If torture produces useful intelligence, then witches are real.

nowonmai: The wording was: Modern humans and modern apes very likely had a common ancestor

naoko: What makes you think this is only about the U.S.? Maybe the message is for the rest of the world: never be as evil as the USA

Who would have thunk that the land of the free would legalize torture before marijuana?
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 4:01 AM on May 2, 2008

Wow, air in the ISS is very different from earth air if it has and affect on the boomerang! Earth air parts when the boomerang flies through it because of simple physics, but air in the IIS parts because it feels DEEP REPULSION towards boomerangs. Or maybe the air in the IIS did not want to hurt the astronaut's feelings? Ohh, wait, you mean effect, nevermind.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 8:45 PM on May 1, 2008

Trip stories are like farts. Only you can enjoy your own.

ALl i'm going to say about LSD in this thread is thank god for free food, music and dancing early on Sunday morning in the Hare Krishna when I was at my mates apartment, and we were broke. Our other option was having breakfast at McDonald's (which, oddly enough, tasted more plastic and fake than the teletubbies did)
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 5:07 PM on April 29, 2008

BTW, It is my birthday today. Henceforth, it is to be known that Hoffman has retroactively reincarnated in the newborn me a few decades ago.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 5:08 PM on April 29, 2008

Anti ethnocentrism snark:

While we thank Hoffman for all the good he did to us, the Mazatecs (psylocibin), the Huichol (mescalin), the Nahuan (LSA), and the Zapotec (salvinorin), this just in Mexico, are forbidden from using their substances, and get little credit for their discoveries. I get 0 results when I search Metafilter for Maria Sabina. Sad.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 6:13 PM on April 29, 2008

WalterMitty: I would recommend rubbing your face with toilet paper. It has done wonders for my ass hair.

My first shave was in the school toilets with a pencil sharpener blade. Girls can be mean.

My last shave? In January. And my wife likes it. Take that you teenage women and your unrealistic expectations of how males should look.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:49 AM on April 29, 2008

Really? I hang 1000 pound barbells from my pubes and walk around the block, pulls the beard right back in.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 4:23 AM on April 29, 2008

There is (or was, no idea what happened during the 'civil unrest' there) a little hotel near the bus station in Oaxaca. The ground floor is a chocolate shop. Not a touristy thing but a place where mothers stop to get some chocolate on the way home from the market. They get the green beans, and process them all the way to the final product. The formulas are posted on the blackboard, and you can custom order. The typical is like 90% cacao, 10% sugar and traces of almond oil, for the traditional... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 6:12 PM on April 28, 2008

I sold my 48Gand my 48GX when I abandoned Chemical Eng. (after switching from Electronic Eng.) in favor of Design School. One of the stupidest decisions I've ever made.

I even got a free color TI92, and gave it back in favor of the monochrome 48GX. Apart from the beauty that is RPN, no other calculator in the universe can match the solid feel and the tactile feedback from an HP calculator. I am sure someone could crack a coconut using a TI, but the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 4:46 PM on April 25, 2008

facetious: In my opinion, the redesign sucks. It is like the equivalent of web 2.0 redesigns of classic web sites. If you can, hold a 48 and a 50 in your hand, click a few buttons, and feel the difference.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 9:33 PM on April 25, 2008

I am too lazy to make a post that links this to the mexican produced assault rifle, the mexican designed and built UAV, the mexican built armored vehicles, and some mexican politician's desire to change the consitution to allow the mexican armed forces to go play with their guns in other countries (participate in peace keeping missions), which they have not done for almost a century. Looks like someone is starting to realize that the harder it becomes to make big money on oil, the easier it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 6:43 PM on April 25, 2008

The only way I can make DecemberBoy's comment make any sense, is that in Mexico everyone who is underage is also a virgin, no matter how much sex they've had before. Some people lose their virginity when they turn 18, most when they get married.

Most of my free alcohol and related substances in London came from Mexican middle class, and richer, kids living and working for a year in London, as illegal immigrants, after finishing high school. Most where atheistic... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 9:30 PM on April 25, 2008

I found it funny, the kid seemed to be pretty cool about the whole thing. It would have been nasty if the kid looked uncomfortable.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 3:53 PM on April 23, 2008

This is a very good post.

One time hitchhiking and camping along the Mayan route, I met three Israeli girls. They were fun to be around, very self confident, and amazingly good campers. I asked them were they'd learned to pack, trek, and take good care of their stuff, and they answered "Military service". they were traveling in Central America to, "forget all that crap, and enjoy the simple life".

At one point in Chiapas, in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:42 PM on April 22, 2008

Slightly off topic, re "the remaining difference", I am reminded of toallagate, or towelgate. After Mexican president Fox is caught doing exactly what he had promised not to do in his campaign, what he had been criticizing in previous governments, he says something like "You found out in the newspapers, see, this government is more transparent than the previous ones, can I get a medal?".
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 3:37 PM on April 22, 2008

If you can read Spanish, you might enjoy this story by Benedetti on the effects of this music in real people: Muzak
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 9:45 PM on April 20, 2008

Do you mean there was a time were you had to achieve something in order to be on t.v., as opposed to hoping to be on t.v. in order to achieve something in life?

from the link: “Too many of the pupils believe that academic success is unnecessary, because they will be able to access fame and fortune quite easily through a reality TV show.”
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:04 PM on April 20, 2008

You don't smoke the cactus, and fuck Carlos Castañeda.

