The following is a neat little experiment, the result of which may be counter-intuitive to some of those who embrace the “all bodies fall the same way inside earth’s gravity” doctrine.

“Legal highs: the dark side of medicinal chemistry”, by David Nichols of Purdue University’s pharmacology department, has hardly been published in the prestigious science journal Nature [469, 7 (2011)] and it is already fully exploited for the usual drug war scare tactics bringing anything to do with psychoactive compounds into relation with pure evil - ‘reefer madness’ over and over again [I found some on Yahoo ‘science news’ but I am not going to link to such crap].

How does an electrical torch or flashlight work? According to the usual description, the lamp inside produces light, this light is shone on the objects we desire to see, partially reflected from their surfaces, and finally some of that light is captured by our eyes. This is not wrong, but it somewhat distorts the fundamentals of visual perception, which is not about perceiving light but about perceiving differences.

What is the most popular form of Citizen Science?

Some want to make us believe it is SETI@home, 8 year olds being pressured by overenthusiastic teachers, or people in their backyards looking for comets.

The old discussion about how an airplane, that is many tons of steel, can keep staying supported in mere air, is a perfect example for how discussions way too often polarize into two camps with both sides being wrong. Little headway is possible once any attempt at resolution is portrayed as either a dangerous accommodating that leads onto a slippery slope toward defeat, or worse belonging to the other, the evil side. There are too many such issues, not only in politics or largely yet to be explored scientific fields like climatology. Even in known physics, for instance in special relativity, there are these polarized debates where both sides are wrong. The theories are well known and their domains of applicability are well delimited by both mathematics and experiment.

One more of the many crazy results of the idiotic “war on drugs” is that we have to pay lots of money for chemicals that actually cost next to nothing. For example, adding up time and money spent on health insurance, physicians, and pharmacies, taking care of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is plainly not a viable option for many poorer people or those with a tight schedule, say single mothers taking care of their kids while having a job. Nobody gets a year’s worth of medication; you have to go at least every month again or more frequently, especially in case of ADHD medicines, so to feed your doctor and the pharmacist. Got insurance?