Erowid Cannabis Vault : Article - "The Truth About Marijuana" The debate over the legalization of Cannabis Sativa, more commonly known as marijuana, has been one of the most heated controversies ever to occur in the United States. Its use as a medicine has existed for thousands of years in many countries world wide and "can be documented as far back as 2700 BC in ancient Chinese writings." When someone says bhanga, ganja, kinnub, cannabis, bung, chu ts-ao, asa, dope, grass, rasta, or weed, they are talking about the same subject: marijuana. Marijuana should be legalized because the government could earn money from taxes on its sale, its value to the medical world outweighs its abuse potential, and because of its importance to the paper and clothing industries. This action should be taken despite efforts made by groups which say marijuana is a harmful drug which will increase crime rates and lead users to other more dangerous substances. The actual story behind the legislature passed against marijuana is quite surprising.
The Dumbass Haunted World – When Propaganda Masquerades as Science Because last week’s reblogging of Robert Anton Wilson’s rather harsh critique of Carl Sagan resulted in a rather spirited dialogue on my Facebook page (friend me), I did something weird. I decided to take some of my fans advice and actually read a bit of Sagan’s work, which I admitted in the post that I’d never truly done. Sadly, since I spend half my life working a soulless day job, I don’t normally have much time to commit to researching things I intentionally avoid for impromptu rants. But I quite quickly found a PDF of the Demon Haunted World, which is the book several people over the years have told me I absolutely need to read, because it WILL convince me I’m not psychic or something. Ugh, I don’t know what to tell you. First off, what’s compelling from a psychological perspective is that part of the reason that post resonated with peeps had to do with a lot of them growing up a huge fan of both R.A.W. and Sagan. Moving on. Adorable right? And again: You know what else?
Why is democracy faltering? Jair Bolsonaro, the frontrunner for the Brazilian presidency, is a far-right, gun-loving, media-baiting hyper-nationalist. The fact that he would be right at home among many of today’s global leaders—including the leaders of some of the world’s major democracies—should worry us all. This compels us to address the question: Why is democracy faltering? We are at a historical turning point. One consequence of recent technological progress has been a decline in the relative share of wages in GDP. Gone are the days when one could count on a steady factory job to pay the bills indefinitely. These developments have contributed to growing disparities in education and opportunity. The growing sense of unfairness accompanying these developments has undermined “democratic legitimacy,” as Paul Tucker discusses in his book “Unelected Power.” Against this background, the ongoing transformation of politics should not be surprising. Even becoming a sports fan is similar.
Best in Show - What's the top data dog? If you look at the numbers, which canine comes out as top data-dog? Which are the best dog breeds according to the data? A visualisation from my book, Knowledge is Beautiful (research by Miriam Quick, dog artwork by Andrew Park and concept & design by David McCandless) We examined data on intelligence, longevity, genetic ailments and other markers to create a “data-score” and then plotted it against public popularity of various breeds, according to the American Kennel Club. » Follow us on Email | Twitter | Facebook » See the data:bit.ly/KIB_BestDogs » Some good discussions of this graphic on Slate & Mail Online » Another viz you might like: 52 Most Common Mythconceptions » See more of our visualizations» Check out our beautiful data-visualization books Part of the infographic mega-tome, Knowledge is Beautiful. We are an independent collective of professional researchers, data journalists and designers dedicating to visualising solid data, great information and mind-expanding knowledge.
Scientist searching Twitter for time travelers tells Raw Story why he’s looking for Pope Francis By Scott KaufmanFriday, January 3, 2014 17:49 EDT If time travelers from the future are living among us, is there a way we can detect their presence in a reliable, scientific way? Raw Story talked to Robert Nemiroff, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technological University who attempted to answer that question by searching for time travelers using the Internet. As Nemiroff and one of his graduate students, Teresa Wilson, note in “Searching the Internet for evidence of time travel,” travel into the future is a commonplace occurrence — you are doing it as you read these words. Even accelerated time travel into the future is “on firm scientific footing,” as demonstrated by “the twin paradox.” Time travel to the past is “controversial, at best, and impossible according to conventional views of the laws of physics.” Nemiroff and Wilson set out to search “for digital signatures that time travelers potentially left on the Internet.” In the end, the database they chose to use was Twitter.
