The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘science’ Category

Yesterday, legislators in the US state of California took the first real step towards a fully legalised, regulated and taxed cannabis market. Earlier this week, the US state of New Jersey legalised cannabis for medical use.

All over America, attitudes and laws are changing and changing fast.

What are we doing wrong here in the United Kingdom?

Lots, by the look of it. How is it possible that we are falling behind America on this very important issue?

A few years ago, the situation was reversed. The attitude here to weed was relaxing, Tony Blair and David Blunkett downgraded cannabis to Class C, making possession a very minor offence. In America, so much as a seed or a used hash pipe was enough in most states to get you a lengthy, mandatory prison sentence.

Cannabis didn’t remain Class C for long, as Gordon Brown asked the ACMD to review its status. The ACMD did just that, twice and recommended that it remain in Class C. That was unacceptable to our very desperate and weak, make-believe Prime Minister and he pushed ahead with restoring cannabis to to Class B. Class B increased penalties for possession, but had no effect on production or distribution, the penalties are the same for either classification. Gordon wanted to send a “strong message” that cannabis was a “dangerous, deadly drug”.

Now, you can ask any teenager if cannabis is lethal and once they stop laughing, they will set you straight. Cannabis is in no way lethal, but our current government and ruling party don’t have a problem lying to the general public about anything. These are the same shitbags that invaded Iraq on the basis of utter fabrication, so a little white lie about weed won’t cause any issues with their consciences.

Well, I can tell you right now, its causing major issues with mine!

America is moving apace to legalise weed. This is a huge shift in attitude and approach from their previous policy of “just say no” and the war on drugs. Its seismic!

America is the most litigious country in the world, if there were any risks to cannabis, someone would be getting sued for damages, whether its the government for allowing it or the people who provide it. America has accepted that cannabis is not a bad thing, but a beneficial product that can help millions medically.

C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General of the United States declared that cannabis was the “most therapeutically beneficial substance known to man” years ago, but it is only now that America is accepting his assessment. At least they got there in the end.

We are still so far away from taking a common sense approach that I’m not sure what to do. Gordon Brown, in his ignorance and desire to appear strong on drugs, has set the cause back at least a decade. Its time we regain some of our lost ground.

Its not just America, many countries have relaxed their drug policies to reflect common sense, the most recent being the Czech Republic. How could the UK be lagging behind them?

We’re lagging behind almost everyone.

I want to change that. I am going to change that.

I just don’t know how yet.

Every journey starts with a first step and this is mine. My goal for 2010 is to combat the ignorance and stupidity that is UK drug policy. Its time for all decent, upstanding, otherwise law abiding residents of this fine country to stand up and demand that they are not criminalised for enjoying a smoke.

We can fight the lies, we can fight the ignorance. We can fight, fight fight until we get what we want, which is a legalised, regulated and taxed cannabis market. The time is now!

A year from now, we will be closer to our goal.You have my word on it.

Martin Luther King, the famous and revered American civil rights activist once said, “…there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that, “an unjust law is no law at all.””

This video is extremely cool, it starts in Tibet and zooms out to the furthest reaches of the known universe, putting it all into temporal and spatial relation to Earth.

Play it in HD, play it full screen, sit back and marvel at how small you are and how little we really know about everything.

Have you ever wondered where you come from and how you got here?

I have and continue to do so, constantly. Sometimes it drives me kind of nuts.

And I don’t mean me, personally. I know how I got here. When a man loves a woman, they do the mummy and daddy dance and nine months later there you are, or a little less than eight months in my case.

No, I’m talking about more than just me, or you or all of us or even our little blue planet, but all of existence, the known universe and beyond.

Not that much of the universe is really known, very little in actual fact. Most of what we think we know about what’s out there in deep space is theory accepted as fact.

Did you know that we only found the first planet outside of our solar system in 1995 and to date, only 407 of them have been identified? Wikipedia knows all.

Don’t you find that surprising, when you’ve probably been taught that the universe is full of billions of planets. Again, theory accepted as fact. Remember, its only 15 years ago since we found that first planet, probably about as long as mobile phones have been in wide usage. That’s not very long at all.

