« Three indicators of cultural success | Main | A reform proposal for Zimbabwean inflation »
Assorted links
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.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 14, 2008 at 04:29 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
"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.
Posted by: BoscoH at Aug 14, 2008 4:53:47 PM
One of my favourite bits of quantum weirdness is half-integer spin particles. Nice common ones like electrons. Rotating a half-integer spin particle through 360 degrees is not symmetrical; you have to rotate it twice round to get back where you started. There is no way to make sense of this on macro-scale.
Posted by: Richard Gadsden at Aug 14, 2008 5:11:05 PM
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!
Posted by: AxiomThree at Aug 14, 2008 5:15:46 PM
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!
Posted by: AxiomThree at Aug 14, 2008 5:17:36 PM
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.
Posted by: josh at Aug 14, 2008 5:22:21 PM
Josh, unfortunately it takes more than one Vicodin pill to get high, unless maybe you snort it. One Vicodin pill doesn't even really help with pain. Maybe if you had 3 glasses of wine with it, or something.
Posted by: Cliff at Aug 14, 2008 6:16:25 PM
I've only taken vicodin a few times, for a back injury. One pill did the trick for me at least.
Posted by: josh at Aug 14, 2008 6:59:19 PM
You can overdose on Vicodin really easy but it isn't the Hydrocodone that will kill you, it's the Acetaminophen. That always bugged me about House. Whenever I too Vicodin I would use the cold water extraction technique to squeeze the Acetaminophen out of the Vicodin. This allows someone in actual pain to (or a junkie who wants to get high) to get enough of the relatively safe (but potentially addictive) Hydrocodone without consuming a death dealing dose of Acetaminophen.
Posted by: themightypuck at Aug 14, 2008 7:14:45 PM
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.
Posted by: Rationalitate at Aug 14, 2008 9:13:48 PM
Rationalitate,
I think for a hard core addict it is quite possible to kill yourself with a clean but unpredictably powerful dose of opiates. Obviously if you want to kill yourself with painkillers, the cheapest (although I bet it is painful) approach is to down a bottle of Tylenol. For a junkie though, whose daily requirements are about 20 times what it would take to drop you like a wild animal hit with a tranquilizer dart on some Animal Planet documentary, I can see how you can be at some risk if the latest batch is significantly more powerful than the last and you haven't checked it. Having said that, I believe (for government regulated drugs) opoid agonists probably kill less people than Tylenol.
Posted by: themightypuck at Aug 14, 2008 10:14:37 PM
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.
Posted by: adam at Aug 14, 2008 10:30:07 PM
they're the same particle.
Posted by: dj superflat at Aug 14, 2008 11:07:29 PM
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.
Posted by: DPrychitko at Aug 15, 2008 6:17:23 AM
2. I can't wait until the Large Hadron Collider, http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/ , destroys space time, or simply provides Steven Hawking a Nobel Prize. Either way, I'm very excited for quantum physics as well.
4. Ask any college student, not a scared high school student, about their experiences in high school. I think a large minority of high school kids are addicted to getting high by any means (risking overdose). Also, getting drugs is way easier than alcohol or cigarettes, mainly because the quantity needed is smaller (supply and demand curve help here?) And Marihuana is way too inexpensive.
Posted by: Brainwarped at Aug 15, 2008 7:08:31 AM
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?
Posted by: Kenny at Aug 15, 2008 8:52:17 AM
the St. Louis photos show the arch, but it was not built until 1965.
Posted by: spencer at Aug 15, 2008 9:16:50 AM
the St. Louis photos show the arch, but it was not built until 1965.
Posted by: spencer at Aug 15, 2008 9:17:00 AM
Tips for enjoying a vacation:
1. Buy a last minute ticket to a country you do not know the capital not the president to make sure you will not meet those http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2008/08/vacation-time-s.html people,
2. Get rid of all lists. You have to deal with them in everyday life.
3. Do not bring food (including almonds). Try the local food.
4. Return directly to the office and bring the joy of vacation to the office. You have time the next couple of weeks to unpack.
Posted by: Student at Aug 15, 2008 9:35:35 AM
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.
Posted by: Don Geddis at Aug 15, 2008 5:06:36 PM
Bvlgari Jewelry
Replica Bvlgari Jewelry
Bvlgari Replica Jewelry
Gucci Jewelry
Replica Gucci Jewelry
Posted by: aion kina at Mar 18, 2009 9:10:53 PM
