Tomorrow (Sat 1st Aug), there’ll be an old mix of mine on Spiritplants Radio.

Spiritplants Radio is a great little community-based online radio station that plays a massive range of awesome music. They  feature the best in new and classic psychedelic rock, electronica, jazz, progressive news, psychedelic lectures, literary pieces, comedy, and many shows of home-grown programming. You can check out any of the shows in their archive, or turn on & tune in any time. It makes great listening at work, at home or anywhere else where you might be avoiding being productive. There’s also some forums and chat you can get involved with. I’ll probably be in and out over the weekend if anyone wants to pop by and say Hi.

So this mix of mine was from an new year’s eve party I was at a couple of years ago. The theme is “chunky” and the genre is “many”, but it’s pretty lively and fun. Hopefully everyone will get something out of it!

A quick disclaimer though… remember this was recorded at a party I was obviously at, so any fuckups in the mixing (especially early on) can be scratched up to the “influence” i was “under”.

It’ll be on at 2 PM US Pacific time, which I think is 10 PM here in the UK. It’ll be on twice more over the weekend, so I’ll update this post when I’ve got the details. at 12:30 PM and 7 PM US Pacific time on Sunday which is (dum de dum de dum…) 8:30 PM on Sunday and 3 AM Monday morning if you’re in the UK.

Our station features the best in new and classic psychedelic rock,
electronica, jazz, progressive news, psychedelic lectures, literaryOur station features the best in new and classic sychedelic rock, electronica, jazz, progressive news, psychedelic lectures, literary pieces, comedy, and many shows of homegrown programming.
pieces, comedy, and many shows of homegrown programming.

Since George Lamb couldn’t investigate his way out of a paper bag, I got in touch with Matt Bowden, the guy behind BZP, for a bit more of an in-depth commentary. If you never watched Can I Get High Legally?, now would be a good time to check it out. Matt is interviewed towards the end, but is barely given the chance to speak. Actually, he only agreed to speak to them on the condition that they mention his Aroma product and Club Stargate website, where you can earn money by getting your mates to buy stuff. I know since it’s the BBC that they couldn’t actually mention these things, but then why did they agree to it? That’s just not nice.

So, anyway, here’s what Matt has to say:

My points all simply come back to quoting proven research. Sure, BZP has risks. We analysed the risk after 10 million exposures in a country small enough that you can contact every hospital and A & D clinic to look for adverse events related to the ten million exposures (26 million pills consumed over 8.5 years) and learned that it was not causative in any reported deaths or significant lasting injuries and had not contributed to the burden on the alcohol and drug treatment industries. Nobody in the country had complained anywhere of addiction to the drug.

Nobody had ever been admitted to hospital or even presented at an emergency department who had followed the instructions on the packet and in every case where there was a hospital admission, the subject had well over the legal alcohol limit (for driving) as well. In some cases where seizures were reported they were up to 15 times over the alcohol limit! In other words they were in very poor shape even without the BZP.

There was one fatality which involved BZP but on a New Years Eve and it was combined with heroic doses of ecstasy, LSD and again mammoth quantities of alcohol. BZP was not considered by the medical examiners on the night to be causative.

It is not completely safe, but then neither is getting out of bed in the morning. It is considered risky to take with ecstasy and/or large amounts of alcohol, but if taken as directed by sensible manufacturers, the risks are lower than many other normal everyday human activities such as a trip to the beach, driving in heavy traffic or a passenger flight in a 747.

The risks are lower than activities such as surgery in a public hospital, a trip to the doctor, or, as our then-Prime Minister suggested young people do instead of taking party pills, a walk in one of our national parks, where poorly experienced trampers freeze to their deaths every year!

Some excellent facts and figures there. It’s just a shame I had to be the one to report them.

Fuck you, George Lamb.

It’s that time again. I’m coding Coffeesh0p from the ground up for the third time since I started in 2006, only this time, it will look exactly the same. Sounds pointless, right? Well, programming is very much like skinning a cat – there’s more than one way to do it, and currently the programming behind Coffeesh0p resembles an epileptic retard with Huntington’s Chorea trying to skin a cat with a dull pocket knife under a strobe light. Almost.

