1. Six tips for enjoying a vacation, from Gretchen Rubin. I endorse them all including the point about the almonds.
2. I never tire of reading about quantum weirdness.
3. Via Andrew Sullivan, American cities in the 1950s; beautiful photos.
4. The war on drugs, continued. This article should be a sobering wake-up for many people.
“Kids think that because these are medicines that are prescribed, they are safe,” she said. “The problem is that there is very little difference between the amount they take for a high and the amount that causes an overdose.”
Hilarious. What happens to adults that they stop being able to think like kids? Kids and young adults do drugs because they like the high and they enjoy the risk.
The sobering wake-up will be the SWAT team smashing down the door when the police start busting parents for being “passive pushers” in this stupid War on Drugs. Paramilitary style forced-entry raids for everyone!
The claim bosco cites sounds wrong anyway. How much Vicodin would it take to overdose? A whole lot more than the one pill it takes to get high, I’ll bet.
I’ve only taken vicodin a few times, for a back injury. One pill did the trick for me at least.
The last paragraph of the article on drugs is absurd:
“Kids think that because these are medicines that are prescribed, they are safe,” she said. “The problem is that there is very little difference between the amount they take for a high and the amount that causes an overdose.”
If we’re talking about opioid painkillers, this is bullshit. The overdose dose is about ten times as much as the effective dose. As any emergency room doctor will tell you, someone who intentionally takes a whole bottle of Percocet won’t die, whereas someone who takes a whole bottle of Advil will. Opiates are very safe when pure (an advantage of prescription drugs over street heroin – heroin is often adultered, but you can’t add things to a pill) – it takes a lot to kill someone. “Overdoses” on opiates are almost always actually bad combinations of opiates and either other sorts of pills (benzodiazepines) or more often alcohol.
Of course it is easier to get pills in school than alcohol. Pills are smaller. How much alcohol could someone really carry in a backpack? Portability matters. You could get any drug you wanted during school, when I was in high school in the early 90′s. Now, I assume you can get any drug you want in middle school. The press is always behind the curve when it comes to what is going on.
Tyler, Richard, or anyone who knows: Is the entanglement hypothesis an extension of the Heisenberg uncertainty concept? Is it an application? Is the former a predominantly empirical claim while the latter is predominantly epistemological? I do not carefully follow this literature, as you can tell.
A sobering wake-up? As in, “why is it so much easier for kids to obtain illegal drugs?” or “oh-my-god, hide the Advil!”.
Tyler, how about an economic analysis of the illegal drug industry? Are there entrenched mainstream interests that stand to lose if they’re legalized? What’s the cost-benefit of drug prohibition?
the St. Louis photos show the arch, but it was not built until 1965.
Your “quantum weirdness” link is confused. It assumes a model of quantum interactions that was popular in the early days (“wavefunction collapse”), but which is almost certainly wrong. And it’s asking the question, “how fast is this collapse going?” And the answer seems to be: faster than anything we can measure.
But that doesn’t mean that there actually is a real collapse, nor that anything is traveling “10,000 times faster than light”.
The vastly more feasible alternative is the Multiple Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. All the calculations come out the same, but there is no “collapse” signal which needs “travel” between the particles — at any speed whatsoever.
If anything, the experiment — which was unable to detect any delay at all between the two particles — is yet more evidence for the correctness of the MW interpretation, vs. the broken “collapse” theory.
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