65> Steven Strogatz in his book "Infinite Powers" shares the story of author Herman Wouk interviewing Richard Feynman about his role in the Manhattan Project. Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus. When Wouk replied, no, Feynman said "You had better learn it. It's the language God talks".

Strogatz writes, "It isn't necessary to learn how to do calculus to appreciate it, just as it isn't necessary to learn how to prepare fine cuisine to enjoy eating it." His book gives a broader view of calculus than any text--more like calculus appreciation.

> Most students who learn calculus will never, ever, integrate a function > again in their life.

This is true. But will they never, ever use the concepts of slope or area under a curve? An appreciation for calculus (or mathematics in general) can enhance one's life in other ways. To know enough math to appreciate the mystery of unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics [0], is mind-expanding.

[0] [https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.htm...](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html)

<comment><USER64> I agree, learning calculus does enhance one's life. Statistics enhances your life even more though since you will actually use it. I use calculus sometimes at work and I use it when learning new mathematical concepts but it still doesn't even come close to how important statistics is to me.

Sometimes it just comes down to utility. If you live in Nevada and you're wondering whether you should learn how to drive or how to sail, pick driving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Or walk and chew gum, like the rest of the world does.

</comment><comment><USER67> Why not both?

Seems to work for the rest of humanity.

</comment><comment><USER68> Math + Mandarin = X; Math + English = Y; Mandarin = 1.11; English = 1.12; Article Usefulness = Math(X-Y)

<comment><AUTHOR> You need to factor in: "English is the de facto language of Business, Engineering, Science, and, most influentially, The Internet."

<comment><USER68> Ok, but spend a little time on the Chinese internet. Sure, they use "some" obligatory English, but the dependency is likely not what many imagine it to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Seems a bit silly. Americans typically learn enough math for the example problems he lists by the time they graduate high school.

I don't think learning Mandarin is such a bad idea, personally.</comment>


Christchurch mosque shootings: 'Manifesto' deemed objectionable - <AUTHOR> https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/385399/christchurch-mosque-shootings-manifesto-deemed-objectionable <comment><USER2> This is nothing more than the State starting to normalize the control of information. Expect things to worsen in the coming decades, until they're good again.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no real desire to read it, although now that we are being told its objectionable and shouldn't be made available, I want to look at it.</comment>


Node.js How to use streams to ftp, unzip, and save a file to mongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://seekhiswit.blogspot.com/2012/06/streaming-zipped-csv-file-and-then.html Streaming with node is pretty great.  I found the documentation a bit tough to follow so I've written an example that I have in production for my company. <comment><USER2> One way to determine if a module on NPM is "decent" is to make sure they implement some way to stream or pipe data in this way. It seems pretty core to Node.JS and is a big win for processes like this which are basically transforming data from one source to another.</comment>


40 years of data show immigration decreases or stabilizes crime rates - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/40-years-of-data-show-immigration-decreases-or-stabilizes-crime-rates/ <comment><USER2> I'm really upset by this article. This piece is in obvious opposition to political motivations to curtail illegal immigration into the country. I am not a Trump supporter. Please read this in its entirety before commenting on what I have to say.

First off, I support legal immigration from all countries and all people of the world based on fair, equal and competitive rules which apply to all peoples.

Second, the Hispanic population in Mexico have an amazingly rich culture, and they are great people. The vast majority are coming to America illegally in search of better opportunity, and in search of work, not crime.

Third, the continued injustice committed to the people of Mexico is primarily a result of the US War on Drugs as well as corruption within the Mexican government. Solving these issues are how to create justice and liberty for these people, which will create economic opportunities, which create greater human welfare and less suffering.

Hopefully none of that puts me in dangerous territory as being a political dissident, but I fear that the increasingly intolerant nature of political speech in America will make what I'm about to say a thought crime. Two things to say to this.

First, having been granted a degree in Economics, the greatest take-away is that statistics and economics are the best way to lie (I did not go in with that impression, but it is blatantly obvious coming out of it).

Second, I know of two families that are selling resort ranches in the Southwest near the border. 30 years ago they were profitable, flourishing tourist destinations. There has been endless massacres and violence nearby in related to gang and drug cartel activity. No one will go there. It is seen as _their_ territory and they will defend it with deadly force. No one dares bring children there. Both of these ranches have been on the market for almost a decade. Since the crime is not out of control, what is the problem here? Will you go there? I know, it's 2 data points, just let me know who is willing to buy these at anything but rock-bottom prices, and can actually get people to go back there. Perhaps the authors of this article would like to take a trip there? Have you ever been shot at on your own property by people who are in your country illegally? Get back to me after you've experienced that.

