Nå har jeg nettopp prøvd min nye KAJAKK. WeeEEeEEeeEEEEeeEeEeeeEe!

Five science fiction movies that get the science right

...fordi det ikke finnes noe mer irriterende enn håpløs fremstilling av vitenskap på film (eller CSI for den saks skyld)!

Kjekk låt fra Modest Mouse. Passer med pils, solbriller og deilig vårvær.

Dashboard

Dette er egentlig meget gammelt nytt, men det er jo kjekt at folk flest får det med seg også. Absint er ikke hallusinogent, det inneholder ikke andre rusmidler enn etanol i vesentlige mengder. Man har lenge beskyldt nervegiften thujon for å være ansvarlig for de såkalte absint-psykosene som herjet blant bohemene på slutten av 1800-tallet. Men som det rapporteres nå inneholder ikke original absint noe mer thujon enn dagens lovlige 'ufarlige' absint. (Forøvrig er det ingenting som tyder på at thujon har noen hallusinogen effekt, så hvor myten kommer fra er vanskelig å si). Derimot inneholdt den gamle absinten meget store mengder etanol. Det eksisterer også teorier om at de mentale og fysiske forstyrrelsene absintdrikkerne opplevde kan skyldes blyforgiftning. Gamle krystallglass kan ha meget høyt innhold av bly, og løsninger med høy etanolkonsentrasjon har blitt foreslått å løse ut litt av dette blyet. Bly er som kjent ikke noe særlig for helsen.

Uansett. Absint er og blir en ekstremt vond sterk alkoholdrikk. Ikke noe mer muffens enn som så.

Gratulerer Thomas, Master of Arts!!!

I kjølvannet av Albert Hoffmanns død våkner interessen for bruk av psykotrope stoffer medisinsk:

BBC: LSD, Ketamine and Cannabis could treat conditions from headache to diabetes

....på MAPS ligger det et knippe nekrologer for Albert Hoffmann...

Albert Hofmann, 11 January 1006 – 29 April 2008

An Obituary by Dieter A. Hagenbach and Lucius Werthmüller

At the age of 102 years, Albert Hofmann died peacefully last Tuesday morning, 29th April, in his home near Basel, Switzerland. Still last weekend we talked to him, and he expressed his great joy about the blooming plants and the fresh green of the meadows and trees around his house. His vitality and his open mind conducted him until his last breath.

He is reputed to be one of the most important chemists of our times. He is the discoverer of LSD, which he considers, up to date, as both a "wonder drug" and a "problem child". In addition he did pioneering work as a researcher of other psychoactive substances as well as active agents of important medicinal plants and mushrooms. Under the spell of the consciousness-expanding potential of LSD the scientist turned increasingly into a philosopher of nature and a visionary critical of contemporary culture.

Until his death Albert Hofmann remained active. He communicated with colleagues and experts from all over the world, gave interviews, and showed great interest in the world's affairs, although he decided to retire from public life already a few years ago. Nevertheless he welcomed visitors at his home on the Rittimatte, and opened the door for late in the evening.

He managed to keep his almost childlike curiosity for the wonders of nature and creation. In his "paradise," as he would call his home, he enjoyed being close to nature, especially to plants. During one of our last visits he said to us with luminous eyes: "The Rittimatte is my second most important discovery." It was always a unique experience to stroll with him over his meadows and to share his enjoying the living nature all around.
Gratefully and lovingly we grieve for an outstanding scientist, an important philosopher, a dear and true friend, and our member of the board.

Albert Hofmann was born on January 1906 in the quiet small town of Baden, Switzerland, as the eldest one of four children. His father is a toolmaker in a factory where he meets Albert’s mother-to-be; when he falls seriously ill, Albert has to support the family. That’s why he decides for a commercial apprenticeship. At the same time he starts studying Latin and other languages, since he wants to take his A-levels, which he succeeds in at a private school, paid for by a godfather.

