Dexter?

On Food and Cooking is one of my favorite books to give as a gift to friends and family who are into food and cooking. It is a great, accessible read and is fun to just randomly flip through or as a reference for when random questions like "how is cheese made anyway" come up (and the internet is either not available or it is more fun to look it up in a book and read it to a room full of drunks).

It is interesting that there is a devout "molecular gastronomist" on this season of "Top Chef". So far his concoctions have been hit or miss...

"I'm a plant."

"I thought they called your kind a fruit?"

(couldn't resist, sorry)

Damn, Everyplace beat me to it. :-)

It pissed me off for years that the drugs were never as good as DARE made them out to be...

Thanks Mark and Crash, I forgot the lines from my favorite poem, Desiderata of Happiness, by Max Ehrmann, vis. "Know what peace there may be in silence" and "Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit."

(Disclosure: I have a PhD in molecular pharmacology and work as a volunteer for Erowid)

I must agree with Joel and D.Culberson. Just because naive people submit information/experience reports to Erowid does not mean it is full of misinformation. Erowid volunteers work hard to vet the huge number of incoming experience reports that are submitted. The experience report section is but one segment of the greater Erowid website. The rest of the website is a collection of information from various sources. It is certainly possible that this information may be inaccurate, misleading, or misinterpreted.

I personally think that Erowid does a good job of presenting as much information as possible and is far better than other sites that either explicitly laud or discourage the use of these substances.

aloha
dr.psilo

@Speedwell: Bird flu is much more of a concern for industrial chicken farmers, with tight living conditions and poor chicken health. Furthermore, the concerns of bird flu spreading to humans is much more relevant when pigs are farmed alongside the chickens, as the pigs are a much better vector for cross-species infection to humans than the chickens are. I would be concerned more about the chickens than humans with urban chicken farming. It is true that an outbreak could spread throughout the city, but it is more likely to decimate the bird population than the human population.

aloha
dr.psilo

I live in Missoula now and find it hilarious that this issue made it to boingboing. I am all for raising chickens in town. I love fresh eggs and I think a conscientious person can raise chickens humanely still with the intent to someday eat them. The only good counterargument I have heard is of a mother with a child who is highly allergic to chicken feathers. This raises interesting municipal legal issues. Do you license chickens in the city? How much should a license be? Should it be a one-time fee or per chicken? I find the process very interesting.

aloha
dr.psilo

For the record, I, too, want that jacket.

As someone who got his PhD investigating the mechanism of action of hallucinogens at the molecular level, I must say that I have little respect for Timothy Leary. Though I understand his role in society as the prankster/discordian,the escapist attitudes that he extolled contributed greatly to a vigorous backlash against these compounds and harmed the scientific investigation of them for decades. I'll take Hoffman, Shulgin, and Nichols over Leary any day.