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Showing posts from May, 2011

Sunday chemistry blogging: DMT

Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, is a naturally occurring substance sometimes used as a psychedelic drug.  It is one of the most famous and widely studied psychedelics (it features in books by McKenna , Shulgin , and Strassman , among others).  If you remember the structural shorthand from last week , you should be able to decipher this picture: Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) (By the way, psilocybin, from magic mushrooms, is extremely similar to DMT.)  The two commonest methods of administration are smoking and ingesting.  The smoking method is sometimes called "the businessman's trip," because it comes on almost immediately and only lasts for 20 minutes or so (compared to LSD's 8-10 hours).  The ingesting pathway is a bit more interesting.  DMT makes one half of the famous ayahuasca traditional mixture prepared by Amazon shamans.  DMT is not normally active orally (it will be metabolized), so one must take a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI—like harmaline) in combinatio

Paycheck update

Our financial officer has informed us that the late payday is due to a mixup back at DC headquarters.  Apparently some jackass "forgot" to submit the bank transfer this month, or something.  They were not remotely specific, whoever it was, but they said that the money should arrive by the 1st of June.  Maybe.  However, I do have faith that our local financial officer is not at fault here.  Even if he had forgotten, by now the situation would have been rectified if he had the power to do so.  We volunteers can complain up a storm.

You can't make this up

So House Republicans have agreed to provide federal aid for the recent tornado damage.  What's the catch ? House Republicans, who require spending cuts whenever new spending is proposed, said the FEMA funds would be paid by cutting $1.5 billion from an Energy Department loan program for the production of fuel-efficient vehicles. Well, at least it's not like oil prices are extremely high or anything.  Good thing these chumps weren't in charge of Japan when the earthquake hit.

Africa links

1. Alassane Ouattara has finally been sworn in to the Cote d'Ivoire presidency . 2. North and South Sudan continue to clash . 3. The Ugandan parliament has elected its first female speaker . 4. Wal-Mart is trying to buy Massmart, the largest retailer in South Africa . 5. The ANC is trying to jam through a bill expanding government secrecy power .

On "To Hell With Good Intentions"

During our mid-service training, one of the breakout sessions had us reading a speech by Ivan Illich called " To Hell With Good Intentions " arguing that volunteer service in developing countries is terrible: I did not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans. I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class "American Way of Life," since that is really the only life you know. A group like this could not have developed unless a mood in the United States had supported it - the belief that any true American must share God's blessings with his poorer fellow men. The idea that every American has something to give, and at all times may, can and should gi

Sunday chemistry blogging: why heroin is not actually a drug

I've been soliciting advice from diverse professional bloggers about making this blogging thing into a vocation, and there was a solid consensus that while wonky political types are fairly common, science writers are much less so.  What's more, taking a look at the science blogosphere, the majority are either biologists or physicists.  So, I'm starting a new series today on chemistry!  Now, I know what you're thinking: chemistry sucks!   Not so.  It's true, chemistry does seem to have the worst reputation of the hard sciences.  My favorite sub-discipline, organic chemistry, is usually considered a form of madness.  (Damn pre-meds.)  I'm here to tell you that, while it might not have the sexiness of astronomy or the interesting squishiness of biology, chemistry can be fun and fascinating.  Onward! The first topic today is the line diagram (or skeletal formula). This is a simple chemical shorthand that lazy organic chemists use to avoid having to draw endless

Quote for the day, if we're still alive

Apparently today was supposed to be the end of the world.  Here's something to celebrate. "I am not contemptuous of the ancient world. It was not a stupid world. My point is that its consciousness was completely different from ours. It is a gigantic error to think that you can transplant their concepts into a life in our world, into a consciousness that has experienced Darwin and Freud and the Industrial Revolution, comparative religion and psychological analysis, research into the nature of dreams and cults and visions and hypnosis, stars and myths and ancient documents, anthropology and quantum physics; a world that knows about closed self-justifying logic, and the conjuring tricks of Indian gurus, and the manipulative methods of cult recruitment and the de-programming of its victims; a world that tries to develop sophisticated techniques for understanding and treating schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders, instead of putting spit on their eyes and exorcising de

A South African IT solution

Apparently the rate of software piracy in Africa is double the global rate .  On a related note, Becca notes that IT problems, particularly viruses, are endemic in the school system here : Viruses spread like wildfire here in South Africa as I'm sure they do in other places with similar conditions (where technology is very prevalent but not very well understood). It seems like it's a constant battle to keep the computers at our schools free of viruses which are mostly spread by USB sticks. Whenever the administrative assistants get together for a workshop or to submit data about the school, they come back with new virus from other administrative assistants. Some people are more concerned than others and follow the directions we give for checking their USB sticks and computers and can usually keep their computers pretty clean, they have to be extremely vigilant whenever anyone else uses their computer. Others don't seem to mind wiping their hard drives clean

Election results

As expected, the ANC won a large victory with 63.6% of the vote (with 80% counted thus far).  However, this is a bit less than the 67% they won back in 2006.  The opposition Democratic Alliance drastically increased their support from 14 to 22.1%.  Given that Coloureds (mixed race) and whites make up about 9% each of the population, clearly the DA's play for the black vote had at least some success.