I wasted too many hours talking some of his readers out of bad peyote and mushroom trips. NO, YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE EATEN BY THE IMMATERIAL BEINGS WHO WANT TO STEAL YOUR RARE MASCULINE NATURE! YES, YOU ARE JUST HALLUCINATING! Drugs are supposed to be fun. Castaneda ruined some great drugs for a whole generation of my peers.


There is a great story, which I have been unable to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 12:05 AM on April 13, 2008

And I wondered how people in Japan came up with the idea of Tentacle Porn.

I have rejected job offers that would have required to commute at peak hour, the job I have now has the most flexible schedule I've seen (the downside: it also means all nighters an calls on Sunday). One of my commutes involved getting on a bus halfway down its route, already full. On good days, I would be squeezed like the people in the video, on bad days, I would be hanging from the railing... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 12:38 PM on April 11, 2008

Just here to say that this thread has made me think of some things I had never thought about.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 8:11 PM on April 6, 2008

And that is the important thing.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 11:49 PM on April 5, 2008

hal, is there a lot of competition to get to work at the South Pole (like becoming an astronaut), or is it just bad luck that whatever you decided to study just happens to be best seen there?
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 3:11 AM on March 31, 2008

Well, it seems I don't have what it takes to work there.

Not a lot of demand for overweight chain-smoking actionscript developers in the South Pole. I just shaved my antarctic explorer beard in dejection.

I will have to keep writing code and hope this is not a second dot com bubble, so that one day I can afford a private expedition.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 5:13 PM on April 1, 2008

I did this for a science fair with a couple of friends. No one got it, specially the judges, except us. So sad.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:10 PM on April 1, 2008

"[conditions he] came to assume were the baseline expectations of his life" If those conditions had been to be alone in an empty cage, would it be less cruel?

You don't get skewed results when you compare what happens to a miserable animal injected with a toxin compared to an equally miserable animal not injected. The control animals for medical research are not wild animals or animals living in eden. They are animals raised and kept in the same conditions as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 3:05 AM on March 31, 2008

Elephantube, the elephant video website that is transmitted in the sub 20Hz band across big swaths of Africa and Asia, just featured a "Humans learn using their trunk" video.

Hundreds of elephants have complained in the comments section that the humans seen in the video have been rote trained to snort milk out their noses, and even if they know what they are doing, they ingested the milk THROUGH THE MOUTH!!!

Also, a human arranging... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 9:16 PM on March 30, 2008

One of my favorite graphic design gym routines was to take an admired work, analyze it and try to figure out what makes it great, and then try to remake it with whatever tools I had available.

In the process of remaking, a lot of invisible stuff becomes visible, like grids, subtle color choices, why an element works where it is placed and nowhere else, etc... At the end, I would realize how much I missed in the analysis, and how much I learned from doing. This made me a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 8:12 PM on March 30, 2008

23skidoo: Can you re-type that in rhyme?

Thank you.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 3:18 PM on March 24, 2008

DON'T MESS WITH 23skidoo!

Or he will litter your city with his posters....

Wait, that was supposed to be an anti littering campaign.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 7:43 PM on March 24, 2008

The problem is that they are not up to First World standards on efficiency and not up to Third World standards in corruption.

Potential immigrants of the world, let us hope the dollar devalues enough that anyone of you can afford to expedite or buy your way into the USA. Whats a million dollars, like a thousand Euros?... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:37 PM on March 24, 2008

Thank you very much for making it clear that it is compassion that makes us human. One is able to be completely off the charts in any of the other dimensions that can be used to describe a human mind, and still be human. But not compassion, compassion is special.

I liked these videos for the complete opposite reason, I had always wondered where the evidence of Hiter's (And Genghis Khan, the Conquistadores, the slave merchants, etc...) domestic side was.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 2:12 AM on March 23, 2008

I am disappointed in your lack of imagination, tkchrist and the others claiming these were not "ordinary" people. It is their acts that make them extraordinary.

It was people who been brought up to believe in pure racist ideology and trained in dehumanization.

Can you really not imagine any kind of training or experience that would make you a monster? Could you have told these others apart when... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 12:07 PM on March 24, 2008

This is cooler than Easter.

I am still waiting for the designer drug that will make the visual parts of the brain run very very slowly, enough to get the effect of a long exposure.

A full nigh would go by in a second, but just imagine all one could see in the sky. This is one drug I could become addicted to, enough to spend winters at the poles.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:35 AM on March 24, 2008

At least he is learning something useful, but I am missing the point of this post orthogonality. Why is this one article interesting or special? What I am supposed to learn from reading this?