The point is, they are using a theory to map out these planets. They aren’t really mapping them so much as predicting and describing what and where they think they are, based on scientific supposition. They haven’t seen a single one of them through a telescope, because one of such power is yet to exist.

I’m not trying to call any of this into question and one day I expect they will prove they’ve found planets outside of our solar system, but I am using it to illustrate something much more fundamental; our knowledge of existence is infinitesimally small and as a race we remain in our infancy.

If you think the universe was created by some all knowing, all powerful god and you’re ok with that, this piece probably isn’t for you.

I wish it was that simple, to just have faith that a high power put me here for some purpose, but I can’t buy into any of that.

If it works for you, great. may your life always be just as free of complexity and curiosity. I certainly wish mine was sometimes.

But its not, and I try to move beyond my questions by accepting that these answers are unobtainable, by me, by you, by every human being who has ever existed or will exist and asked these questions.

Intellectually I understand that these questions won’t ever be answered to my satisfaction, but I can’t help continuing to crave the answers. Our knowledge and experience is far too limited and our brains far too tiny and useless to come up with any plausible explanations for anything that matters.

Its not fair that we can ask these questions, but are unable to ever know the answers. And that’s my prediction, that for as long as our species exists, people will continue to seek answers that will never, ever come.

Think about that, no matter how many generations follow ours, for however many millennia, we won’t get the answers the most fundamental questions concerning the origins and purpose of all of existence.

Now I am trying to move beyond acceptance of these things I know I won’t know, to an even more basic view: All of existence is utterly pointless.

I’ve believed for a long time that life is pointless, but then I see most things in a bleak and dreary light, so this shouldn’t surprise you. We go about our brief, tiny lives, flitting from here to there like insects, but unlike insects we fill our heads with thoughts of grandiose self-importance.

We think because we build, create, destroy, reproduce, kill and dominate our domain that we’re so important, so worthy of everything we take for granted that we’ve missed just how insignificant we are in the scheme of the universe.

And if it turns out we are the most advanced living creatures in the universe, then what does it say about that universe?

That it is just as insignificant as we are.

The universe is bigger and more diverse than anyone can ever imagine. I don’t think I can come up with a fraction small enough to express how much we know about it, but I can try.

We know this much:

1/100000000000000000000000000000000000000000^{100000000000000000000000000}

Even if you don’t understand fractions, or exponential numbers, I’m sure you can see that is an extremely small number. It a chip off a fleck of dust above zero.

That’s how much we know.

We think we know a lot more.

By choosing to believe in the utter pointlessness of all existence and that any deeper understanding of all that exists is impossible without accepting the unproveable, can be quite liberating.

If we let go of the unknowable, then we can concentrate on the things that matter to us personally. Sure, you still have to play ball with society, pay your taxes, eat your vegetables and brush your teeth, but you’re doing all those things for yourself, without wondering why you’re here.

Oh, who am I kidding, I’ll obsess about this crap forever, utter pointlessness or not.

The Climate Change Summit opens up in Copenhagen on Monday, where a bunch of world leaders will add to the problem by producing a lot of hot air, but probably no viable solution to this very real problem.

Yep, I believe the climate is changing. I can see it and feel it and have done for a while now. Here in the UK, the winters seem milder and though last summer wasn’t one of the hottest on record, it was hot enough. I’ve seen what’s happening to the polar ice caps, not first hand, but computer graphics aren’t that good, so the footage has to be real.

Is it just a normal cycle? Maybe. Is human activity contributing or accelerating the process? How could it not? We live in a closed ecosystem, our atmosphere is sealed tight against the vacuum of space. The more greenhouse gasses we pump into this sealed bubble, the hotter it will get.

I don’t want to be a hypocrite, I want to do my part to help prevent climate change. I use low energy light bulbs, which aren’t as bright as the old incandescent style. I recycle as much as I can, which is messy and time consuming. And I don’t take unnecessary car journeys, which means riding the bus and tube with unwashed strangers.

I know its not much, but its something. I’d like to do more.

That got me thinking, what more could I do to help slow down climate change? Then it hit me, there’s something we all could do that would have an instant, immediate and measurable effect on the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the environment.

All living things exhale carbon dioxide, or CO2 as its known. Humans are the only living creatures to understand this and to be able to adjust their own output.

