Monthly Archive for April, 2006

Mexican Lawmakers Pass Bill to Legalize Drugs

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 30, 2006
in Other Drugs
. 0 Comments

The federal legislature of Mexico has passed a bill to legalize “small amounts of cocaine, heroin, even ecstasy” for personal use. President Vicente Fox’s signature is expected to be forthcoming since his office has voiced support for the measure.

Currently, Mexican law leaves open the possibility of dropping charges against people caught with drugs if they can prove they are drug addicts and if an expert certifies they were caught with “the quantity necessary for personal use.”

The new bill drops the “addict” requirement, allows “consumers” to have drugs, and sets out specific allowable quantities, which do not appear in the current law.

Specifically, the new law would allow a person to carry the following:

  • - Marijuana (5 gms),

  • – Heroin (25 mgms),
  • - Cocaine (0.5 gm),
  • - Peyote (2.2 lbs), and
    • – An array of other drugs, including:
  • - Methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA),
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Your Thoughts Are Your Password

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 28, 2006
in Computers, Consciousness/Psych/Brain and Technology
. 0 Comments

What if you could one day unlock your door or access your bank account by simply “thinking” your password? Too far out? Perhaps not.

Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, are exploring the possibility of a biometric security device that will use a person’s thoughts to authenticate her or his identity.

Their idea of utilizing brain-wave signatures as “pass-thoughts” is based on the premise that brain waves are unique to each individual. Even when thinking of the same thing, the brain’s measurable electrical impulses vary slightly from person to person. Some researchers believe the difference might just be enough to create a system that allows you to log in with your thoughts.

A pass-thought could be anything from a snatch of song, the memory of your last birthday or even the image of your favorite painting. A more achievable alternative might present you with predetermined pictures, music or video clips, to which you would think “yes” or “no” while the machine monitors your brain activity.

wired

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Gamers May Soon Control Action With Thoughts

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 28, 2006
in Games and Technology
. 0 Comments

Someday soon, video gamers may be able to use their heads, literally, to get better scores in their games.

At least two start-ups have developed technology that monitors a player’s brain waves and uses the signals to control the action in games. They hope it will enable game creators to immerse players in imaginary worlds that they can control with their thoughts instead of their hands.

San Jose’s NeuroSky has been testing prototypes of its system that uses a sensor-laden headband to monitor brain waves, and then uses the signals to control the interaction in video games. They hope that such games are just the beginning of a mind-machine interface with many different applications.

``Research on brain waves is well known,’’ said NeuroSky Chief Executive Stanley Yang. ``But we have worked on a way for detecting them with a low-cost technology and then interpreting what they mean. We think this will have broad applications.’’

mercurynews

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Japanese Researcher Shows Robot Legs That Could Replace Wheelchairs

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 28, 2006
in Robots/A.I.
. 0 Comments

A Japanese researcher demonstrated in Tokyo Wednesday a pair of robotic legs that can negotiate stairs and could eventually find use as a wheelchair substitute.

“Elderly people using wheelchairs cannot get up and down stairs,” said Atsuo Takanishi, an engineering professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University. “We wanted to create a robot that could do that and walk around rough surfaces.”

Takanishi has been working on the machine since 2003 in conjunction with robot manufacturer tmsuk Co. Their goal has been to create a two-legged robot that can fully operate in a human environment—specifically, one with features such as stairs that they can climb as homo sapiens do.

The latest version of the robot, the WL-16RIII, can manage the mechanically difficult feat. At the demonstration in Tokyo, one of Takanishi’s students rode the robot—which bears some resemblance to the mechanical “Wrong Trousers” of Wallace and Gromit fame—up and down a staircase and along a pebbly path outdoors.

msn

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The Total Information Awareness Project Lives On

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 28, 2006
in Big Brother
. 0 Comments

In April, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the advocacy organization for citizens’ digital rights, filed evidence to support its class-action lawsuit alleging that telecom giant AT&T gave the National Security Agency (NSA), the ultra-secret U.S. agency that’s the world’s largest espionage organization, unfettered access to Americans’ telephone and Internet communications. The lawsuit is one more episode in the public controversy that erupted in December 2005, when the New York Times revealed that, following September 11, President Bush authorized a far-reaching NSA surveillance program that included warrantless electronic eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mails of individuals within the United States.

