Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Pork pork pork.
Excerpts from a letter home:
The names have been changed to protect the innocent, and in some cases, the guilty as well. Anyways, pretty much sums up my weekend rightly. On to more... er, other news!
(Toldja I was getting rid of the block thingies. Next, I'll work on my segues.)
I received another lesson in "believing scientific studies" today from reading the Citizen. Seems that a rather prominent study released last year about ecstasy that said that a single dose could cause severe brain damage and possibly death was rather severely in error. The baboons in the study that died from "ecstasy" were in fact shot up with overdosages of methamphetamines. Oh, how some scientists are chortling at their error, much like a mix up of buying soy milk when one actually wanted cow milk. Ha ha! Silly scientists, giving E a bad name, when they should really be punishing those silly speed ODers. Well, except for the fact that they're probably dead. The article went on to talk about how you'll never find a study talking about virtues of controlled substances. Well, never in the States at any rate. See, turns out that not many folks want to fund studies into possible boons of illicit substances, so researchers are left somewhat high and dry, until they turn to NIDA. The National Institute of Drug Abuse will gladly fund your study into the effects of illegal drugs, provided you further the cause of the drug war, which is to say that all drugs that are not from a doctor are BAD BAD BAD. One of the points that was also mentioned was the lack of a use/abuse line for those BAD BAD BAD chemicals that brighten folks' days. Booze? Sure, you can have a drink every now and again, but when you start needing a shot of rye to get up in the morning, you crossed the line somewhere. Pot? No line. All use = abuse. No such thing as moderation here! No sir! Hooray for double standards! Also, it seems that anything that says otherwise just isn't too happy and is worthy of suppression! Yay censorship! See, there was a WHO study done that said that in moderate use, cocaine just might not be all that bad. Not good, certainly, but not worthy of detonating your head instantly. Funny, seems this would be rather big news, and certainly in the drug community. Don't recall reading about it though, do you?
Er, I seem to have strayed with no way to get back to my original point, if there ever was one, and if you can suck emotion from my words, you might have been picking excessive anger vibes by the end. I seem to do this a bit, don't I? Well, the article was indeed really good, and I guess the moral of the story is, before you spout off the latest scientific research as gospel, try and find out who funded the study. I remember being told this once before, but this latest bit managed to jolt me into remembering again. And speaking of remembering... well, I forget the segue I had planned. Guess I'll do without.
(from BoingBoing)Coolest. Saw. Evar. If only for the party tricks one could do.
(again, BoingBoing)Who wants to wear their food!? ME ME ME!!! Well, no not really. But if you did, know that it's possible.
(once more, into the BoingBoing)BRAIIIINSSSSS!!!! God bless copyright expiry. Now you too can own a copy of Night of the Living Dead for free! Legally! Hooray! ¶ 7:36 p.m.
Excerpts from a letter home:
Had a great weekend! Didn't get to see Kevin (he was in Edmonton this weekend, ironically), but saw everyone else. Ride down with [my aunt] was pretty good, and the weather was really nice (all until this morning going to work...). Got to [my uncle's] on Friday night and spent most of the rest of the weekend there. He and I went downtown on Saturday and did a bit of shopping. I wanted to pop in to a comic store, and it happens to be kiddie corner to Honest Ed's, so we stopped in there as well since I've never been. Ed's is... an experience. I would never have thought that one store could amass such a massive collection of merchandise in addition to tacky ornamentation (like giant stone heads and 12-foot tall cuckoo clocks). More extended family showed up, so it was a rather full house. [My 5-year old cousin] is infatuated with Grease, John Travolta and Elvis. She had a ball on Sunday morning searching for eggs both indoors and out (couple of casualties, as we had to pull one egg from a gopher hole and another was ransacked by racoons) and we also rented School of Rock, which everyone liked. ([Said cousin] didn't quite get the whole rock star mythos the film is grounded in, but she got a big kick out of Jack Black acting like a spaz and the kids playing rock and roll.) [My uncle] had a meeting with a friend of a friend of his from Isreal on Monday, so I hung out at Yorkdale mall for a bit on the way to Grandma's. Managed to score a copy of Gear For Your Kitchen (book by Alton Brown that I can't justify paying 50 bucks for) that was mistakenly labelled with a 30% off sticker, so I got it for what the price of the paperback edition would have been. Ended up with a textbookish copy of Joy of Cooking that I guess Grandma had a second copy of. So now I'm swimming in books (plus lugging around a couple of hardcovers was fun). Finally, I caught the 6:55 bus back home, which was an express and actually arrived earlier than the milk run that left at 5:40 (and it wasn't a 6-hour bus ride!).
The names have been changed to protect the innocent, and in some cases, the guilty as well. Anyways, pretty much sums up my weekend rightly. On to more... er, other news!
(Toldja I was getting rid of the block thingies. Next, I'll work on my segues.)
I received another lesson in "believing scientific studies" today from reading the Citizen. Seems that a rather prominent study released last year about ecstasy that said that a single dose could cause severe brain damage and possibly death was rather severely in error. The baboons in the study that died from "ecstasy" were in fact shot up with overdosages of methamphetamines. Oh, how some scientists are chortling at their error, much like a mix up of buying soy milk when one actually wanted cow milk. Ha ha! Silly scientists, giving E a bad name, when they should really be punishing those silly speed ODers. Well, except for the fact that they're probably dead. The article went on to talk about how you'll never find a study talking about virtues of controlled substances. Well, never in the States at any rate. See, turns out that not many folks want to fund studies into possible boons of illicit substances, so researchers are left somewhat high and dry, until they turn to NIDA. The National Institute of Drug Abuse will gladly fund your study into the effects of illegal drugs, provided you further the cause of the drug war, which is to say that all drugs that are not from a doctor are BAD BAD BAD. One of the points that was also mentioned was the lack of a use/abuse line for those BAD BAD BAD chemicals that brighten folks' days. Booze? Sure, you can have a drink every now and again, but when you start needing a shot of rye to get up in the morning, you crossed the line somewhere. Pot? No line. All use = abuse. No such thing as moderation here! No sir! Hooray for double standards! Also, it seems that anything that says otherwise just isn't too happy and is worthy of suppression! Yay censorship! See, there was a WHO study done that said that in moderate use, cocaine just might not be all that bad. Not good, certainly, but not worthy of detonating your head instantly. Funny, seems this would be rather big news, and certainly in the drug community. Don't recall reading about it though, do you?
Er, I seem to have strayed with no way to get back to my original point, if there ever was one, and if you can suck emotion from my words, you might have been picking excessive anger vibes by the end. I seem to do this a bit, don't I? Well, the article was indeed really good, and I guess the moral of the story is, before you spout off the latest scientific research as gospel, try and find out who funded the study. I remember being told this once before, but this latest bit managed to jolt me into remembering again. And speaking of remembering... well, I forget the segue I had planned. Guess I'll do without.
(from BoingBoing)Coolest. Saw. Evar. If only for the party tricks one could do.
(again, BoingBoing)Who wants to wear their food!? ME ME ME!!! Well, no not really. But if you did, know that it's possible.
(once more, into the BoingBoing)BRAIIIINSSSSS!!!! God bless copyright expiry. Now you too can own a copy of Night of the Living Dead for free! Legally! Hooray! ¶ 7:36 p.m.
