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I've got some phat new headphones. Sennheiser HD 280 Pros. I opted for them over the HD 600s because of the price, they're slightly more portable, and they're closed, which means I can't hear a thing when I have them on. Not a thing.

I also downloaded "Rumors" by Lindsay Lohan, and I can't stop listening to it. just can't say no to a redhead!

Here's the whole photoshoot.

Wired has an interesting article up on the Wall Street Journal, and its lack of an online presence. I hadn't noticed it honestly, until I read about it. When I travel I usually try to get a copy of the journal from the hotel I'm staying at because it's good reading. But when it comes to my daily intake of online news (my only source) the Journal is conspicuously missing.

The WSJ has opted to require payment in order to access their material online. This has relegated its impact on the web to "insignificant." Much like I wrote about the other day:

The more readily available information is the more impact it's going to have on the world.

The for-pay model that the Journal opted for is outmoded and outdated, and was a bad move. I hope they change it because I enjoy reading it, and I'd like to add it to my collection of resources that I read on a daily basis. Even worse, some of the best, most-insightful, well-written journalism anywhere is going unread by the majority of the online world.

The French are not happy with Google right now. Aside from Google losing myriad lawsuits in France, they've also drawn the ire of the head French librarian as well due to their recent project which entails indexing several influential academic libraries in the US. Monsieur Jeanneney is upset that Google is only digitizing English works. This, he believes (and probably rightfully so) that English works will be given more weight than French ones.

Indeed this is true. The more readily available information is the more impact it's going to have on the world. If you can find something by typing a simple search query on the Internet, the odds are more people are going to read it than if something was only available in book format. (I can't remember the last time I used a book to do research.)

It's sort of a natural selection for information. That which is indexed, and that which is not.

All French-bashing aside, I hope this spurs other countries and other languages to take up the digitalization of literary works. It will only increase informational penetration, because let's face it: most younger people spend more time reading things online than they do reading books.

More than a decade later, Halpern is now an associate director of substance abuse research at Harvard University's McLean Hospital and is at the forefront of a revival of research into psychedelic medicine. He recently received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give late-stage cancer patients the psychedelic drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy. He is also laying the groundwork for testing LSD as a treatment for dreaded super-migraines known as cluster headaches.

And Halpern is not alone. Clinical trials of psychedelic drugs are planned or under way at numerous centres around the world for conditions ranging from anxiety to alcoholism. It may not be long before doctors are legally prescribing hallucinogens for the first time in decades. "There are medicines here that have been overlooked, that are fundamentally valuable," says Halpern.

I wonder if we'll study them in coming years… anyone care to comment? Personally, I'd like to see drugs re-evaluated despite their public stigma. (*cough*marijuana*cough*)

The article goes into quite a bit more detail about the whole thing, and how psychedelic drugs were "discovered."

From New Scientist.

The internet is shit

"If I can operate Google, I can find anything… Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."

–Alan Cohen, V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider, New York Times, 6/29/03

I can name 20 people from my old school class who aren't in Google. I can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawling. I can go into a bar and hear stories Usenet hasn't come close to in its 22 years of waffle. "Oh but what about the stuff you CAN get on the web?" the netheads say. But they're missing the point.

…

And look what we've done with it. Food wrappers and soap operas now tell us to visit their websites. Money is pumped online by people who can't even spell HTML. All manner of pointless and irritating content is continually poured down the infinite hole of data, unfiltered and over-appreciated. In accepting freedom of speech, we can't hide from its consequences - which in this case is millions of terabytes of unreliable information, badly designed and clumsily written. We have failed our own creation and given birth something truly awful. We're just too busy cooing over the pram to notice.

And then what? Then we can move on. If we truly understand that the internet is shit then maybe we'll go back to looking elsewhere to check our information instead of just Google. Maybe journalists will do proper research again. If we remember that the medium isn't the message then maybe we'll stop aimlessly surfing for something amusing when we could actually be doing something fun. And, crucially, if the internet is just seen as occasionally unavoidable, maybe those websites that give us something special will be all the more amazing for it.

Interesting take. Can't say I disagree with all of it either.

Penguin Warehouse, Inc. - Buy a Pet Penguin Today!

I want a Gentoo. But then I'd have to use Gentoo Linux. And I don't really want to do that.

Aren't they cute, though? I shall call him… Walter.

7.52am, and I've been up for an hour. Showered, ready to go. See I've got a doctor's appointment at 8.40, a pharmacokinetics exam at 11, and a meeting with the Dean of Pharmacy at 2.30 to discuss the kinetics professor, and how he's not teaching us. This is the first time I've felt unprepared for an exam as a result of a professor not doing their job. Usually it's just me being a slacker.

Went out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory last night with Adam which was nice. It's been an incredibly stressful day, but I've been bitched at for including semi-details about frat-related stuff in my blog, so I won't go into details until it's all done and over with. Let's just say I took an Ativan and went to bed around 10.00 last night.

$6488.

That's what my week-long stay at Beth Israel cost Blue Cross. All-in-all much less than I expected. It is likely that Blue Cross gets preferred pricing, while those without insurance pay the most. I don't have to pay that amount, I just wanted to know for my own benefit how much it ended up costing.

Hooray health insurance!

Intriguing idea. It made me wish that I had been able to learn during my recent week-long stay. Granted, I'm over 19, but it still would have been cool to get a first-hand look at medicine on the front lines, as it were. I suppose the permissions would have been a nightmare, though. Still wish I could have tailed a doc or five. Not that I'd have had the strength for it. *shrug*

In regards to the article, it's no surprise that children are creative under duress. Writing, drawing, or any other creative activity can be a coping mechanism; I'm not quite sure why these findings are ground-breaking or otherwise exceptional.