Category: Of Interest

Those miscellaneous things that just must be published.

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Top 10 Pot Studies Government Regrets Funding

This floated up on Popurls today. Warning! Popurls.com is geek crack! If you read Popurls, you could potentially lose days off your life without even realizing it. I cannot be held responsible for broken relationships and financial hardships resulting from introducing you to Popurls. Popurls is indeed a gateway drug, a portal mind you, to more intense, more serious sources of information. If you or someone you love is an information addict, keep away from Popurls!

From Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Cannabis, Top 10 Pot Studies Government Wished It Had Never Funded. Follow the link for more detailed information. I find it interesting how economics and politics play into issues such as marijuana. Alcohol is far more damaging than cannabis yet it remains legal. I find information like this interesting to read because I believe we waste huge amounts of money by keeping marijuana illegal for little benefit. It is legal in Denver and taxed in TN.

  1. MARIJUANA USE HAS NO EFFECT ON MORTALITY Sidney, S et al. Marijuana Use and Mortality. American Journal of Public Health. Vol. 87 No. 4, April 1997. p. 585-590. Sept. 2002.
  2. HEAVY MARIJUANA USE AS A YOUNG ADULT WON’T RUIN YOUR LIFE Eisen SE et al. Does Marijuana Use Have Residual Adverse Effects on Self-Reported Health Measures, Socio-Demographics or Quality of Life? A Monozygotic Co-Twin Control Study in Men. Addiction. Vol. 97 No. 9. p.1083-1086. Sept. 1997
  3. THE "GATEWAY EFFECT" MAY BE A MIRAGE Morral AR, McCaffrey D and Paddock S. Reassessing the Marijuana Gateway Effect. Addiction. December 2002. p. 1493-1504.
  4. PROHIBITION DOESN’T WORK (PART I) National Research Council. Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us. National Academy Press, 2001. p. 193.
  5. PROHIBITION DOESN’T WORK (PART II: DOES PROHIBITION CAUSE THE "GATEWAY EFFECT"?) Reinarman, C, Cohen, PDA, and Kaal, HL. The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy: Cannabis in Amsterdam and San Francisco. American Journal of Public Health. Vol. 94, No. 5. May 2004. p. 836-842.
  6. OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART I) Munson, AE et al. Antineoplastic Activity of Cannabinoids. Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Sept. 1975. p. 597-602.
  7. OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER, (PART II) NTP Technical Report On The Toxicology And Carcinogenesis Studies Of 1-Trans- Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol, CAS No. 1972-08-3, In F344/N Rats And B6C3F(1) Mice, Gavage Studies. See also, “Medical Marijuana: Unpublished Federal Study Found THC-Treated Rats Lived Longer, Had Less Cancer,” AIDS Treatment News no. 263, Jan. 17, 1997.
  8. OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART III) Sidney, S. et al. Marijuana Use and Cancer Incidence (California, United States). Cancer Causes and Control. Vol. 8. Sept. 1997, p. 722-728.
  9. OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART IV) Tashkin D. Marijuana Use and Lung Cancer: Results of a Case-Control Study. American Thoracic Society International Conference. May 23, 2006.
  10. MARIJUANA DOES HAVE MEDICAL VALUE Joy, JE, Watson, SJ, and Benson, JA. Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. National Academy Press. 1999. p. 159. See also, Harris, G. FDA Dismisses Medical Benefit From Marijuana. New York Times. Apr. 21, 2006
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Get Entertained and Fight Cancer

Tonight is a good night to go out on the town. I heard on the radio and found details in the MetroPulse that musicians and artists will be performing at 10 different locations to raise money for the Thompson Cancer Survival Center.

If you go out ever, anywhere in Knoxville, chances are you’ve seen Laith Keilany play his guitar. You heard him accompany the likes of Jodie Manross and the Mikel Grubb Band. Or, perhaps you’ve had the unique pleasure of seeing Keilany play the oud, an 11-string middle eastern instrument. He’s played all over Knoxville, and around the Southeast and East Coast. And, it’s not uncommon for Keilany to be playing for free. For years, Keilany (along with Manross) has been the go-to guy when a benefit or fundraiser is in need of a good musician with a good heart. So it’s only fitting that the fourth annual Knoxville at Night will benefit the Thompson Cancer Survival Center and Keilany, who was recently diagnosed with cancer. [Source]

Starting next week Panera will be selling a pink, cherry flavored bagel in the shape of a ribbon to support the fight against breast cancer. A portion of the purchase of these bagels will be donated.

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Feed the conspiracists

Cathy likes to joke about my conspiracy-mindedness. I like to makeup conspiracy theories as jokes. Here is some fuel on rigged elections. The comments make some valid points about why this would be hard to do in practice such as the injected number of votes not matching the recorded number of voters.

I really like the comment that suggests we get a vote receipt like an atm receipt. When the polls close all votes are published on a website. You could then match your vote receipt to the published vote to see if it differed. If it differed then you could dispute it. This would not allow for changing votes because you are reporting that it is different than the information printed on the vote receipt, not that it is different from your memory.

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Google Maps vs Yahoo Maps and Geotagging

I love Google Maps! I used to use Mapblast and still contend its line directions are the best way to present driving directions. Are Google Maps accurate? Using Sergey Chernyshev’s tool to compare Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, I am surprised to find that although Google Maps has more detail in Europe, Yahoo maps appears to be more accurate in the US (at least in the areas I checked).

I found Sergey Chernyshev’s site while reading Thomas Hawk’s review of Flickr’s new geotagging option. Thomas Hawk is the Chief Evangelist for the photo sharing site Zooomr which makes his review of Flickr so much better. Zooomr was reviewed by C|Net 7 days ago. Geotagging is the practice of associating GPS coordinates with a picture, blog, post, or other information. GeoURL is a service mapping URLs to specific locations on the planet.

Geotagging is unhealthy for the paranoid because placing coordinates on a photo, or blog entry, publishes publically (in most cases) your exact location at an exact time. Some people may decry this a privacy issue (remember, you voluntarily put the information in the public’s eye) or declare it dangerous as "the bad people" could derive patterns in your life and track you down. It may be wise to not geotag your house or neighborhood but in reality does it really matter if people know that on Tuesday at 3:03pm you were standing by a cool statue? Personally, I wish my camera automatically put the coordinates with the EXIF information on the pictures and that the photo services would automatically grab that info. Some cameras do this already.