It's an entirely specious argument made in this piece. Media simultaneously complains and brags about fleeing these places in the country with the highest immigration as being far too dangerous for normal human life to exist (1), while simultaneously arguing that more crime is committed by the domestic population, which is not supported by reality. It's double speak.

1 - [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/opinion/sunday/goodbye- al...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/opinion/sunday/goodbye-albuquerque- land-of-violence.html)

If you want to solve these problems, stop publishing blatantly spurious, politically-motivated pieces, and do something to actually help these people. Fight against the War on Drugs. For equal rights and legitimate pathways to citizenship for the many that are working here legally, doing hard work here, below the US minimum wage. For justice and liberty within government and against the plutocracy.

This piece is really bad. Most decreases in crime are likely due to general decreases in crime over the time-period studied, or other blatant oversights.

Nowhere did I say I disagree with equal rights or opportunity, nor with diversity. I disagree with an illegal, unfair immigration scheme and a War on Drugs, the former of which puts corporate interests, and latter DEA and CIA interests, above the welfare of the people.</comment>


Popular posts from leaky bug-tracking systems - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/03/05/bugs/ <comment><USER2> Very cool read! Apache/nginx logs can be really interesting to look through sometimes.

It is sad that the Referer Header is pretty much dead now. Looking at the Apache logs used to be a useful way to see what was going on and why a site was busy suddenly. Those headers were also a great way to gather whatever analytics was called before it became what it is now. I guess we just called them 'stats' because we didn't care about ads?

I once was looking at the logs for whatever reason and spotted a link back to what was clearly a webmail system at a decent sized .edu and decided to click that link. BOOM. I was looking at someone's inbox. There was no authentication at all on the email there. I did report that, hopefully they fixed it fast.

<comment><USER3> > There was no authentication at all on the email there. I did report that, > hopefully they fixed it fast.

I bet there was some token in the URL, and that URL with the token was sent as the referer, and then when you clicked the link, you also got the authentication token since it was in the URL.

<comment><USER4> Ok that was a small beer-bottle-over-the-head moment.

Does this sort of disaster have a specific name? I realize it's a type of XSRF but I don't know of any contractions for "I was erroneously supplied working credentials and this needs fixing".

This reminds me of the practice of digging through GitHub for leaked credentials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How much of programming/IT is tiptoeing through a minefield of broken shit hoping you can remember enough edge cases from your experience that you can avoid snagging on an issue which arrests your progress for large stretches of time?

And how much of vaunted 10x productivity is being able to have a clear path to get up to speed and stay at speed, without such snags anywhere nearby?

And how much of company problems are related to many employees being stuck in tarpits like these (and similar businessy ones)?

</comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting!

Risking going off on a tangent...Regarding the first one with the time issue. I've always felt uneasy about all the ambiguity in the components of the time structure. People can easily get confused about the offset, the tz, and the dst flag. Are they independent? Do you add all their effects together when you calculate the UTC time? Are they redundant, so you can only use the offset? No surprise that it's interpreted in many different ways.</comment>


How to write fast code in Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/write-fast-code-ruby-rails <comment><USER2> One of my favorite tricks is to generate the JSON for your API responses in Postgres instead of in Ruby.

You can get 100x speedups, but the downside is that you wind up with big nasty SQL queries that duplicate Ruby logic and are hard to maintain. There was a nice gem that would automatically produce JSON-generating SQL [0], but it is abandoned now. It only supports Rails 4 and ActiveModelSerializers 0.8, which are both quite old. I _just_ published a similar gem [1] that works for Rails 5 and AMS 0.10. Unlike the old gem, mine outputs JSON:API (common in Ember projects). I hope to add the traditional JSON format too. AMS 0.10 makes this easier, since it introduced the concept of "adapters". My gem is super new and doesn't yet cover a lot of serializer functionality, but I'm hopeful about supporting more & more. Feedback is welcome!

On the writing side, I've found activerecord-import [2] to be very useful. It batches up INSERTs and UPDATEs and for Postgres it even knows how to use INSERT ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE.