Critics charged that the Bush administration had violated both the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against unwarranted search or seizure, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which requires eavesdropping warrants to be obtained from a special court of judges empowered for that purpose.

In February 2006, the controversy intensified. Reports emerged that component technologies of the supposedly defunct Total Information Awareness (TIA) project—established in 2002 by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop advanced information technology to counter terrorists, then terminated by Congress in 2003 because of widespread criticism that it would create “Orwellian” mass surveillance—had been acquired by the NSA.

technology review

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Mind-Controlled Robot

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 28, 2006
in Robots/A.I.
. 0 Comments

Spanish engineer Jose del R. Millen has recently been elected by Scientific American as one of the research leaders in 2004 for his experiences that allowed a small robot to move around a model house, while the bot itself handled time-sensitive maneuvers such as avoiding obstacles.

Each user chooses three mental states that produce distinguishable brain-wave patterns and trains the system in a few hour-long sessions. These states are then used as “forward,” “left” and “right” commands.

Millen is currently leading the MAIA project to come up with a mind-controlled wheelchair, and a mind-controlled robotic arm that could be be used for future prosthesis. Don’t hold your breath: the scientist doesn’t expect the mond-controlled wheelchair to be ready before 2015.

wmmna < research paper.pdf

Marijuana is Medically Useful, Whether Politicians Like It or Not

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 28, 2006
in Big Brother and Cannabis
. 0 Comments

IF CANNABIS were unknown, and bioprospectors were suddenly to find it in some remote mountain crevice, its discovery would no doubt be hailed as a medical breakthrough. Scientists would praise its potential for treating everything from pain to cancer, and marvel at its rich pharmacopoeia—many of whose chemicals mimic vital molecules in the human body. In reality, cannabis has been with humanity for thousands of years and is considered by many governments (notably America’s) to be a dangerous drug without utility. Any suggestion that the plant might be medically useful is politically controversial, whatever the science says. It is in this context that, on April 20th, America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement saying that smoked marijuana has no accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.

The statement is curious in a number of ways. For one thing, it overlooks a report made in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), part of the National Academy of Sciences, which came to a different conclusion. John Benson, a professor of medicine at the University of Nebraska who co-chaired the committee that drew up the report, found some sound scientific information that supports the medical use of marijuana for certain patients for short periods—even for smoked marijuana.

This is important, because one of the objections to marijuana is that, when burned, its smoke contains many of the harmful things found in tobacco smoke, such as carcinogenic tar, cyanide and carbon monoxide. Yet the IOM report supports what some patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, AIDS and cancer—and their doctors—have known for a long time. This is that the drug gives them medicinal benefits over and above the medications they are already receiving, and despite the fact that the smoke has risks. That is probably why several studies show that many doctors recommend smoking cannabis to their patients, even though they are unable to prescribe it. Patients then turn to the black market for their supply.

economist

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George W. Bush is a Tool

Published
by
billycuts
on April 25, 2006
in Energy/Fuel, Law, Political and Resistance
. 0 Comments

A poll comes out showing that the people are pissed about gas prices and that this anger is affecting the approval rating of the president:

A Washington Post / ABC News poll says 70 percent of Americans say higher gas prices are causing them financial hardship. And most are blaming President Bush, with 74 percent disapproving of how he is handling the issue.

As usual, Bush decides to play politics and lower gas prices. All well and good, until you realize how he’s doing it:

President Bush is temporarily suspending environmental rules on gasoline and deferring purchases for the nation’s strategic reserves in hopes of driving down rising gasoline prices.

Of course! Call for alternative fuels in your State of the Union Address, then instead of pouring money into those types of iniatives, let’s just screw over the environment a bit more. But it gets even better.

President Bush says the Justice Department is working with states’ Attorneys General to investigate allegations of price gouging at the pump.

Of course, gas is so expensive because of gas stations gouging the price. Not because of the artificial manipulation of the market by gas companies. Whatever. Luckily, folks in Illinois and California are pushing for Bush’s impeachment


State Rep. Karen Yarbrough (D-Maywood) has sponsored a resolution calling on the General Assembly to submit charges to the U.S. House so its lawmakers could begin impeachment proceedings.

