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Comment by s1k3s | Hacker News Reader

You had to name it Ganja, didn't you?

Edit: on second thought, good for you! Screw all the politically correctness BS that invades our software development stuff. There's no place for that in science.

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> Ganja is a Hindi name for hemp, derived from the word ganjha, from the Sanskrit gañjā, referring to a "powerful preparation from cannabis sativa". The term ganja, one of the oldest and most commonly used synonyms for marijuana in the English language, dates to before 1689.

I had hoped there would be a more direct association between the Hindi name and the underlying mathematics given Indian mathematics emerged as early as 1200 BC. Would make for a perfect reverse-psychology alibi.

It's also the name of the second largest city in Azerbaijan.

In high school, my school hosted some exchange students from "Ganja school #5". As we were standing at LAX airport waiting for the Azeri students to arrive, a couple of surfer dudes wearing board shorts and Hawaiian shirts walked by and stared at our sign:

"Ganja school .... duuuuuude .... I wanna go there!"

To add, Ganja pronounced with very short sound of "a" means bald :)

Ganja as hemp is mostly pronounced as Gaanjaa, but accepted spellings are Ganja.

It's not really political correctness as much as it is morality. We've been conditioned to believe marijuana is bad, unfortunately.

On the one hand you're somewhat right: there are certainly many of those who fear marijuana with the only reason being that it is among "the drugs"; but is marijuana abuse not the greater issue of the two? Certainly you can agree that inhaling any smoke is bad for the lungs, for a start?

You can use marijuana/cannabis without smoke in a million different ways.

> We've been conditioned to believe marijuana is bad

Well, you'll have a really hard time convincing people that it's good. (Unless they already have a vested interest in rationalizing their decisions.)

Nobody ever got smarter from smoking too much weed.

http://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/

Carl Sagan: Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? ... I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent.

> Nobody ever got smarter from smoking too much weed.

What about having fun or relaxing? Most recreational substances or activities aren’t supposed to “make you smarter”.

Its a drug and should be promoted as such. Lets not swing the pendulum the other way. I can't be convinced putting smoke in your lungs is not harmful.

If smoke is the problem you can eat or vaporize it for example.

Everyone knows it's a drug. It also has a handful of applications in medicine, but so do a lot of drugs. Doesn't mean it's for everyone. As a recreational drug, the societal and personal harm associated with consuming marijuana is rather low. And nobody with any integrity is acting as though smoking something isn't bad for your lungs.

Weed has already thoroughly permeated society, no use trying to turn back the clock there. We should just stop arresting people for it and stop making it so you have to take unnecessary risks to get it.

Smoke is merely 1 of 100 ways to consume cannabis.

That's a very prejudiced opinion, and you should critically review it.

You're repeating something you've been indoctrinated to believe, that you haven't given any thought to, so yes it's going to be difficult to convince you and others like you otherwise.

The negation of bad isn't "good". It's "not bad".

Like anything you can overdo it. I regret smoking so much in my youth. I also regret drinking so much, and eating so much pizza and chocolate, and spending all day surfing (the web, sadly, not the waves). I was doing all those things before I became old enough to buy cannabis (although cannabis did exaggerate them somewhat).

It does seem like the cannabis had a negative effect on my memory and emotional stability (I was high basically the entire day for several years while my brain was still developing). And many of my worst paranoid delusions ever have been on uncomfortably high doses of cannabis. But so have some of the most beautiful and dare I say spiritual experiences of my life, and I wouldn't take those back.

I do wish I'd waited until I was older though, and in a better place emotionally (I was using it as a painkiller, if you will.)

All things considered though, I'm a much bigger fan of psilocybin and LSD. Rather than worsening my addictions they made me quit a lot of unhealthy things I was doing. I also found microdosing to be very beneficial.

For comparison, you can conduct a business meeting on a small dose of LSD and find that it actually helps you pay attention and think clearly, while even small doses of cannabis will interfere with something as trivial as a trip to the corner store.

A headier pot certainly makes my mind sharper. Now, a pot with a heavy body load, that's more of the stereotypical "lazy stoner". But to say "nobody ever got smarter from smoking...weed" is kind of short-sighted.

Correct. You have to smoke exactly the right amount.

I don't think that's it, either. I think it's that the word "ganja", in United States parlance, is sort of puerile and gets uttered ironically more than it does unironically. I think that most of us not caring about weed anymore is what makes the oblique reference to it kind of passe and eye-rolly.

Commenters without a substantial or interesting contribution to make tend to focus on things like names.

There is lots of place for politics in science, universities have internal politics also.

Ganja is the second largest city in Azerbaijan, why is it such a political statement?

The obvious answer is the one I assume you deliberately glossed over… Marijuana is still highly "political" in many, many places.

Should have named it "WearAMaskDuringAPandemic.js". No way that's going to turn political...

It’s a clever joke because exterior algebra (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exterior_algebra) is also knows as Grassman algebra, named after Hermann Grassmann (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Grassmann)

It effectively makes the license "don't use this in an educational setting", unfortunately.

Then again, the substance it refers to is perfectly legal in several of countries (and a number of states in the US). By that metric, Wine should be avoided too.

I didn't give any metric.

By yours, semen is perfectly legal in several countries (and a number of states in the US). That doesn't make it appropriate as a name in an educational setting.

Or, "Today we are going to be using Wine" doesn't need quite so much careful disambiguation.

> semen is perfectly legal in several countries (and a number of states in the US)

Ah, yes, Illinois made semen illegal in 1923, as we all know. I now run around hiding from the cops.

Cigarettes are legal in every state in the US, but naming something “cigarette.js” when it has nothing to do with them won’t help.

...nor hurt.

cigar.js is actually a good name for a lib.

What educational setting, primary school? Congratulations on your precocious children!

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