The reason I’m recoding it this time, and also the reason behind why I recoded it last time is that I’ve gotten a lot better at programming since the previous incarnation. This time, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around taking an Object Orientated approach. That means using code to represent things as an object, such as a product, a news post, a comment, or a basket, which is a great way of looking at things. Before, I might have written some code to pull product information straight out of the database and display it, which works OK, but if the database behind the site changes for some reason, then I’d have to go through every page and update the code to work with the new database. Object orientated code makes anything like this much easier, because all the code to talk to the database is kept in one or two files, which can be modified or swapped for something else really easily. Since each object is kept in a single file, they can also be reused for any other site that requires something similar. For example, Coffeesh0p and Salvia-Trip.net both use the same object to talk to the database – I just borrowed the code from one site and uploaded it to the other.

As Coffeesh0p expands, the existing code has become much harder to maintain and add new bits to, which is also much easier using objects, as the code is far easier to read and understand. Imagine if I wanted to add a comment to something. Without objects, it might look something like this horrible mess:

$sql = "INSERT INTO `comments`(`item_id`,`name`,`email`,`body`,`rating`) ";
$sql .= "VALUES (1, 'Synchronium', 'pretend@email.addr', 'Here\'s my comment!', 5);';
mysql_query( $sql, $database_link );

But with objects, you don’t even have to know any PHP to work out what the following does:

$comment = new Comment();
$comment->item_id = 1;
$comment->name = 'Synchronium';
$comment->email = 'pretend@email.addr';
$comment->body = 'Here\'s my comment!';
$comment->rating = 5;
$comment->save();

As you can imagine, coding like this hardly gives me a headache at all!

Learning to code was probably one of the best things I ever did. Seriously. I’d recommend it to anyone, and there are loads of books out there for beginners.

So, yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to. Nothing interesting or hilarious, but important nonetheless.

As a treat for indulging my geekiness, I bring you the Brass Eye episode on drugs. Brass Eye got a passing mention in my misses’s last post, Can I Get High Legally?, and it occurred to me that a lot of readers from outside the UK probably wouldn’t know what we were talking about. Well, for those that don’t know, it’s one of the funniest TV programs of all time, written by a personal hero of mine and comedy genius Chris Morris.

Click the red play button once, close any adverts that might pop up then click the green play button to watch it. The first 40 seconds or so are blank, so you might want to skip it forward.

Whether cannabis is hard to come by for you, or you don’t like associating with criminals to get hold of it, or even if cannabis has lost its allure as tolerance slowly creeps in, these four tips will help you get the most from your stash.

#1 – Store It Wisely

If you keep your weed in ziplock bags, or a tobacco tin, or safely secreted under the garden gnome with the green hat, then you’re storing it wrong! Well, not wrong, but you’re certainly not making the most of it. Most of the THC in cannabis is found in the microscopic translucent hairs, or trichomes, covering the buds. Since these are on the outside of the plant, they have a habit of falling off, or sticking to the bag your weed is kept in, which is bad news for you. Fortunately, the solution is elegantly simple – store your cannabis in a pot with a mesh screen at the bottom, like this Aluminium Mesh Stash Box. In no time, you’ll have a respectable amount of trichomes collected in the bottom compartment. If you’re lazy, you can roll a joint with a pinch or two, but if you’re a dedicated pothead, you can press several grams of it into your own incredibly potent hash.

#2 – Weigh It

Weighing out exactly how much cannabis you put into a joint brings a number of benefits. Sounds boring, but you’d be surprised at how much this tip could save you. Firstly, you probably need much less weed than you think. Start out by weighing out the amount of weed you’d normally smoke and write it down somewhere. Then, when you come to roll another joint, reduce that amount by 10 or 20 mg and see if it still gets you to where you want to be. Keep going with this until the last joint you’ve smoked isn’t quite enough. The previous comfortable amount of weed is now your standard amount, which will almost definitely be less than when you started out. The second benefit is that you can now be scientific with your joint rolling. Each joint you smoke will be as strong as the last, and as strong as the next one. You know exactly what to expect.  Rolling for more people than usual? Then just multiply up the amount. Going out for something important later on? Smoke 10mg less than your standard weight. The final benefit is only achieved if you have scales with a little plastic lid on. When you’re done weighing it out, you can push it all up against the side of the lid into a line, which can then be dropped straight into your rolling paper. What’s the point in that, I hear you ask? Well, then you have direct control over the distribution of pot in your joint. Want to put more pot in the front? Then make your line thicker at one end. Are you rolling for loads of people? Then you might want to make your line as consistent as possible to benefit the most people. The possibilities are endless! Kind of.