I’m proposing that every human being who is physically able, should hold their breath for at least one minute per day. You could do it all in one go, or you can do two 30 second periods. You could even go longer if you like, but I can’t be held liable if you pass out, fall down and hit your head. I only suggested a minute a day.

If everyone held their breath for one minute daily, that would have a huge impact on the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere annually. These things add up quickly and if I were a scientist I could estimate how much CO2 would be saved, but I’m not, so I can’t. So we’ll stick to “a lot.”

Look man, if we don’t do something and pretty goddamn soon, breathing won’t be an issue that most of us will need to worry about any more.

So I’ll be holding my breath, and not just for one minute every day. I’ll be holding it while our leaders meet this month to work out whether they can save the human race. If they do come up with a solution, I’ll certainly be surprised, but I’ll also finally be able to exhale.

You don’t want me to turn blue, do you?

The powers that be haven’t really sold us on the coming climate apocalypse.

I’m not denying its happening, I can clearly see its effects regularly on a world wide scale, I just don’t think our politicians and scientists have explained it to us very well.

“Climate change” has a PR problem, but don’t worry, I’m going to attempt to offer a simple solution.

The planet Earth itself is not threatened.

There, I said it.

Climate change is not going to destroy this rock we’re stuck on, regardless of the atmospheric temperature, Earth will keep spinning through space for a very long time, probably until our Sun turns into a Red Giant or Supernova or whatever it is stars do and that’s millions of years away.

Climate change might kill every living thing on the planet, or at least most of them. That should be a strong selling point, only we don’t really care that much about living things other than humans.

And it seems we don’t care that much about all the humans anyway, only some of them. You know, the ones that look like us, dress like us, talk like us, ummmm, us.

Not them.

But most of all, we care about ourselves. Self-preservation is something we all seem to have in common.

Tackling “climate change” has to be about saving one’s self from the coming Armageddon. Fear is always an excellent selling point.

Slowing climate change will save your life and the lives of everyone you care about. Not slowing climate change will probably kill us all.

“All of us” includes you. You might really die from the effects of a warmer planet.

If the global temperature goes up, more people will die from heat-related illnesses. Remember all those old French folks who died in the heatwave in 2003? There’d be a lot more deaths like that.

Got air conditioning? If the energy suppliers can’t keep up with demand, it won’t matter and you’ll still fry.

Large, currently heavily populated areas of the planet will become uninhabitable, potentially displacing millions. All those refugees will have to go somewhere, which will increase crowding in more temperate regions while stretching dwindling resources beyond capacity. Life will become more difficult to sustain.

Tropical diseases without known cures will spread out from the current hot zones to increasingly wider areas and even more people will die.

Food production will be disrupted, prompting starvation on an unimaginable scale.

I’ve read that London has only a 48 hour food supply at any given time, because of the way supermarket stock is managed. Food practically goes from lorry to shelf without sitting long in the back room. Its a deliver-as-required system.

If your local supermarkets ran dry, how would you feed yourself and your family? Even if you stockpile long-life meals, they’ll run out eventually. Think you can get a farm up and running before it does? Assuming there’s still enough water and the sun’s not so hot that it fries your plants and livestock before you have the chance to take the first tasty bite.

Unrestrained climate change means death for you.

Its simple math really, if we don’t do something soon, we’re all gonna end up dead.

It won’t be the end of the planet, or the end of the world, but it will be the end of us.

And that includes you.

Suddenly, those low energy lightbulbs don’t seem so bad and separating your recyclable goods doesn’t seem like such a chore, does it?

A bunch of world leaders are heading to Copenhagen this December to go through the motions of a Climate Change summit. Perhaps, if they adopted the following slogan, people might finally start paying attention:

Climate Change = Death

And once everyone’s paying attention, perhaps we all can start taking the right steps to slow down climate change. The life you save just might be your own.

Dig it, hep cats. Your hippy’s back and he’s bigger, badder and higher than ever!

Ok, some of that first statement may not be true. Please allow me to deconstruct it for you:

- I haven’t been anywhere, therefore I can’t be “back”

- I’m still the same height I’ve been since I was 16. I’m not “bigger”, unless you count my ego and I don’t.