“And if the page didn’t have stuff to learn, I’d rip it out.”

I see.

/Ripping this post out.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 11:32 PM on March 23, 2008

This is my 4 months worth of beard. I think it will be worth something for next year's competition, right now I am in the uncanny valley between dirty smelly hobo and distinguished early 20th century mexican intellectual.

It is funny that my wife went from "icky" to "mmmmh, I like how that feels" in less than 1/2" of growth. Size does matter.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 4:12 PM on March 23, 2008

Did someone post to metafilter the story of those people with disabilities that use the Segway because it does not dehumanize them in the eyes of ignorant or prejudices people the way a wheelchair does, but still get abused by people who automatically assume they are just lazy ass hipsters flaunting their wealth, and by cities that will not consider a Segway a disability device, and who would give everything they own to be able to walk 10 yards without collapsing from exhaustion or pain, and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 10:36 PM on March 21, 2008

BTW: Do you think someone Kamen is dumb or ignorant enough to think "These people have no access to WATER, but they must of course have access to 220v electricity and $15,000 dollars to spare, otherwise how can they afford a home and 2 cars in today's economy"?

If you think you are smarter than him, send a resume (no accent in this machine), he is always looking for bright people to hire.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 10:40 PM on March 21, 2008

A stained glass ICBM? Pictures or its a lie!
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:18 PM on March 21, 2008

Here is a review from the other side.

Pharyngula is in my daily reading list, I really enjoy the science posts there, and I like to know where the creationist are hiding, but it is sad to read the comments. It is clear that the ID and creationist crew are ignorant, willfully or not, and a bunch of hypocrites, but most of the most vocal defenders of science, evolution and atheism show a lot of ignorance. They defend their views with outdated, already refuted, or just... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 9:54 AM on March 21, 2008

Yes rusty, I love that about the people behind expelled. They are so used to having an unquestionable authority figure, and to defending it to the death (the death of the questioners, usually), that they believe that if the can tarnish Darwin, the whole edifice of evolutionary theory will fail. That is why they spend half of the movie making the point DARWIN = HITLER.

They have no idea how science works.

It would be great to get one of these... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 12:14 PM on March 21, 2008

I saw this in another website, but with a few differences that made it better.

The camera would shoot automatically.
The camera was hidden.
The camera was a videocamera.
The camera was in a girl's locker room.
The girls were naked.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 10:57 AM on March 21, 2008

the bit about being 63 is what has surprised his colleagues, seeing as mathematicians tend to peak by the time they hit 30.
posted by linux

linux, that misconception is based on G. H. Hardy's A MAthematician's Apology in which he said "I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty". He also said that he had never known a former mathematician that could make it in any... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 10:28 AM on March 21, 2008

And it's an official holiday in Mexico, Benito Juarez's birthday, a Mazatec indian that made it to president, and is responsible for the separation of church and state! Good Friday and Juarez's birthday the same day, how sweet.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 9:44 AM on March 21, 2008

Really interesting. I am left wishing for more details.

Regarding doctors, anyone who frequents biology or physics blogs knows that doctor != scientist, doctor != rational and doctor != tolerant. If one does not conform to the norm, it is very hard to find a doctor with whom to establish a mutual respect relationship. If it is hard for pot smokers, I can only imagine how hard it is for someone in such a rare situation.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 11:04 AM on March 20, 2008

I suck at scientific notation. I wanted to go back to 2003 to prevent myself from eating that raw chicken, but went back 5 billion years. I took a dump in a warm puddle, I hope no one notices.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 11:29 PM on March 19, 2008

And also, blessed be the poor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, or something.

I say they all get baptized and then promptly dispatched to heaven. Better than a pension, and heaven has better weather than Britain.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 7:46 PM on March 19, 2008

People going adult male + child companion = evil make me really sad.

Even in the middle class side of my family, I have uncles and cousins from 2 and three generations ago that traveled with strangers to places far away, and spent many years being raised by another family. The farmer side of my family has too many of these stories to count.

A concrete example: My great-grandmother lived in a small city, and went to visit her sister in a village... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:28 PM on March 19, 2008

Damn, one paragraph got lost when I pasted my comment. They did not take my great-aunt-back, they left her with another family for 5 or 6 years.

My great-grandmother was like five feet high, rode a huge horse, kept a rifle across the saddle, and a gun in her rebozo.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:37 PM on March 19, 2008

Where is dios? I want to hear his opinion on this. Seems like the Dutch are finding answers to "hard questions which must be asked and answered regarding the proper role of democratic majorities to govern".
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 12:59 PM on March 19, 2008

Dhammond, unexpected and interesting answer. Specially the "Civil War" part.

Based on this record, I recommend that the next time the USA wants to engage in a humanitarian mission, or wants to liberate some oppressed people, it lets its most enlightened states win a war against its most retrograde states.

Cambodia I am learning about right now.

After RTFA, I wish, not usual in me, I could live 200 years. Just to read the history books.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Curare at 1:00 AM on March 18, 2008