#3 – Potentiate Your Pot

There are a couple of perfectly legal and cheap things you can use to maximise the effects of your weed. These work especially well if you’ve been smoking non-stop for years and rolling on the floor pissing your pants at the latest cat macros is only a distant memory. They might be a bit much for the novice smoker, but that’s the flip side – you need to smoke less, stretching out your weed supply as much as possible. The first is 5-HydroxyTryptophan, a biological precursor to serotonin (5-HT) and melatonin. Taking 50 – 100 mg of 5-HTP about an hour or so before you smoke has a very noticeable effect. The second is a smoking mixture called Cahoots. I’m not sure exactly which ingredients are responsible for this potentiation, but the words “Twice as long… Twice as strong” on the front of the pack certainly sound reassuring.

#4 – Create Your Own Smoking Mixture

This is a great tip for those heavy smokers who want to tweak their smoking experience slightly, or simply cut down on the amount of tobacco they get through. The idea is to add some other smokable herbs to your tobacco, without making it taste horrible or too harsh. Here’s a quick recipe, but please feel free to adapt it however you like. Please post any suggestions for improving it in the comments.

This can then be rolled with your (weighed out) cannabis just like tobacco on its own. For extra points, you could even mix in some Cahoots mentioned in point #3.

If you follow these tips, I guarantee you’ll save money, save weed and have a much more interesting experience.

Got any tips you’d like to share?

Yep!

Last Thursday at 9pm, a programme being shown on BBC3 called “Can I get High Legally?” caught my interest. Not having a TV ourselves, we patiently waited for it to become available on iPlayer whilst the orders poured in – a massive amount, far more than usual. Something in the programme had obviously made legal highs seem pretty appealing. Or had it?

Our orders per day. Guess when the documentary was on.

George Lamb was presenting, which made me wary from the outset. What can this uber-trendy, slightly poncy metrosexual reminiscent of other Camden boys like Noel Fielding and Russell Brand have to say about the science and safety of legal highs? Well, as it turns out, nothing. The description of the programme on the BBC website claims that “George Lamb dives into the world of legal highs, meeting users and sellers, finding out why they are legal and if this means they can also be called safe”. In actual fact, the programme consisted mainly of Lamby boy wandering round Camden (where else?) looking shocked. You can buy legal highs in shops? There’s proper websites selling them? It all actually looks professional? That’s because they’re legal, idiot. We’ve already established that. Unless he feels that the purpose of the programme was to answer the question in the title, which seems pretty pointless – “Can I get high legally?” – well yes, of course you can.

This brings me on to my first major issue with the programme (and believe me, there were many, but I’ll only rant about a select few here); where were the mentions of alcohol and tobacco? They literally did not get mentioned once, which I think is pretty appalling. Holy shit George, did you know you can just wander in off the street and buy a pint? And there’s proper shops selling it? Regardless of one’s opinion about the “differences” between drugs and alcohol, it is a mind altering substance that you can buy legally and with minimal restrictions, just like the legal highs George Lamb is horrified to see available, displayed in attractive ways and with nice pictures on the packets to entice customers. What about the Martini advert with George Clooney and all the sexy women? Why is that different? What about all the casual references equating getting drunk with having a good time in popular media? Why is all of that OK, in fact so OK that it doesn’t even get a mention? People just do not see that intoxication is intoxication, and if one kind is acceptable then we need to think about why. George Lamb voices his concerns throughout the programme that legal highs are so dangerous precisely because they’re legal – because that means everyone thinks they’re safe and isn’t careful enough. I think that is a valid point, but where it applies most strongly is with alcohol and tobacco, substances that most people don’t even consider to be “drugs”. How many deaths are there per year from legal highs, George, compared to alcohol and tobacco?