The Milky Way's Monster, Unveiled Just in time for Halloween, astronomers have delivered the best-yet view of a real-life cosmic monster—Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way. Or, rather, a view of hot clumps of gas that orbit it, teetering on the edge of oblivion. The results reveal new, previously unknown properties of our galaxy’s largest black hole and point the way toward a deeper understanding of gravity. Black holes, like all truly terrifying monsters, can scarcely be comprehended, let alone seen. Even Einstein doubted they existed, despite his theory of general relativity predicting that they must. They are knots of gravitation bound so tightly that within them spacetime dissolves; spectral shadows so voracious they devour light itself. These hot spots are thought to be “magnetic thunderstorms” that occur when intense magnetic fields form filaments that snap apart and reconnect, releasing copious energy to heat nearby gas within a black hole’s accretion disk.
7 Amazing Interactive Infographics Created With HTML, CSS and Javascript Infographics (Information graphics) are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics able to let us absorb the information in an effective way. In real life, we can easily find some in our surrounding, for example, maps, train route, signs and so on. On the internet, we can find heaps of well-designed and educational infographics, on Queness, we also featured a few and including a post about how to make one: However, in this post, we are not going to feature the common static and image based infographics. All infographics in this post are made with HTML, CSS3 and Javascript. Is the Internet Awake?
Visit to the World's Fair of 2014 August 16, 1964 By ISAAC ASIMOV he New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding." Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. 17 striking findings for 2017 Pew Research Center studies a wide array of topics both in the U.S. and around the world, and every year we are struck by particular findings. Sometimes they mark a new milestone in public opinion; other times a sudden about-face. From an increase in Americans living without a spouse or partner to the impact of Donald Trump’s presidency, here are 17 findings that stood out to us in 2017: 1 Partisan divides dwarf demographic differences on key political values. The average gap between the views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents across 10 political values has increased from 15 percentage points in 1994 to 36 points today. 2 Donald Trump’s presidency has had a major impact on how the world sees the United States. 3 About four-in-ten Americans say they live in a gun-owning household, while three-in-ten say they personally own a gun. Gun owners and non-owners have starkly different views on gun violence in America.
8 pro tips for creating interactive infographics | Infographic Infographics are everywhere on the web right now, and they're increasingly interactive. Luke Clum offers 10 pro tips for creating an interactive infographic - read on to find out how you can create a design that truly engages with its audience... 01. Before you start to make your interactive infographic, it's worth considering why you're making it interactive. As the brilliant infographic Why Your Brain Craves Infographics explains, people are visually wired. There is also the vital component of kinetic learning, by which people are better able to retain information through a physical activity. This combination of visual and kinetic approaches is what makes interactive infographics the data visualizations of the future. 02. One of the most popular types of interactivity requires just a little scrolling from its user participants, which usually triggers animations and transitions. Scrolling can also be used in really simple ways, with simple narratives. 03. 04. 05. 06. 07. 08. 09. 10.
How far should we trust scientific models? – Jon Turney Here’s a simple recipe for doing science. Find a plausible theory for how some bits of the world behave, make predictions, test them experimentally. If the results fit the predictions, then the theory might describe what’s really going on. If not, you need to think again. Scientific work is vastly diverse and full of fascinating complexities. Now, however, there is a new ingredient. As computer modelling has become essential to more and more areas of science, it has also become at least a partial guide to headline-grabbing policy issues, from flood control and the conserving of fish stocks, to climate change and — heaven help us — the economy. Modelling is an old word in science, and the old uses remain. Computer models are different. In this new world of computer modelling, an oft-quoted remark made in the 1970s by the statistician George Box remains a useful rule of thumb: ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’. There are numerous possible sources of fuzziness in that vision.
DARPA wants to build an AI to find the patterns hidden in global chaos That most famous characterization of the complexity causality, a butterfly beating its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, is thought-provoking but ultimately not helpful. What we really need is to look at a hurricane and figure out which butterfly caused it — or perhaps stop it before it takes flight in the first place. DARPA thinks AI should be able to do just that. A new program at the research agency is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them. It’s called KAIROS: Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas. “Schema” in this case has a very specific meaning. Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they’re surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define.
NASA: Industrial civilization headed for ‘irreversible collapse’ By Nafeez Ahmed, The GuardianFriday, March 14, 2014 23:42 EDT Natural and social scientists develop new model of how ‘perfect storm’ of crises could unravel global system A new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary ‘Human And Nature DYnamical’ (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists.