One of the crazy repercussions of the idiotic “war on drugs”, apart from destruction of innocent lives and whole countries like Mexico and the US, is that you cannot openly buy many quite harmless substances while relatively dangerous ones are freely available.

An interesting chemical in this respect and also in regards to the philosophy of mind and what we understand to be “truth” is 2-(diphenylmethoxy)-N,N-dimethylethylamine, short Diphenhydramine (DPH). As a sleep aid it is available cheaply in 99 cent stores (in the US). You can also spend a lot of money instead buying the exact same marketed as Benadryl against allergies.

The InterAcademy Council Board, composed of presidents of 15 academies of science and equivalent organizations(1) representing Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, pulled no punches in assessing the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) performance during the latter part of the decade.

Despite overwhelming evidence for climate change, the IPCC issued “substantive findings” based on little proof and needs to rework its process, the independent review said.   The UN had requested the IAC review.   

That's a long way down from the heady days of a 2007 Nobel Peace prize for the IPCC.   

First of all, yes, I know not to expect any better of the Express. But it's coming up on a year since Squid Says: What's for Dinner? Probably Not You, so it must be time for another rant.

I just can't help taking the bait, even though this is clearly trolling:

Millions of killer giant squid are not only devouring vast amounts of fish they have even started attacking humans . . . Hunting in 1,000-strong packs the giant squid can out-swim and out-think fish.

Wave functions and characteristic vectors.

There aren’t many cyclopses in nature, and those that exist don’t live up to expectation. They tend to be crustaceans like water fleas and another aptly named “cyclops” (see left photo below) or early invertebrate fish-like ancestors of ours like lancelets.

Getting these animals tipsy and stabbing them through the eye with a stake turns out to be much less impressive than when Odysseus did it.

Arctic Ice September 2010

As I write these words - September 01 2010 - Arctic sea ice extent as reported by NSIDC and JAXA is not as low as I had expected it to be.


image source: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
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The IARC-JAXA graph shows 2010 extent as 4th lowest of recent years thus far, behind 2007, 2008 and 2009.

A new paper produced by the DZERO collaboration got me quite interested today, for several reasons. The analysis is based on a large data sample: over seven inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions! This is a huge dataset, the result of about 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions! In fact, the measurement these data has made possible is extremely precise and it exposes quite strikingly the shortcomings of our present modeling of the production of vector bosons.

As promised, here's part three of the nails-in-the-brain trilogy. Only, while nails may be the brain-poking standby, they're not the only foreign bodies to be shot, shoved or stabbed into the human brain.

For example, after getting into a fistfight a man reported to his local emergency room with a headache, black eye and a cut on his cheek. Imaging found a 10.5-centimeter paintbrush embedded in the man's brain. Surgery removed the paintbrush and the man experienced no lasting effects. The paintbrush had entered bristles-first.

It's counter-intuitive that hurting oneself could make a person feel better but, based on the assumption that no one truly wants to hurt themselves without a benefit, researchers have taken reports from people who compulsively harm themselves and sought a way where cutting or burning could provide relief from emotional distress. 

Individuals with borderline personality disorder experience intense emotions and often show a deficiency of emotion regulation skills. This group also displays high prevalence rates of self-injurious behavior, which they claim helps them to reduce negative emotional states.

'Dry' water, which resembles powdered sugar yet consists of 95 percent water, was discovered in 1968 and got attention in the cosmetics industry.   Each powder particle contains a water droplet surrounded by modified silica, which is much like ordinary beach sand. The silica coating prevents the water droplets from combining and turning back into a liquid so the result is a fine powder that can soak up liquids - or gases - which chemically combine with the water molecules to form a hydrate.