These are the kinds of questions he should have been answering, which brings me onto my second point. It’s hard to pin down, but there was just a general lack of substance. Where were the statistics, the graphs, the interviews lasting more than 20 seconds, the facts? This programme, these questions, had such potential, but it just wasn’t in depth enough. He doesn’t ask the right questions, he misunderstands or misrepresents (or both) the points made by the experts and he whizzes through the whole thing not really covering anything. They set up a night out, for example, where a group of three students were to take some legal highs and record their experiences throughout the night. What we in fact got was three sweaty faced goons grinning into the camera, edited with some generic “rave” footage. What did they take? Pretty basic question. How much did they take? Were they drinking alcohol? How long after ingestion was the footage filmed? Why didn’t the BBC choose to show more than 3 or 4 seconds of footage at a time so that we could actually get a look at them – were they sweating, slurring, delirious? We didn’t get the answer to any of these questions and considering that this was presented as a case study of people taking legal highs, I think it’s pretty shocking journalism. But perhaps I’m being unfair – we did learn during a meeting with Lamby in a greasy spoon the next day that they felt a bit rough. Well big woop.

Another massive misrepresentation was the case study involving Guernsey. Guernsey, for those of you who don’t know, is mega strict on illegal drugs. This legislation has obviously been highly successful as they now have a massive problem with legal highs, as the teenagers and young adults (because it is mostly them) can’t get hold of the real stuff. George Lamb didn’t quite seem to be able to make his mind up here – whilst he explains how unusual the situation is there and seems pretty sure that it’s because of the super tough drug laws, he then questions teenagers on the street and expects us to be shocked that they’ve all tried legal highs. Of course they’ve all tried legal highs, they all take them there, that’s the whole point and why you went Guernsey! It’s not representational of the population at large so I really didn’t get the point of this section at all. His condescending attitude towards users of legal highs also really pissed me off. He got down with the kids and joined them in their car whilst they smoked some kind of legal smoking mix (probably Spice) from their hand-crafted Coke bottle bong (we’ve all been there) and questioned them about the safety of what they were doing. When they replied that they were aware that it was risky, he was incredulous – fancy knowing that something you’re doing is risky and doing it anyway, how stupid, right? Right? Well, no. Unless Lamby boy’s never crossed the road, got in a car, lit up a fag or basically done anything ever, he’s being a total hypocrite. As it turns out, he actually admits to having taken cocaine and ecstasy during the program, making his hypocrisy even more apparent. Being aware of the risks of something and doing it anyway doesn’t make you an idiot, it means you’ve considered the risks and decided they’re minimal, or at least minimal compared to the benefits. Yes, an aeroplane might crash, but you want to go on holiday, and it’ll probably be fine. People make these kind of decisions every day.

Another aspect of the programme boasted about in the description is that Lamb talks to “sellers”. Well, he actually talks to one, and he was a complete arsehole about it. He wanders into shops and rings people up wanting to talk to them on camera right now, and then treats it as some kind of admission of wrong-doing when they say no. Finally, Chris from Potseeds.co.uk, a friend of ours, agrees to talk to him and George is off to Potseeds HQ in Totnes. The way it is edited makes Chris look like a lone man who sells drugs out of a shed, rather than the manager of a busy, successful and completely above board business, and Lamb’s tone is mocking throughout. He picks up packets off the shelves, laughing at their funny names, in a scene akin to a crap drugs education lesson at school where you’re warned off drugs as “only dopes smoke dope”. The worst bit though is when Lamb chooses to assess what Chris has said in the voiceover, recorded after he’s left Totnes, rather than addressing his criticisms to him when he has a chance to reply. Chris hesitated, we are told, which obviously makes him a bastard and a liar and a downright horrible human being (or words to that effect). Or, it just makes him a normal man who isn’t trained for TV, who knows every single syllable he utters will be analysed to death and used against himself and the entire legal highs industry.