- I’ve always been pretty bad, short of murdering someone, I don’t think it would be possible for me to be “badder”.

- I’m always high, so how could be “higher”? “Higher” than what?

So basically, I’ve already wasted 30 seconds of your valuable surfing time with utter nonsense and bullshit. What a start!

Truth is, much like London, my brain is a bit fried from the heat. This week’s been a bit unbearable. And don’t forget the humidity!

How could I ever forget the sickening, thick heavy feel of the atmosphere around me this week? It would be fine if I was on holiday in the Med on a sandy beach, lying in the shade with frozen daiquiris brought to me whenever I snapped my fingers, but I’m not. Instead, I’m stuck in my north London ghetto hell.

My lair is brilliant in the winter, it holds on to heat like nobody’s business, but in the summer that quality is a curse. Also, I have a small, southern facing conservatory, which acts as a super-efficient solar heater for the entire house. It hit a balmy 46 degrees C in there this week, which easily boosts the overall temp in my house to 32 or 33 degrees C.

In other words, fucking hot!

And before you ask, the conservatory does have blinds, on the ceiling and windows, light coloured, but they don’t seem to make a difference. I’m considering replacing them with totally opaque blinds, that reflect light and heat. I’ve thought about it before, but its a big job that I couldn’t do myself.

Anyway, I’ve got countless fans, a couple of dehumidifiers (which rock!) and a giant air conditioner, which help a bit, but can’t compete with the fierce effects of the conservatory. I can just about make it comfortable to sit on the sofa in my living room, but so much as shift position or god-forbid stand up, and its suddenly like entering a sauna.

London wasn’t built for tropical weather, certainly my 100+ year old house wasn’t. Its early in the summer to be sweltering like this.

I don’t see how anyone can deny climate change when they have litres of sweat running off their foreheads and into their eyes. Trust me, it stings.

I wonder if I could get planning permission to put a swimming pool into my tiny back garden. Clearly nothing Olympic sized, just a small plunge pool for cooling off. How much of a bribe would it take? And how much would the pool cost?

All more than I would want to spend.

One just has to accept that its going to be a long, hot, horrible summer in the city and do whatever you can to just get through it.

And if the heat doesn’t getcha, there’s always the swine flu.

Health authorities in the UK announced this week that swine flu can now not be contained, and they are expecting 100,000 new cases a day by the end of August. I also read that as many as 40 people a day could be dying from it in that time as well. Shouldn’t we be panicking?

We’re not panicking because its all very abstract. It will become much scarier when you hear about swine flu taking someone you know. If this is going to be as bad as they say, we’ll all find ourselves in the position of knowing a victim eventually. Oh dear.

So far, there have only been 4 deaths from swine flu in the UK and all of them have had the following code used to describe their deaths: they also suffered from underlying health issues. In other words, you’re more likely to die if you have something else seriously wrong with you.

That probably won’t always be the case and it will start killing otherwise healthy, fit people. Ut oh.

Damn, I’ve come over all apocalyptic. Well, when faced with the fires of hell and a pig-based plague from Satan, do you blame me?

Our stupid government went ahead and reclassified weed today, against the advice of the scientists, medical experts and drug advisors. Cannabis has been returned to Class B, which means penalties for simple possession have increased, but penalties for dealing and production remain the same, sort of…

While not in place yet, a 3-strike system is to be implemented later in the week. On your first offence, you will be given a warning, on your second, you will be fined 80 quid and on your third, you will be charged. Naturally, this new penalty system is not in place today and won’t be until at least midweek. The government couldn’t even co-ordinate the change in classification and the new penalties so they started on the same day and they’ve had over a year to plan it. Losers!

So why did they change the classification?

I don’t know, there isn’t a single good reason for the change. Laws regarding cannabis are even more muddled and confusing now than they ever were!

The advice from the various government advisory boards was to leave it in Class C, but if they did that, they couldn’t score any political points with our poorly informed electorate.

Check out this BBC report for more details.

No one in the UK government is interested in the truth, or doing the right thing where cannabis is concerned. I am so disappointed and depressed by this stupid outcome, words cannot begin to express my distress.

I found this list of Cannabis Myths from a drug organisation in the US state of Indiana. Even they know more about weed than Gordon Brown and his idiotic cabinet. Please read it so you can be armed with the truth being denied us by the media and the government here.