Collected links

1.  SF legends recommend the best SF . 2.  False molestation accusations are really, really bad . 3.  The war on drugs vs. the Constitution . 4.  Five ways to improve foreign aid . 5.  A great diagnosis of a classic liberal pathology . 6.  Speaking of drugs, Ellen Willis was awesome .

Election day!

South Africa voted yesterday in the rough equivalence of midterm elections. To my amazement they actually set up a polling station, complete with official signs, officers and police in my tiny village. It's been an extremely visible campaign with the two main parties putting up signs all over creation in a mess of languages. The two main parties are the African National Congress and the Democratic Alliance.  This was apparently the first election where the DA, traditionally the party of whites and Coloureds (mixed race) made a serious effort to get the black vote.  To my eye they had a much better-organized campaign, with their signs up long before the ANC's and a much larger media buy.  The DA strategy focused on service delivery, going with the slogan "We deliver for all" (or in Setswana, " Re direla botlhe ," or in Afrikaans, " Ons leiwer dienste aan almal ," or in Zulu...you get the picture) featuring commercials with a bunch of gogos (grand

Rwanda and *The Fate of Africa*

Matt Yglesias pointed me to an interview with Rwandan president Paul Kagame the other day: Paul Kagame, 53, has been president of Rwanda for the past decade and vice-president—and de facto leader—for seven years before that. But for all the power and years of command he appears as lean and austere as he was as the 36-year-old guerrilla commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel army that fought an end to the 20th century's swiftest act of mass murder—the killing between April and July 1994 of some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers. I'm no historian, but my service here has had me reading a bunch of books on African history. The last one was The Fate of Africa , a cynical and bloodcurdling — but good — post-colonial overview.  For such a gigantic topic, it's necessarily a bit limited (focusing a bit more on macroeconomics than I'd like), but it covers most of the big events.  Most African postcolonial leaders have had a wide authoritarian streak (a trend t

Short-circuiting the electoral college

I always had a rather hazy idea that getting rid of the electoral college would take either a constitutional amendment or changing the voting laws in every state.  I had heard of some proposed state laws that would award electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote, but not thinking about it very hard, I assumed you'd again have to get one passed in every state. However, looking closer, a grassroots group called National Popular Vote has invented a slick workaround that could deep-six the electoral vote without all that much effort (compared to a constitutional amendment, that is).  It's an agreement among states to award their electors to the winner of the popular vote based on Article II, Section I of the Constitution, which gives the states the right to determine how their electors are selected. The beauty is that the law doesn't take effect until there is the critical majority of 270 electoral votes represented in participating states, so no state has to worry

Budget cuts field report

Via Wikimedia So the GOP's frantic evisceration of government has finally hit way out here in the boonies.  Here's the story: President Obama's FY 2011 budget contained $440 million for the Peace Corps, which would have been a $40 million increase.  Originally Peace Corps was preparing to operate at Obama's level, but when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, headquarters revised operations down to a $400 million level.  Thus the South Africa post reduced the numbers of trainees for this year from 130 to 110. Since Congress never passed a budget, they authorized a bunch of continuing resolutions telling agencies they could function at 2010 levels.  However, during the last confrontation over shutting down the government in April, Congress scraped off an additional $25 million (thus giving Peace Corps a $375 million pot).  The number of trainees here was further reduced to 99, but since we're so far into the fiscal year, a great deal of that money ha

Prepaid electricity

via Wikimedia Atrios : As dirty fucking hippies predicted, because we've been through this before with telephone deregulation, electricity "competition" will lead to companies engaging in dubious practices to bilk you out of your money. Electricity isn't like gas or a bottle of milk. You use it most of the time without having any sense of the per unit cost (both per kilowatt hours and how many kilowatt hours your teevee users), you just know roughly what your bill "should" be based on past experience. This is just one more pain in the ass for people who have enough pains in the asses to deal with. I think he's right about the likely effects of electricity deregulation and how people don't pay much attention to their electricity bill, but I'd say people should pay more attention to it even if it is a bit of a pain in the ass.  (Though I think Atrios was mostly talking about having to sift through your bill to make sure the compan

I have been assimilated

Now when I'm reading a normal book and I find a word I don't know, my immediate instinct is to bring down the cursor so I can look it up with the Kindle auto-dictionary. ( h/t: Shakespeare's Sister )

Electoral college shenanigans, ctd: lose the Presidency with 78.05% of the vote

Taking another look at this post , I see now that I made two mistakes (some I noticed and some others pointed out).  First, I didn't use eligible voters, I used total population.  Second, I could have easily rigged it to come out with exactly 270 votes by simply removing a state.  So, I redid the calculation with data from here .  (See below.)  In this case, Wyoming through Wisconsin yielded 273, so I subtracted Montana, which is the least over-represented state with three electoral votes.  The total was barely changed from the other calculation: 21.95%.  Still, technical accuracy is worth checking. 2008 Presidential election, via Wikimedia In comments, Alon added: "Well, Tony Blair won his three general election with an average of 40% of the popular vote and only 35% in 2005."  This is a valid point; parliamentary systems often return a prime minister who has only won a plurality.  However, to clarify the point, the really egregious thing about the electoral colleg