Amid opioid crisis, researchers aim to put medical marijuana to the test

Dr. Dean

(NBC News)

Anecdotal and historical accounts of pot’s painkilling properties abound. But so far, scientific evidence that it works better than traditional painkillers is hard to come by.

Because the U.S. government classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug with no medical use — like heroin and cocaine — funding for research is hard to get, scientists say. And as a 2015 article in the journal Current Pain and Headache Reports points out, high-quality clinical studies of pot’s effectiveness — randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled — are limited.

Dr. Jeffrey Chen wants to change that.

YES! RESEARCH!

Why our individualistic culture makes us less happy

Dr. Dean

(Vox)

A new book entitled The Happiness Fantasy by Carl Cederström, a business professor at Stockholm University, traces our current conception of happiness to its roots in modern psychiatry and the so-called Beat generation of the ‘50s and ‘60s. He argues that the values of the countercultural movement — liberation, freedom, and authenticity — were co-opted by corporations and advertisers, who used them to perpetuate a culture of consumption and production. And that hyper-individualistic culture actually makes us much less happy than we could be.

This has long been an apt criticism of the Human Potential Movement. But I would add it was not the intent of its founders who were interested​ in​ social reform.

How America’s ‘most reckless’ billionaire created the fracking boom

Dr. Dean

(The Guardian​)

You can make an argument that the Federal Reserve is entirely responsible for
the fracking boom,” one private-equity titan told me. That view is echoed by Amir Azar, a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “The real catalyst of the shale revolution was the 2008 financial crisis and the era of unprecedentedly low interest rates it ushered in,” he wrote in a recent report. Another investor put it this way: “If companies were forced to live within the cash flow they produce, US oil would not be a factor in the rest of the world, and would have grown at a quarter to half the rate that it has.”

Worries about the financial fragility of the fracking revolution have simmered for some time. John Hempton, who runs the Australia-based hedge fund Bronte Capital, recalls having debates with his partner as the boom was just getting going. “The oil and gas are real,” his partner would say. “Yes,” Hempton would respond, “but the economics don’t work.”

Oh, what could possibly go wrong here?

Does everything in the world boil down to basic units – or can emergence explain how distinctive new things arise?

Dr. Dean

(Aeon)

Emergence was popular in philosophy of science more than a century ago. Reputable figures such as John Stuart Mill, Henri Bergson and C D Broad suggested that chemistry and biology would struggle to account for the origins of life; perhaps life could only be said to ‘emerge’ from these domains, demanding its own special laws and explanations. Beginning in the 1930s, though, advances in quantum chemistry and the discovery of the structure of DNA and RNA showed the potential of atomistic approaches. Soon enough, a cloud of suspicion formed over emergence and its scientific potential.

Nowadays, the concept is often invoked by quantum mystics, believers in souls, and advocates of the inscrutable nature of consciousness. These are the fuzzy approaches to emergence, and we should avoid them. But emergence shouldn’t be judged on the basis of its dubious friends. Long disdained, emergence can still be a valuable addition to our ways of understanding the world. The trick is to capture what is interesting about emergence without lapsing into an attitude of awed mysticism.

I have long been attracted to this idea. It has a powerful explanatory​ narrative that addresses​ multiple​ of metaphysical and epistemological​ gaps.

If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer

Dr. Dean

(The Guardian​)

Veganism has rocketed in the UK over the past couple of years – from an estimated half a million people in 2016 to more than 3.5 million – 5% of our population – today. Influential documentaries such as Cowspiracy and What the Health have thrown a spotlight on the intensive meat and dairy industry, exposing the impacts on animal and human health and the wider environment.

But calls for us all to switch entirely to plant-based foods ignore one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate these ills: grazing and browsing animals.

Rather than being seduced by exhortations to eat more products made from industrially grown soya, maize and grains, we should be encouraging sustainable forms of meat and dairy production based on traditional rotational systems, permanent pasture and conservation grazing. We should, at the very least, question the ethics of driving up demand for crops that require high inputs of fertiliser, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides, while demonising sustainable forms of livestock farming that can restore soils and biodiversity, and sequester carbon.

Honestly, she had me at cheese. Man oh man, I love cheese. Behold the power of cheese.

Finding silence online is difficult, but the pursuit is worthwhile

Dr. Dean

(The Verge)

What silence looks like online is hard to describe, because it’s necessarily individual: I have a different threshold than you, for example, for dealing with Twitter trolls or rogue Instagram commenters. But I do think there are a few rules. First, quiet is found in considered spaces — think @everycolorbot or #cloudtwitter. Second, if silence is found through listening, then peaceful places online are more generative (like Glitch or Codecademy, or one of my favorites, Twine) and, generally, focused on maintaining small, healthy communities (like Metafilter). Silence pools like the tides. It’s hard to find at high tide, and immediately obvious where the pools are when the tide are out.

True silence​ online​ can only be found at Zombocom

A Really Good Day

Dr. Dean

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I read this as a follow up to Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind.  It covers a lot of the same gound, though Ayelet Waldman comes at if from a diferent place.  Pollan has an emersive journalistic and perhaps a “betterment of well people” perespective. Which is perfectly vaild.  Waldman, in the presentation I will post below, says that her book is “about microdosing.  It’s a book about the history of psychodelics.  It’s a book about the criminal justice system, and its a memoire about my own struggles with mental illness, my marriage my children.”

My big take away from A Really Good Day. is twofold. First, if what you know about drugs and drug abuse comes from casual media consumption you are porbably horribly worng about everything you hold to be true  Second, whatever harm you think the “war on drugs” has done to American culture — it’s far, far, worse.

Inside the Far-Out World of Dream Therapy

Dr. Dean

(Medium) 

Dream interpretation often gets lumped into the same kind of pop mysticism as tarot cards and astrology, deemed a useless attempt to assign meaning to what is widely believed to be nothing more than the random firing of neurons in the brain. . .

Tarot and Astrology are forms of “divination” not “mysticism.”

“As soon as we start paying attention to our dreams, we begin to understand that there is an intelligence there,” says Rubin Naiman, PhD, a psychologist and sleep and dream expert with the the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine. “There’s a wisdom. There’s a compassion. There’s depth, and it can open our hearts to seeing life in a whole different way.”

Naiman is one of a burgeoning group of psychologists around the world modernizing the work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud by incorporating dream therapy into his practice. But Naiman is more than just a dream therapist — he’s a dream crusader on a mission to fix the “epidemic of dream loss” he believes we’ve found ourselves in that has left us, well, psychically constipated.

“Dreaming digests. It metaphorically chews on, swallows, assimilates, filters through, and it decides what it’s going to excrete,” Naiman says. “We’re nourished by daily experiences, and if we’re no longer digesting new experiences, we become psychologically malnourished. People who don’t dream well are not receiving nourishment on a daily basis from new experiences.”

Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

Dr. Dean

(Bloomberg Businessweek)

Miami-Dade is built on the Biscayne Aquifer, 4,000 square miles of unusually shallow and porous limestone whose tiny air pockets are filled with rainwater and rivers running from the swamp to the ocean. The aquifer and the infrastructure that draws from it, cleans its water, and keeps it from overrunning the city combine to form a giant but fragile machine. Without this abundant source of fresh water, made cheap by its proximity to the surface, this hot, remote city could become uninhabitable.

Huh!