I also have a handful of Postgres extensions that use arrays to do fast math/stats calculations. [3, 4, 5] If you are thinking about moving something into C, it's natural to consider a gem with native extensions, but perhaps a Postgres C extension will be even better.

[0] [https://github.com/DavyJonesLocker/postgres_ext- serializers](https://github.com/DavyJonesLocker/postgres_ext-serializers)

[1] [https://github.com/pjungwir/active_model_serializers_pg](https://github.com/pjungwir/active_model_serializers_pg)

[2] [https://github.com/zdennis/activerecord- import](https://github.com/zdennis/activerecord-import)

[3] [https://github.com/pjungwir/aggs_for_arrays](https://github.com/pjungwir/aggs_for_arrays)

[4] [https://github.com/pjungwir/aggs_for_vecs](https://github.com/pjungwir/aggs_for_vecs)

[5] [https://github.com/pjungwir/floatvec](https://github.com/pjungwir/floatvec)

<comment><USER3> One way to mitigate spreading logic between SQL and Ruby is by using SQL views with something like Scenic [0] which can back an ActiveRecord model just like an ordinary table. This is especially nice for complex reporting because it centralizes your query logic in a single view as a sort of virtual table that can be queried from both ActiveRecord and normal Postgres queries.

[0] [https://github.com/scenic-views/scenic](https://github.com/scenic- views/scenic)

<comment><USER4> Does anyone know how best to deal with views with sqlalchemy in Python? Looks like a good approach!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One comment about the caching section. Rails is generally really clever getting the cache key for you automatically.

Instead of doing

      Rails.cache.fetch("blog_#{blog.id}_posts_#{posts.max(:updated_at)}") do
        blog.posts.as_json
      end

You can (and should) actually use something like

      Rails.cache.fetch(Post.all) do
        blog.posts.as_json
      end

Or even specific scopes, e.g.

      Rails.cache.fetch(blog.posts.published) do
        blog.posts.published.as_json
      end

The cache key will include the query hash, item count in the results and the max updated_at automatically for you.

In some rare cases, you might want more control and then probably best to use something like `ActiveSupport::Cache.expand_cache_key`[0]

e.g.

      key = ActiveSupport::Cache.expand_cache_key(["blog posts", blog.posts])
      Rails.cache.fetch(key) do ... end

[0] [https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Cache.html...](https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Cache.html#method- c-expand_cache_key)

<comment><USER6> Fwiw I never really got this approach to caching b/c the keys are always based on calling the db, and calling the db is usually what you're specifically trying to avoid with caching, not just the transform of db content to json/html, which should be cheap?

<comment><USER7> The active record queries like User.all are lazily loaded, so it's totally possible to pass them around like keys without them being executed.

That said, I wouldn't use a query as a cache key since there may be more than one thing I want to cache about that query (GP's example is their as_json representation, but what if I wanted something different to be computed? Like maybe html snippets? I would expect the cache key to mention everything about the thing it's caching.)

<comment><USER5> > what if I wanted something different to be computed? Like maybe html > snippets? I would expect the cache key to mention everything about the thing > it's caching.

This is exactly where you'd use something like ActiveSupport::Cache.expand_cache_key(["blog posts", blog.posts]). You can add bits of info to your cache keys to distinguish them from one another.

It's probably also worth mentioning that the `cache` view helper does parts of it for you already, and takes into account the digest of the view code itself among other things. Rails provides a really neat abstraction here that does make caching easier.

It has some rough edges, and some gotchas, but overall it's pretty smart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ruby On Rails is an amazing piece of software. I love the fact that solving problems in Ruby so intuitive & expressive - You just have to focus on building the solution rather than constantly cracking the language.

I wrote a post how why one should still learn Ruby - [https://bilalbudhani.com/why-you-should-learn-ruby- regardles...](https://bilalbudhani.com/why-you-should-learn-ruby-regardless- of-what-they-say/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm forced to learn rails at a new job — and I really dislike it. There's so much magic and things are built in an obscure/extremely inefficient way to work around/"take advantage" of frameworks limitations/features.

There is so much code that is not part of the codebase driving the behavior of the system — and that third party code is very tightly coupled to the actual behavior that will be observed by running the code. Figuring how anything actually works is made massively harder than required and developers are encouraged towards designs that will require ridiculously inefficient database interactions.

