Anodyne

Coconut water has all those good electrolytes & tastes waay better than "rehydration salts". Tried and tested by me & all my workmates I worked early weekend shifts with. You can buy cans and just leave them in the medicine cabinet or back of the fridge, you don't need to stumble out and get fresh coconuts (although they are awesome). As for a salty pre-nap drink that tastes better than plain saltwater but is just as easy to make: miso. And for eating so you're not drinking on an empty stomach - this may just be my personal taste, but if I'm drinking a lot I'm probably already getting loads of carbs and don't need any more (either that or it's late at night and I don't need heaps of carbs to keep running), so I prefer protein-heavy foods. Spicy fried eggs with leftover nacho beans is a food of the gods.

Yep, and that's what Darklight was doing also. Change took a more enthusiastic tone, and DL gave a more detailed idea of the amount of time & work & failures you would have to deal with if you wanted to get into home tissue-culture. As someone who is totally naive about this topic, I appreciated both approaches. Thanks peeps

This might be better suited to a wiki, rather than a book? Easier to update & distribute, no? I mean for the more well-established knowledge we have here. For new research, then maybe something else. But for the bulk of stuff you're talking about, I am just thinking that putting a book together is a huge goddamn project - to write everything, compile it, edit it, get it printed and then get it out to people... it'd take years. Lots of them. And money. Whereas a wiki can be done piecemeal, and then at least the part on that plant can be 'published' so people can read it & improved on it, and then someone writes another section, and so forth. Of course, you'd need some really good mods/editors (or whatever they're called) because we talk a ton of shit around here and a wiki needs a much more concise writing style.

Yes but this is why I'm so baffled. Isn't there a different schedule which is for restricted-but-medicinally-useful drugs such as morphine? Isn't that the distinction between S1 & S2? That S1 is for "no accepted medical use" and S2 is "we think this drug has abuse potential but it also has therapeutic potential, or at the very least it might and we're going with these lesser restrictions so that researchers can actually access these materials to bloody well find out for us whether or not it has medicinal value"? And in the light of the recent medical-marijuana boom in the States, wouldn't that (S2) be the more appropriate schedule here? As I understand it, the FDA isn't satisfied from the existing body of research into medicinal cannabis/cannabinoids that they should be rescheduled to S3. And while I'm not up-to-date with that research, that does seem like a fair point. From their point of view, they want studies that look into the efficacy of particular compounds or preparations of compounds, so they can then compare those to the conventional meds for that condition. While a plant or plant extract might be a whole mash of different things, and more to the point, not consistent in composition - different harvests or varieties might have wildly differing ratios & concentrations of the active compounds. Which makes life hard if you're the FDA who is trying to work out how to glean meaningful data from studies which use a whole range of different preparations, taken by different ROAs, and then attempt to condense that down to any kind of useful numbers about dosages, and then find companies that are willing to produce consistent preparations which match the FDA recommendations... so I do concede the point that this is tricky business. But the point where they totally lose me is where they go "well, we aren't satisfied that the current scientific data supports a recommendation of using medicinal marijuana products to treat condition X, so instead of putting these things into S2 (a highly-restricted but still accessible schedule where researchers might be able to get hold of those materials to answer those questions that we said needed answering before we would approve this) - instead we decided to leave it in S1, the most restrictive category which is typically used for drugs where we have already made the decision that they have no medicinal value. Have fun getting ethics permission for those studies now, suckaz!"

Wow, when I first read that I thought it must be a typo or that maybe I was misremembering which direction the US drug schedules ran in... what with all their states approving medical cannabis all over the place, I felt certain that the intent of any CBD re-scheduling must surely be to drop it down from "restricted" or "no medical use" to "prescription-only", as we've done here. But no, it seems that they've actually done the opposite. What the actual fuck?

yay for zombie-kickin' Iggy awesomeness, boo no Sydney peaches concert. And on the topic, here is one of the finest performances ever caught on film as Mr Pop lip-synchs to a totally baffled countdown audience

her & Brooke Candy need to make an album, though I think Peaches would win in the costume department, especially if we're judging on balls-out weirdness...sometimes literally...

Aw yeah, nostalgia-tone colour scheme! Lovin it!

If you haven't already, you could check out the Cabin Porn thread for some inspiration. Looking forward to your updates, the place looks amazing.

Well in this utopian future that I'm envisioning that contains such things as [tests which might actually test the thing they're trying to test, rather than some thing which may or may not correlate to the thing they're trying to test], I should think that people with anxiety disorders would now have access to medical marijuana, so perhaps that would help? Also, we're not talking about sitting an exam here, the idea was that it would just test your capacity to do basic stuff like multitasking and reflexes. If people are so anxious that they can't perform simple tasks like pressing a button whenever the red dot appears in the corner of the screen, then I would have to wonder how they would handle road-ragers or any other stressful situations which they might encounter whilst driving. In the unlikely event that these ever did become a thing, perhaps people who are able to drive competently but have specific anxieties which make them unable to press buttons while cops are watching, would be able to appeal on medical grounds if they failed? Or even to preemptively get some kind of letter from their doctor for the RTA so that there was a mark on their drivers licence which asks that they be given an alternative test due to their condition. Whatever the solution was, I think it would be much easier to iron out the kinks in this style of test, than it would be to work out exactly how many ng/ml equaled dangerous impairment for every single drug which drivers might have taken.

In the Advanced Search page, under "Date Created" there are no months on the calendar, just blanks. Even if I type out dates (eg. 12/06/2016) the function still doesn't work and I get a totally blank error/info box pop up. Is this something to do with changing the date format in the recent upgrade maybe? Or is this a pebkac situation?