The final bit of the programme that really got my goat actually had the potential to be very interesting. Lamb goes to speak to an actual scientist (just one though – toxicologist Dr. John Ramsey from St George’s College at the University of London) about legal highs and he is told that MDMA is probably safer than many legal highs as it’s been around for such a long time we know how to deal with it. Well, I totally agree – pure, pharmaceutical-grade MDMA is almost definitely safer than legal highs. In fact, it’s one of the safest drugs around, so saying that it’s safer than legal highs is kind of a non point – it’s also safer than alcohol. But, more importantly, pure, pharmaceutical-grade MDMA is not what we should be talking about here – it’s not what is available in clubs or pubs or whatever to the average customer. Ecstasy, MDMA’s dirty little sister, is what must be considered when you compare illegal drugs to legal drugs, as that is the alternative. Even street bought MDMA is nowhere near 100% MDMA. This leads me on to the final, and in my opinion, worst moment of this documentary, where George Lamb fucks up yet another incredible chance to actually learn something from someone who knows what they’re talking about. He’s talking to Matt Bowden (who we also spoke to later for comment), the guy who made BZP big in New Zealand, as a reaction to the massive crystal meth problem they have there. Matt categorically says that BZP is not “safe”, it’s “safer”, but if people are going to do it, “safer” is better than nothing – my sentiment exactly. At this point Lamb demonstrates a display of ignorance of Brass Eye proportions when he says that he’s been told that “taking an ecstasy” is safer than taking legal highs. By this point I was practically screaming at the screen, and I bet I don’t need to tell you why as I’m sure you all have a much higher IQ than Lamby evidently does – the scientist said MDMA, for christ’s sake, not ecstasy, and that’s a pretty fucking important difference. After this, Lamb takes salvia and makes a total tit of himself but I was sick of his bullshit by then (although I did notice that he didn’t even explain what salvia was… considering that he’d been talking about synthetic legal highs all the way through it might be important to mention that salvia is a plant, and is in no way a legal high).

I had many more complaints about this programme, from the trivial (like Lamby’s stupid highlights/streaks/whatever the hell they are) to the not-so-trivial (what about all the legal highs out there that aren’t synthetic? They didn’t get a mention at all, other than salvia which he didn’t differentiate from everything else he’d been talking about), but those are the main ones. I wouldn’t mind if the programme had concluded that legal highs were all bad, as long as it was based on some interesting, reliable evidence. As it was, there wasn’t really a conclusion at all, and I felt like I hadn’t learned anything. There were some interesting ideas (following users on a night out, for example) and some very interesting contributors. It’s a great topic and, as legal highs become more prevalent, something that needs to be discussed, but uninformed dirge like this contributes nothing other than yet more misunderstandings. Given the BBC’s track record, with programmes like Horizon definitively stating that popular legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than MDMA and cannabis (watch that episode here), I had high hopes that this programme would give a well researched, balanced insight into the legal highs industry. Instead, we got a overgrown gawky teenager marvelling at “druggies” and consistently boasting about his own supposed experience with illegal drugs (which did nothing but make him look like a hypocrite), topped off with an image of salvia use no more insightful than “woah, man”. Disappointing work, BBC (But thanks for the extra sales )

Hopefully I can find a video of this somewhere to post up here, but no luck yet.

UPDATE: Here it is! Unfortunately, the site it’s hosted on will probably try and sell you a girlfriend or something before you can actually watch the video. Click the red play button and close the pop up window if one appears. Then, the play button turns green. Click it again and you can watch the entire thing:

If this was made a few months earlier, I wouldn’t have needed to revise.

No, this won’t be another edgy list of all the books everyone thinks are really “far out”, like
The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, Food of the Gods or The Doors of Perception. This will be a list of incredible books that will force you to think about your place in the universe from a totally rational perspective, instead of relying on half-baked theories thought up by crazy bearded stoners.

I promise you that if you read all of these books on this list, not only will will feel a renewed sense of wonder at the world around you & universe at large, but you’ll also come away from it with a sound understanding of the scientific method and a perfectly tuned bullshit detector necessary to wade through the heaps of crap spouted by lesser mortals.