Rails is terrible I think for experienced developers because there are no mechanisms in the codebase — instead there are layers and layers of "conventions" which often only exist to try to avoid bugs that would've been much better to catch or prevent with a combination of a type system, high level tests, and less mutation.

<comment><USER10> This is a decent criticism of Rails, but there are things you can do to make it smoother: try to avoid doing unusual things.

A big point of using a framework is to leverage an ecosystem other people's libraries (and stackoverflow questions!), and they will typically only work well if your code is relatively "normal".

If your code looks like "beginner" code in the framework, you're doing it right.

As a point of comparison, I switched to Django for a few years after a few years of Rails. Django was a lot less magical and was more debuggable. But Rails' magic actually encourages a better project structure. Django doesn't care about your structure.

I also found the thoroughness and completeness of the ecosystem surrounding Rails to be stronger. That is the real selling point to me. For most things you want to do in Rails, you will find a library that integrates with the project and DB structure you already have.

<comment><USER11> Disclaimer: I haven't used Rails since around 3, but my assumption is the DX hasn't changed too much. Plus if Rails N was marketed at Rails "N-1" devs, then new devs coming in late have a lot of learning to do.

> avoid doing unusual things

If by "unusual" you mean "not the Rails way", then this makes sense. But the problem is, the Rails way doesn't always line up with the way an experienced programmer might want to do something.

In the specific example of fetching data from a DB - an experienced programmer might intuitively avoid multiple round-trips to the DB, and want to find the appropriate hook point(s) in a request handler to optimise this. Making 20 requests for 20 models is "unusual".

Rails doesn't make things like this easy. It's quite opinionated on how you should work. The core assumption in play here is that databases will either be fast, or can be made faster, essentially externalising the problem. Or if you want to address this - find a Gem to do it, or dive into the layered guts of it to figure it out.

Related - if I recall correctly, foreign keys were not deemed an important enough feature for inclusion in Active Record, and the Rails way is to embed the logic for joins into your models rather than the database. I'm sure many of us here could name several scenarios where this is just plain wrong.

<comment><USER12> Activerecord is indeed a major trade-off with rails. For heterogeneous projects, it can be frustrating that rails tends to favour validations, constraints and foreign key relationships in the ruby model files.

Eg. You have a dot.net service that needs to write some data to the database, and doing it via REST endpoints on your rails app is really slow compared to accessing the database directly. But now you don't have any constraints on your relationships, and it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Extra sad, since you do have some constraints (belongs_to etc) - they're just not communicated to your database.

I have some legacy rails projects I maintain, and my job would've been easier if previous developers followed the rails way more closely - and whenever I manage to refractor my way back, code becomes shorter, clearer, more efficient and less error prone.

Things like only half of a relationship being defined, and joins being hand- rolled in one direction is a "favorite"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a really good post. That said, I would have listed caches first. Caches are the real key to excellent performance in Ruby on Rails.

</comment><comment><USER14> A long time ago I made "The complete guide to rails performance" by Nate Perkobec. It's not free but it really taught my a lot about on the ways to achieve very good performance with Ruby and Rails. Does anybody have any good resources on how to achieve better performance with ruby and something like async, concurrent ruby, threadpools and forking?

</comment><comment><USER15> I miss RoR, I think I will churn out a project for old times sake!

<comment><USER16> Rails 6.0 is excellent. For single developer and small team web apps it's pretty much the pinnacle of productivity.

<comment><USER17> How does this compare to Django? Would it be worth it for me to learn Rails?

<comment><USER18> Depends on what you're looking for and how much time you want to put into it. What Rails does, nothing else even holds a candle to. But it's hard-won mastery.

Rails, when learned properly, enables complete and total dominion over the entire sphere of web development. Nothing else compares, nothing else even comes close.

Anything you'd ever want to do with the web, save the kind of scaling that led Twitter to replatform 5 years in, can be done 10x faster and 10x more reliably with Rails. The main bottleneck is understanding. There's a zen to Rails that you have to appreciate before you can unlock its potential.

It greatly saddens me that Ruby and Rails has been falling out of favor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> what are modern practices for scaling rails apps when the database is the bottleneck? I have a GIS-heavy app that is built with rails, but leans on PostGIS a lot for the heavy computation. Simply getting bigger and bigger database instances doesn't seem to scale very well, and moving the GIS computation code in to ruby is not an option either (RGeo is good for some things, but can't replace PostGIS for most of my needs)

<comment><USER20> Postgres 10 introduced native table partitioning and it became much easier to use in postgres 11. This will let you divide large tables into smaller ones that can be queried more efficiently

Rails 6 introduced multiple databases natively in activerecord. You can more easily have read only databases or segment off high write workloads.