In 1926, at the age of twenty, Albert Hofmann begins to study chemistry at the University of Zurich. Four years later he does his doctorate with distinction. Subsequently he works at the Sandoz pharmaceutical-chemical research laboratory in Basel, a company to which he proves his loyalty for more than four uninterrupted decades. (In 1996 Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy merged to become Novartis.) That’s where he mainly works with medicinal plants and mushrooms. He's specifically interested in alkaloids (nitrogen compounds) of ergot, a cereal fungus. In 1938 he isolates the basic component of all therapeutically essential ergot alkaloids, lysergic acid; he mixes it with a series of chemicals. He then tests the effects of the thus derived lysergic acid derivatives as circulatory and respiratory stimulant – among others LSD-25 (Lysergic acid diethylamide). Because the effects observed fell short of expectations, however, the pharmacologists at Sandoz quickly lose interest in it.

Five years later, following a "peculiar presentiment," Albert Hofmann devotes himself again to LSD-25. On 16 April 1943, while synthesizing, he is overcome by unusual sensations – "a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness," – which prompt him to interrupt his laboratory work. "At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxication like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight too unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away."

Three days later, on 19 April 1943, Hofmann sets out for the first voluntary LSD trip in the history of man. Because he cannot yet judge the enormous efficacy of the drug, he takes, at 4:20 pm, with 250 microgram a relatively high dose – and gets to know the hallucinogenic power of the substance with all its intensity.
With his discovery of LSD Albert Hofmann has caused a snowball effect, which turns into an avalanche in no time. It influences the late second millennium – at least in the Western world – to an extent, comparable only to the "pill". Consciousness researchers respectfully spoke of an "atom bomb of the mind."

To worldwide setting-in research Albert Hofmann makes essential contributions. So he is, in 1958, the first one to succeed in isolating the psychoactive substances psilocybin and psilocin from Mexican magic mushrooms (Psilocybe mexicana); in Ololiuqui, the seeds of a climbing plant, he finds substances related to LSD. He isolates and synthesizes substances of important medicinal plants in order to study their effects. His basic research blesses Sandoz with several successful remedies: Hydergine, an effective one in geriatrics, Dihydergot, a circulation- and blood-pressure stabilizing medicament, and Methergine, an active agent applied in gynecology. Hofmann stays with Sandoz until his retirement in 1971, last as head of the research department for natural medicines. From then on he devotes more and more of his time to writing and lecturing. He increasingly wins recognition for his scientific pioneering ventures: he is given honorary doctorates by the ETH Zurich, the Stockholm university, and the Berlin Free University; and he is called into the Nobel Prize Committee.

Here, outstanding contributions to research were honored – but Albert Hofmann's life's work comprises much more. From the start he took a favorable view of efforts by physicians and psychotherapists to include LSD into new approaches for the treatment of manifold chronic diseases. But LSD isn't only useful with special diagnoses – it's Hofmann's firm belief that the "psychedelic" potential of this "wonder drug" could be beneficial to all of us. In LSD-induced altered states of consciousness its discoverer doesn’t only see psychotic delusions of a chemically manipulated mind, but windows to a higher reality – true spiritual experiences during which a normally deeply buried potential of our mind, the heavenly element of creation, our unity with it reveals itself. "The one-sided belief in the scientific view of life is based on a far-reaching misunderstanding," Hofmann says in his book Insight – Outlook. "Certainly, everything it contains is real – but this represents just one half of reality; only its material, quantifiable part. It lacks all those spiritual dimensions which cannot be described in physical or chemical terms; and it’s exactly these which include the most important characteristics of all life."

It’s not the single consumer alone who profits from chemicals which help to understand these aspects of the world; for Hofmann it could help to heal deficits the Western world chronically suffers from: "Materialism, estrangement from nature (...), lack of professional fulfillment in a mechanized, lifeless world of employment, boredom and aimlessness in a rich, saturated society, the missing of a sense-making philosophical fundamentalness of life." Starting from experiences as LSD conveys them, we could "develop a new awareness of reality" which "could become the basis of a spirituality that's not founded on the dogmas of existing religions, but on insights into a higher and profounder sense" – on that we recognize, read, and understand "the revelations of the book which God's finger wrote." When such insights "become established in our collective consciousness, it could arise from that, that scientific research and the previous destroyers of nature – technology and industry – will serve the purpose of changing back our world into what it formerly was: into an earthly Garden of Eden."