Gordon Brown may still not be long for politics as the current economic depression (someone has to say it) may sink his career yet. If it does, it will be the one good thing to come from an otherwise bleak financial outlook. Here’s hoping!

I think they located some of this hippy ancestor’s in China.

Go on, clicky the linky good! You know you wanna!

(The northlondonhippy apologises for any perceived racist humour in the above post. You can’t be too careful these days.)

As much as I like to pretend I am perfection personified, the truth is I am a deeply flawed individual.

My life is literally littered with bad decisions and unfortunate choices, the results of which continue to dog my days on a daily basis.

It’s fine to reflect upon ones mistakes, as long as one is not mistaken into thinking that something can be done to rectify them. The choices you make can’t usually be undone and the consequences will be with you until the day you die and may even continue to effect others after you’re gone.

I’ve got no particular decisions in mind, this has more to do with a general overview than anything specific.

I don’t want you to think every choice I’ve made in my life has been wrong, I’ve made some good choices too, but lately I’ve been thinking about some of those moments in my life, where I zigged when perhaps I should have zagged.

It’s easy to second guess your own decisions after the fact, when the fullness of time and experience yield the missing pieces of the puzzle that weren’t available at the time of taking the decision. It’s also an exercise in futility.

Much of life is futile and pointless, so its not really enough of a reason not to think about these things.

There’s a theory that states every time a decision is made, the universe is split and alternative realities follow both paths and that all of existence consists of a “multi-verse” of infinite existence. Everything that can happen, does happen, just not in your reality.

Somewhere in the multi-verse, there’s a version of me that successful, happy and fully fulfilled. No doubt taller, too.

How’d I get stuck in this reality? If there really is a multi-verse, then in at least one of them (and possibly many more), I’m king of the planet and in charge of you all. Don’t worry, if there are infinite possibilities, then you get to be king or queen of the world yourself, and I get to be your slave.

Not all of the realities in the multi-verse would be sunny, as I expect there are plenty that don’t turn out as well. Think about it, how many realities exist without me? Perhaps in some, I was still born and never even got to take my first breath.

I know that even when my decisions have been wrong, they’ve been right for me at the time. I have to believe that, because I can’t travel back in time and change them. At least not yet, anyway, but give me another six months and my time machine will be up and running and I’ll be charging loads of dosh for rides to the past and future. Think you can afford it?

My many personality flaws, at least as I see them, colour my every move. I’m certainly my own worst enemy and I’m more responsible for holding myself back than anyone else.

I used to genuinely believe that anything is possible, but as I get older, I’m less convinced. As you get older, the corridor of options narrows and while you may still create the illusion of choice, your choices become more and more limited with each passing day.

I can’t remember where I heard this one, but it made a lot of sense: “You spend the first half of your life acquiring things and the second half having them all taken away from you.”

I’m undeniably in the 2nd half of my life. It’s not too much of a stretch to see where things are going for me. Its all downhill from here.

Can you tell that my birthday is approaching? It’s about 2 months away. Hey ho.

If I had the chance to do it all again, would I do things differently? Of course I would, what honest person wouldn’t?

That doesn’t mean I would do everything differently, but there are a few wrongs I would certainly put right.

It doesn’t matter because no one gets a second chance, except in the multi-verse reality where reincarnation happens and it was just my luck not to end up in that one either.

Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living”. If that is really true, then I have the most worthy life known to man.

Either that or my narcissistic tendencies are starting to overwhelm being an obsessive-compulsive sociopath with manic-depressive tendencies.

You have a nice day, too.

Why isn’t THIS WOMAN in charge of UK drug policy?

I’m talking about Lady Amanda Neidpath, the head of the Beckley Foundation, the group responsible for THIS REPORT which I wrote about recently.

Why are our elected official so afraid of the truth?

Why do we ignore experts on issues which are controversial? Certainly people with this sort of extensive knowledge and experience on any subject (including and especially drug use) should be embraced, as should their conclusions.

We don’t expect enough from our leaders, we should expect more. We should receive more too.

Let’s put Lady Neidpath in charge of the UK’s drug strategy. She’s already got my vote!