Foreign tables are a way to allow bringing in data from multiple databases into one so it "looks" like everything is in a single db. This got better/faster, particularly with joins in postgres 12.

Also consider things like materialized views or even plain views which can help bring together just the right data you need ahead of time.

Just a couple options off the top of my head.

<comment><USER19> Thanks! Partitioned and foreign tables look quite interesting -- I'm at the point where I need to scale the database compute load (with write access) across many nodes, but coordinating those nodes has seemed challenging with rails.

And yeah I can probably lean on views a bit more to save some search time for point/line-in-polygon operations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> gray_-_wolf Hm or maybe for APIs just replace the whole thing with sinatra and sequel. Most of advices still apply in the article still apply though.

</comment><comment><USER21> Would these suggestions apply for Django?

I'm assuming Django also faces similar issues

<comment><USER22> Yeah, some of them are just common "best practices".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I vaguely remember an article about a fatal flaw in Ruby on Rails that was said to be not fixable? Is that ancient history and has been overcome, or was it not even a thing and I read bogus information?

I have developed in Django and avoided RoR due to this possibility, but am always interested in learning more, provided the tools have a decent shelf life...

<comment><USER24> You might be thinking of an old SQL injection vulnerability that allowed updating models from unchecked request parameters, aka the mass assignment problem[0]. That type of thing can be a concern in any web application, regardless of the framework. Modern Rails does a decent job of discouraging it out of the box.

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/03/hacke...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/03/hacker-commandeers-github-to-prove-vuln-in-ruby/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Step 1: Step away from Ruby.

I loove ruby, it's my first choice for scripting wherever performance doesn't matter. No way around the fact that it very slow though.

<comment><USER26> Is ruby that slow? I always understood it was comparable to python?

Plus if it is performant enough for Shopify and Github it seems like it would be performant for 90%+ of use cases? The speed of development and the flexibility of development is much greater than most stacks once you add rails.

<comment><USER27> If ruby was performant enough for Shopify, this article would not have been written.

<comment><USER28> Hm, a lot of the article focuses on optimizing your interaction with a database (rdbms/sql), which has nothing to do with the performance of ruby (some of it arguably has to do with _Rails_).

Even more of the article has to do with Rails, and not ruby in general.

But the larger point, are you suggesting that in a language that is "performant enough", developers need _no_ performance advice, they can write however they want and get adequate performance, for any performance needs?

Maybe, although I'm dubious. The existence of advice for programming does not mean a language/platform isn't "something enough" until we have AI writing code. At any rate, if such a language exists it is not ruby. But I disagree with that suggestion. The existence of optimization advice does not mean that a language "is not performant enough". If Shoppify is still happily using ruby/rails, I would say it indeed demonstrates they are performant enough for them.

<comment><USER27> Nope I'm not. But Shopify is large enough to have a first-class engineering team that would (presumably) be writing efficient code, which is nothing special. So if this first-class engineering team is still writing about _fast code in Ruby_, doesn't that imply Ruby isn't fast?

<comment><USER28> Shopify's engineering team is obviously writing code congruent with the advice they give here, that's why they give the advice! I'm not following you at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


TB Is Now the Top Infectious Killer - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/28/452565249/tb-is-now-the-top-infectious-killer-even-though-deaths-are-down <comment><AUTHOR> "There's another TB statistic that's particularly worrisome. The new report estimates that there were roughly half a million cases of multi-drug-resistant TB last year, double the number from the year 2000. Conventional antibiotics can't cure MDR-TB. Treatment can take two years or more with drugs that cause severe side-effects; some patients are left completely deaf."

I did a semester-long report on TB in college, and our findings were that multiple drug resistant TB and poly-drug resistant TB would be growing public health problems in poor countries in the coming decades. This was a conservative way of framing that problem. Realistically, TB is wildly infectious, and extremely dangerous to societies that can't afford treatment.