It would be the first state legislature to pass such a resolution, though the measure faces a dim future in a Republican-controlled Congress.

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Dumbing Us Down: An Interview With John Taylor Gatto

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 20, 2006
in Big Brother, Civil Rights, Neoliberal Globalization, Political and Society/Social Systems
. 2 Comments
If anyone is qualified to intelligently analyze the institution of modern schooling, it’s John Taylor Gatto. While teaching in the public schools of Manhattan for 30 years, Gatto was named New York State teacher of the year as well as New York City teacher of the year three times. Then, at the height of his teaching career in 1991, he published an essay in the Wall Street Journal titled I Quit, I Think… and promptly quit.

Since then, Gatto has traveled the world lecturing and writing about the perils of his former profession. His first book, Dumbing Us Down : The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, has become a modern classic of today’s home-schooling movement. His latest book, The Underground History of American Education, chronicles the often-chilling origins of our schooling system, and details why and how children are damaged by it. Extensively researched and thoroughly documented, it is the standard by which all critiques of compulsory schooling must now be compared.

Today Gatto is busy working on The Fourth Purpose, a three-part, six-hour documentary series which “will tackle the American school system: present, past, and future—its anomalies, its history, and the alternatives. The idea is to throw a bucket of ice-cold water in the faces of pundits, experts, and bureaucrats.”
————-

So what, then, is the primary objective of compulsory education?

The primary objective is to convert human raw material into human resources which can be employed efficiently by the managers of government and the economy. The original purposes of schooling were to make good people (the religious purpose), to make good citizens (the public purpose) and to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose). Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military state of Prussia in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising and other forms of indirect command. In this fashion, poor Prussia with a small population became one of the great powers of the earth. Its new schooling method was imitated far and wide, from Japan to the United States.

alternative press review

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Police Fire on Mass Nepal Protest

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 20, 2006
in Activism, Big Brother and Civil Rights
. 0 Comments

Nepalese security forces have opened fire on protesters in the capital, Kathmandu, killing at least three people, hospital sources say.

At least 100,000 people defied a shoot-on-sight curfew, marching on central Kathmandu to rally against the absolute rule of King Gyanendra.

Doctors say at least 40 others were injured, some seriously.

BBC

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Bicycle Day

Published
by
billycuts
on April 19, 2006
in Consciousness/Psych/Brain and Entheogens/Psychedelics
. 0 Comments

It was 63 years ago today that Albert Hofmann first deliberately ingested 250mcg of LSD-25. After beginning to feel the effects of the chemical, Dr. Hofmann and his assistant rode their bicycles to his house.

Here’s a short excerpt from “LSD: My Problem Child” in which Dr. Hofmann describes his experience:


4/19/43 16:20: 0.5 cc of 1/2 promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate orally = 0.25 mg tartrate. Taken diluted with about 10 cc water. Tasteless.

17:00: Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh.

Supplement of 4/21: Home by bicycle.

From 18:00- ca. 20:00 most severe crisis.

Here the notes in my laboratory journal cease. I was able to write the last words only with great effort. By now it was already clear to me that LSD had been the cause of the remarkable experience of the previous Friday, for the altered perceptions were of the same type as before, only much more intense. I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. I asked my laboratory assistant, who was informed of the self-experiment, to escort me home. We went by bicycle, no automobile being available because of wartime restrictions on their use. On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had traveled very rapidly. Finally, we arrived at home safe and sound, and I was just barely capable of asking my companion to summon our family doctor and request milk from the neighbors.

In celebration of this day, psychonauts across the globe will be taking LSD and riding their bicycles (hopefully in a safe spot). I recommend that our readers do the same.

A few LSD links:

Images, Video, Audio, and Text from the 2006 LSD Symposium
Hofmann Library Collection
Audio from the Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead from Internet Archive

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Scientist Reverses Process of Cell Division

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 17, 2006
in Biology and Health/Bio-Tech
. 0 Comments

Gary J. Gorbsky, Ph.D., a scientist with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, has found a way to reverse the process of cell division.

The discovery could have important implications for the treatment of cancer, birth defects and numerous other diseases and disorders. Gorbsky’s findings appear in the April 13 issue of the journal Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific publications.