Click on any of the pictures to see the book on Amazon. Here goes, in no particular order:

Antimatter

Author: Frank Close

With the recent release of the Angels & Demons film, this book is essential reading, and weighing in at less than 150 small pages with big text, there really is no excuse. If you’ve ever wondered anything between “What the hell is antimatter?” and “I wonder if I can build an antimatter superweapon to take over the world?”, then this is the book for you.

What it’s about: This book gives a detailed, yet understandable history of particle physics and separates antimatter facts from antimatter fiction.

Why it will expand your mind: Humans have evolved to cope with things of average size, in average temperatures for an average length of time. This book forces you to think small – not down to the size of cells, or even the simplest biological molecules, but to atoms themselves and beyond. Because we’ve not evolved to deal with things on such a small scale, particle physics is almost an alien concept. Thankfully, this book is written with clarity in mind, peppered with plenty of helpful diagrams and examples.

The Selfish Gene

Author: Richard Dawkins

Heard about this crazy, heretical “Evolution” business? This book is chock full of solid evidence, impeccable logic and brilliant thinking that will leave you with no doubt about evolution’s roll in everything you can see around you. Forget religion – this is the book with all the answers, and the evidence to back them up.

What it’s about: This is the book Charles Darwin would have written if he knew what we know now. Dawkins fills us in on the details of modern evolutionary theory from a gene’s-eye view of the world.

Why it will expand your mind: Evolution explains everything. Everything! If aliens exist, they too would have evolved. This process is so universal, it provides a thread on which to hang every other fact we’ve ever learned, uniting them all with one common explanation. A solid understanding also allows you to easily explain absolutely anything you might encounter.

If this is your first foray into evolutionary biology, you might like to start with River Out Of Eden. Your brain won’t be torn asunder with logic and reason, but you’ll definitely get a glimpse of the bigger picture. If you’ve done any biology-related higher education, then I’ll also suggest The Extended Phenotype, arguably Dawkins’ most important work, after you’ve finished The Selfish Gene.

Bad Science

Author: Ben Goldacre

Bad Science is your defence against a world of horse crap where everyone is trying to rip you off. Ben Goldacre also blogs at BadScience.net and writes a column with the same name for The Guardian. You can read an entire chapter of this book here.

What it’s about: Confused about MMR jabs? Homoeopathy? Crystal healing? Fish oil? Then read this book.

Why it will expand your mind: You’ll learn the simplicity of the scientific method and why it’s so important to the world we live in. It will teach you to think for yourself and apply a healthy dose of scepticism to the next dose of health advice you might hear about from someone trying to sell you something. Not particularly mind expanding on its own, but it has a synergy with all the other books in this list.

The God Delusion

Author: Richard Dawkins

If you’ve heard of Richard Dawkins, this book is probably why, having already sold over 1.5 million copies. Even if you’re religious, you need to read it, because you should always hear the other side’s argument – if something challenges your beliefs, and your position remains the same, then your beliefs can only be strengthened.

What it’s about: While it’s not possible to unequivocally prove that God doesn’t exist, this book presents several cast iron arguments why all religions are (probably) wrong, the logical fallacies at the heart of faith itself, and the evils perpetrated in the name of religion every day.

Why it will expand your mind: As hard as it to imagine, the life of an atheist is not one of misery and pointlessness. The outlook on life presented in this book will encourage you to enjoy your life as much as possible, look after others and realise exactly where you fit into the universe. Combined with the other books in this list, there is no room left for unsupported speculation – there are rational answers out there to be marvelled at.

A Brief History Of Time

Author: Steven Hawking

Probably the most famous popular science book of all time, A Brief History Of Time has sold over 10 million copies. Funnily enough though, hardly anyone has actually read it!

What it’s about: While the first book in this list dealt with the miniscule, this book deals with the massive. From the Big Bang to black holes, and everything in between, this book covers the hot topics in cosmology with as much clarity as could be expected. While a little mind-boggling at times, persevering is totally worth it.

Why it will expand your mind: For the same reason as Antimatter – this book deals with things we haven’t evolved to comprehend.

If reading is not your thing, there are plenty of documentaries online about all the topics these worthy tomes cover. Perhaps I’ll make a list of those too one day.