With this message the genius chemist turns into a profound philosopher of nature and visionary critical of contemporary culture. The critical distance from the LSD euphoria of the hippie- and flower power-driven ones Albert Hofmann has never given up, however; that he has fathered a "problem child" he already emphasizes with the title of one of his most known works. He always underlines the risks of an uncontrolled intake. On the other hand he never tires of emphasizing what's the basic difference between LSD and most of the other drugs: even if used repeatedly, it doesn't make addictive; it doesn't reduce one's awareness; taken in a normal dose it’s absolutely non-toxic. The total demonizing of psychedelics, as pursued by the mass media, conservative politicians, and governments from the sixties onward, he never could understand; for him, there is no reason why mentally stable persons in the right set and setting shouldn't enjoy LSD. All the more disappointed Albert Hofmann was when, in the late sixties, he had to see it happen that the use of LSD was worldwide criminalized and prohibited – even for therapeutic and research purposes

The impetus for a change emanating from the impact of the international Symposium "LSD – Problem Child and Wonder Drug" in 2006 in Basel, at the occasion of his 100th birthday, quickened him to say that "after this conference my problem child has definitely turned into a wonder child," and he regarded this development as his most beautiful birthday present.

And after just shortly before his 102nd birthday, he enjoyed taking notice that the first LSD study with humans has received the permission from the Federal Office of Public Health in Bern, which he called the "fulfillment of my heart's desire."

His life has become an ideal for many for how we can reach a great age in mental and physical vigor by retaining a childlike curiosity.

Albert Hofmann repeatedly expressed his conviction, that his mystical experiences and his trips into other worlds of consciousness, which he experienced first spontaneously as a child and later during his experiments with psychedelic substances would be the best preparations for the last journey which everybody has to go on at the end of her or his life. He has retained his curiosity for himself for his last journey.

Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, died of a heart attack yesterday in his native Switzerland. He was 102. While researching a fungus that grew on rye, Hofmman synthesized the compound into lysergic acid diethylamide, which eventually helped influence every piece of music written in 1967.

Oda

Fotografi: murrik

Det er alltid kjekt å kunne si hva var det jeg sa, men dessverre ikke alltid like hyggelig.

Motstanden mot biodrivstoff øker i takt med omfanget av matvarekrisen.

Uansett.

Hva var det jeg sa?

og...

...hva var det jeg sa?

Et godt og innsiktsfullt innlegg om den norske narkotikapolitikken i Dagsavisen i dag:

Skudd i blinde

De (...) tror visst fortsatt at det går an å vinne krigen mot narkotika. Men den krigen er tapt. Narkotikaen vant. Nå gjelder det å få til en fredsavtale.

I Danmark har de tatt til fornuft...

Denne fredagen føles som en mandag. Man blir litt dagvill når man jobber som jeg gjør for tiden. Hver dag. Jeg har jobbet 27 av de siste 28 dagene. For det meste ikke lange og tunge dager. Sette seg i bilen hver morgen, kjøre 3 mil, jobbe noen timer, kjøre hjem igjen. Men likevel. Det gjør noe rart med hodet.

Strangeland



Teletubbies møter David Lynch

Houseman oppsummerer hvilke av de 1001 bøkene man MÅ lese før man dør han har pløyd seg gjennom. Som den gode lesehesten jeg er, måtte jeg nesten ta en sjekk jeg også. Her er de 32 jeg har lest. De resterende 969 er nå oppførst på leselisten.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Candide – Voltaire
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous

...alle anbefales!

Enda en grunn til å være skeptisk til botox: Botulinum-toksin kan spre seg til hjernen! Fra før vet vi at man blir seende ut som en voksdukke av det. Madness!

Som jeg har nevnt tidligere, det at man skal bli så frisk og fjong av å drikke store mengder vann er en ren myte! Man skal drikke når man er tørst.

Fantastiske mikrobe-kosedyr!

Jeg vil ha svartedauden:

Framtidsvisjonene presentert i storfilmen Junior fra 1994 ser ut til å være i ferd med å gå i oppfyllelse.... Ihvertfall på et vis:

Thomas Beatie, a married man who used to be a woman, is pregnant with a baby girl

The Raconteurs er Jack Whites 'andre' band. De kom med det ypperlige albumet 'Broken Boy Soldier' for et par år siden.

De hadde egentlig tenkt å gi ut sitt siste album uten noen som helst form for promotering. Dessverre ble planene lekket noen dager før utgivelsen, så albumet kom ikke helt uventet.

Uansett er det en litt mer rocka videreføring av det forrige albumet. Med et par perler. Særlig sistesporet, Carolina Drama. Jeg ELSKER den.