“No one has gotten the cell cycle to go backwards before now,” said Gorbsky, who holds the W.H. and Betty Phelps Chair in Developmental Biology at OMRF. “This shows that certain events in the cell cycle that have long been assumed irreversible may, in fact, be reversible.”

Cell division occurs millions of times each day in the human body and is essential to life itself. In the lab, Gorbsky and his OMRF colleagues were able to control the protein responsible for the division process, interrupt and reverse the event, sending duplicate chromosomes back to the center of the original cell, an event once thought impossible.

omrf

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Children Bond With Robots

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 17, 2006
in Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Robots/A.I. and Society/Social Systems
. 0 Comments

An experiment started last year by Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories and a nursery school in San Diego is revealing that children can develop emotions toward robots, leading to new commercial possibilities as machines become smarter and friendlier.

“We adults tend to ask children if it is a toy or a human being, but they are free of such established categorisation,” explains esearcher Fumihide Tanaka who has been working on the project with Machine Perception Laboratory. “If intelligent-machine technology is successfully developed, a century later people will see the concept just as commonsense. This is natural as we are living in a different era now.”

The children, aged up to 24 months, started spending one hour every day with QRIO in March last year. Tanaka remote-controls the robot from a hidden place for some 80% of the immersion sessions, with the humanoid moving on its own for the rest of the time.

Children initially stayed away from the biped but gradually warmed to it, hugging the robot and otherwise showing affection. Researchers found out that when the robot takes part in the children’s dance sessions, the toddlers stay in the room for twice as long.

Children consider the robot not a toy or a living human being but “something between the two”. “They are adapting themselves to the robot and empathising with it, although nobody teaches them to do so,” Mr Tanaka added.

While QRIO is their playmate, another robot, RUBI, which runs on a wheel with a TV panel in its belly, joined the class in April 2005 as a teaching assistant.

WMMNA < australian

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Lancet calls for LSD in labs

Published
by
billycuts
on April 14, 2006
in Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Entheogens/Psychedelics, Health/Bio-Tech and Mind/Body/Spirit
. 0 Comments

“Use more psychedelic drugs,” is not advice you would expect from your GP, but that is the call from an influential US medical journal to researchers.

An editorial in the Lancet says that the “demonisation of psychedelic drugs as a social evil” has stifled vital medical research that would lead to a better understanding of the brain and better treatments for conditions such as depression.

The journal’s editor Richard Horton said he was not advocating recreational drug use, but championed the benefits of researchers studying the effects of drugs such as LSD and Ecstasy by using them themselves in the lab.

“The blanket ban on psychedelic drugs enforced in many countries continues to hinder safe and controlled investigation, in a medical environment, of their potential benefits,” said the editorial, ”...criminalisation of these agents has also led to an excessively cautious approach to further research into their therapeutic benefits.”

Dr Horton told Guardian Unlimited that important advances were made by researchers using psychedelic drugs on themselves, but that these studies were stifled by the post-1960s anti-drug backlash. “Our very earliest understanding of the neurochemistry of the brain came from studying LSD-like compounds. Those same researchers were also taking those drugs, not recreationally, but as experiments on themselves. This was immensely important work.”

Guardian Unlimited

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Beverage Creates a Buzz

Published
by
billycuts
on April 14, 2006
in Anthropology, Ethnobotany/Botany, Law, Other Drugs and Resistance
. 0 Comments

INZA, Colombia — Call it the “Real Thing.”

Indians in this remote mountain village in southern Colombia are marketing a particularly refreshing soft drink that harks back to Coca-Cola’s original formula, when “coca” was in the name for a reason.

Advertising posters here describe the carbonated, citrus-flavored Coca-Sek as “more than an energizer” — a buzz that just might be provided by a key ingredient, a syrup produced by boiling coca leaves.

Since January, the Nasa indigenous community has been offering the soft drink locally and in neighboring Popayan, where it is bottled. By the end of the year, the Nasa hope to sell Coca-Sek nationwide, targeting the same consumers who drink Gatorade or Red Bull, both highly popular with Colombians.

For six years, the Nasa have been quietly selling coca-flavored cookies, aromatic teas, wines and ointments at informal sidewalk stalls and in health food stores. They say they’re trying to capitalize on a plentiful resource — and remove the stigma from a leaf that for them is sacred.

LA Times

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