The clinch is that TB is entirely treatable, but it is very money and resource intensive to do so, requiring reliable access to medication and quarantining from healthy people over a long period of time. In poor countries, compliance with single drug regimens isn't great a lot of the time due to nonexistent infrastructure for distribution and treatment monitoring-- requiring a cocktail of drugs to deal with drug resistant TB is no different. Additionally, TB-specific hospitals, where they exist, are largely places that people with TB go to die. Their relatives frequently get infected from visiting a TB-infested hospital den, of course.

The rise of XDR-TB (poly drug resistant) means that a growing number of people get a death sentence from an otherwise treatable disease. The suggestions I made in my college report were to invest in healthcare infrastructure and secured involuntary quarantine facilities; the former to help those with MDR- TB and regular TB, and the latter for the rest, who probably can't be helped rationally under utilitarian economics of a poor country. Best to limit exposure to the healthy.

<comment><USER2> Very informative, thank you. With regards to the quarantine facilities, ebola showed us that this can be a very touchy subject - the Americans/Europeans swooping in and locking people away. Perhaps the fact that TB is more readily treatable, and that patients will generally recover, will help the situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends, really. During the Ebola scare, the Nigerian government came down extremely hard with military enforced curfews, public water/transit shutdowns, involuntary quarantines, etc. Not only did these "harsh" strategies work, they worked spectacularly at preventing widespread infection.

I highly doubt these measures would be used against TB, though-- it just isn't deadly enough. The countries with high TB infection rates are the ones without a serviceable central government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think that the threat of infectious diseases like ebola and TB are among the main reasons for developed nations to get serious about reducing economic inequality both globally and within developed countries.

I live in LA and a few years back there were several articles written about TB spreading within the homeless population. With all the resources that the US government pays to monitor its population to try to prevent a terrorists from using things like biological weapons, you would think that the US government would be concerned about members of the homeless population that are carrying TB or MDR-TB. The infected homeless are basically untrackable since they most likely don't have bank accounts, home addresses, etc.

If you told the CIA that you knew of an untraceable terrorist sleeper cell in the US spreading a contagious disease, you would likely have their full attention. In some ways this is what's being allowed to happen, even as the US dumps billions into fighting terrorism abroad.

Working to reduce inequality abroad might also help to stop outbreaks like we saw with ebola. I think in the future, people will look back and say "Well of course there was going to be a global pandemic that wiped out X percent of the world population. You can't have a world that is hyper-connected with air travel while simultaneously leaving most of the population in poverty without getting that result."

TB in LA article: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/22/tuberculosis- outbre...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/22/tuberculosis-outbreak-los- angeles_n_2743373.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Earlier this week the UK media were reporting that some parts of London rates of TB up to 150 cases per 100,000 population - higher than Iraq, Eritrea and Rwanda.

[http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/27/tb-rates- in-p...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/27/tb-rates-in-parts-of- london-worse-than-iraq-eritrea-and-rwanda)

<comment><USER5> Any particular reason why? London isn't exactly a third world city and the British have a free healthcare system which should be rich enough to handle the treatment.

<comment><USER4> Poverty and inequality.

Some areas (eg Newham) have large minority populations that travel to countries where TB is common, and are often disengaged from the healthcare system. Poor (eg damp) housing sustains it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I missing something, or we have had a TB vaccine for almost a century? Wouldn't that be a "trivial" solution to the problem?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCG_vaccine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCG_vaccine)

That's the vaccine. You can't prevent your way out of an already-blown epidemic, though. I'm also not sure how common that vaccine is, or for how long it's protective, or if it's fully protective.

EDIT: all of the information I am wondering about is in the wikipedia article I linked. Seems like vaccination isn't widespread in a lot of places, including the US.

<comment><USER7> Much like Polio, vaccination isn't/wasn't common in the US because it's a preventable disease that was basically eliminated. I think some higher risk people may have gotten it (teachers, medical professionals, etc.) but since the vast majority of people wouldn't ever see TB in person they didn't need the vaccine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone interested the PBS Documentary show American Experience had a fantastic episode on TB a month or two ago called "The Forgotten Plague" (although they do talk a bit about how it's coming back thanks to drug resistance at the end).

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/plague/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/plague/)

<comment><USER8> This was really good, a few things about it really surprised me since my understanding of the history of TB was pretty lacking. Really recommend checking it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> More than malaria...? Article mentions nothing about it.

<comment><USER10> It may be distinguishing between diseases that are transmittable between humans and those that are transmitted by a 3rd party (a mosquito).</comment></comment>