- Vertmorpheus, 2007

Yeah I just had a quick search but couldn't find the article - a while back New Scientist (I think?) wrote about work that was being done to create what was essentially a simple little handheld computer game, to be used to test drivers' impairment. The idea was that cops could pull someone over, ask them to play through a level of the game to prove that they were capable of doing all the things needed to drive safely: judging distances, reacting quickly, keeping track of multiple tasks and things in their peripheral vision. The thing that I really liked about this idea was that it tested ACTUAL BLOODY IMPAIRMENT, not just what happened to be in your bloodstream at the time. And so people who smoked a joint last night would pass just fine, whereas people who were impaired for other non-drug-related reasons (like sleep-deprivation) might fail. And aside from the overall idea of actually testing the thing that you want to test, this might also be the only way to tell from an on-the-spot test whether someone is impaired from a novel/analogue-type drug, which there may be no existing forensic tests for, so may not show up on swab or even blood testing. Of course, this type of test is only superior if the aim is to make sure that people are driving safely. If the real aim of roadside drug testing is actually just to give cops reasonable-suspicion to search people, then no, this probably wouldn't work at all.

I'm sure that better research has been done on this topic since I last researched it for uni 15 years ago, but back then the evidence seemed to point towards minimal impairment from [normal doses of] THC, which was totally negated by the subjects being very, very aware of how impaired they were, and adjusting their driving speeds accordingly. Which I'm sure cuts absolutely zero ice at an RBT station, I just found it an interesting point: drunk people underestimate how impaired they are, stoned people are fully aware, or even exaggerate.

See, this is why we need gender-neutral pronouns people, so we can avoid giving offense to our mutant cacti.... #respectmypronouns

I dunno if that should be considered a bad thing... I actually kinda like the idea that businesses will have to choose which drug they want to serve.

I spent a bit of time wandering around in some rainforest recently and was awed by the diversity of fungi - sometimes it seemed like every tree had a different one. So I started wondering about the possibility of getting some lichens established on some of my potted trees & stones at home. Has anyone ever tried doing this? Is it feasible, and if so, what's involved? I've managed to keep specimens on dead wood going just by keeping them somewhere moist, but have never tried to inoculate a new piece. I figure for the lichens that since they're a symbiosis spores won't cut it - you would actually need to break off a chunk of living lichen to get both fungi & algae - I assume this is how they propagate normally. And then I guess you choose some bark or stone with a nice rough surface and just attach it with something that will hold it in place and keep it moist? Pantyhose lined with some coir maybe? This tek describes how to make a kind of nutrient glue containing lichen fragments - for painting onto rocks which will eventually grow a coating of lichen - but I'm wondering if the growth rate could be improved by keeping the surface even more moist and protected, hence the coir/pantyhose idea. I'd also be interested if anyone has any ideas on how to propagate crust-type fungi. I have a tiny stick with some Terana caerulea growing on it and would love to know how to grow more. Imagine if every tree in your garden looked like this! And the red version which I haven't identified yet (sorry about the crap photo)

Nice one Sally, love the can-do attitude around here. If that goes down well we can move on to the parallel series I've been working on: "When home surgery goes wrong", where I detail my other attempts at DIY.

I dunno if they're always beneficial, I repotted a few cacti recently which had ant nests (just reglar little black ants) in them and it seemed like the fungi they had been farming had made the soil water-repellent. So maybe it depends on the fungus?

http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/supermoon-which-will-look-brighter-and-larger-than-any-moon-for-68-years-to-pass-by-earth-on-14-november/news-story/5e98acb44565e5c2ac5b1445bf5ead7c

Yeah cloudy here during moonrise, and now later that it's cleared up the moon looks very bright but like you say, can't really tell any size difference when it's away from the horizon. Oh well, maybe the Dec one will be on a clear night.

*applause* Nicely put RC. This essentially sums up why I don't think the medical-first approach is necessarily a bad one. Sure, it's fucken ludicrously, laughably late, but like they say "the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second-best is now". And if the aim (as I hope it is) is to build a long-standing social institution which won't be re-banned the first time the political winds change, then I think establishing a firm footing in legitimate, scientifically-supported medical uses is a great way to start. Well actually they kinda can, if they have the money to lobby politicians to make it really hard for individuals (which they probably do) How many people bother to distil their own alcohol, or cure their own tobacco? It's not because the industrial products are cheap or great quality, it's because they've made sure the process is so inaccessible for individuals, and the penalties so out-of-proportion, that few bother.

Nah it cleared up in the end, no need for such drastic measures as getting out of bed early.

Bah, raining in Sydney. Looks like it's raining up most of the east coast too, where all the nice ocean views would be. Maybe it'll blow over in the next few hours? Worth keeping an eye out in case it clears up anyway, and I also wanted to bump the thread for anyone who isn't being stalked by stormclouds.

@theuserformallyknownasd00d here's a study about some of the possible mechanisms at work (plus scroll down for a fascinating list of associated articles): Ultrapotent effects of salvinorin A ...which is vaguely referenced on page 38 of the above paper "[salvinorin A] showed moderate anti-inflammatory action", along with another paper by the same researchers which suggests that (possibly among a wider range of anti-inflammatory effects) it might also specifically be effective for inflammatory gut problems like Crohns: Inhibitory effect of salvinorin A, from Salvia divinorum, on ileitis-induced hypermotility: cross-talk between kappa-opioid and cannabinoid CB(1) receptors Myself & others also ramble a bit about some of the other psychoactive drugs known to have similar activities in this old thread.