I stumbled across this image on my hard drive recently; I have no idea where I originally discovered it (consequently the lack of appropriate credit), but there's no good reason not to share it with the world again. Hats off to the clever media hacker behind this!

Here's another 78-minute mix of awesomeness, provided by a budding DJ from NYC, Celery Moon.

01 The Black Dog - Floods V3.1 (Bass Soldier Remix)
02 Fujiya & Miyagi - One Trick Pony
03 The Embassy - New Plans
04 Scott Sunn - Emergence (Let's Go Outside Remix)
05 Orbital - Sad But True
06 Sasha Dive - Annihilating Rhythm
07 Deadmau5 - The Reward Is Cheese
08 Toddy Terry - Get Down (Kenny Dope Remix)
09 D1 - I'm Loving
10 Future Sound Of London - Hardhead
11 Feadz - Brand New Car Instrumental
12 Quando Quango - Love Tempo
13 Alphabeat - Fascination (Linus Loves Edit)
14 Celery Moon - Drugs v. 1
15 The Juan Maclean - Happy House (Prince Language Dub)
16 Pest - Pat Pong (Solid Groove Remix)
17 Martin Landsky - Man High
18 The Rapture - The Sound (Max Pask Mix)
19 Charles Schillings - Spin It Right
20 Infamous Upstarts - Everything In It's Wrong Place
21 Eric Prydz - Sweet Genesis
22 Kylie Minogue - Wow (Death Metal Disco Scene Remix)
23 Buy Now - Bodycrash
24 Hercules And Love Affair - Athene
25 Let's Get Invisible - Spices Of Love Chesty (C.M. Quick Edit)
26 The Teenagers - Sunset Beach (CFCF Remix)
27 Yannick Labbe - Gallieni (Skwerl Remix)
28 Midnight Juggernauts - Nine Lives
29 Autechre - Altibzz.

Hey Folks,

I stumbled across this site advertising 'DMT Flash' shoes when doing a google image search for DMT...

I dunno whether it's common knowledge that there's shoes called this, but it sure surprised me and I thought you may appreciate it to...!

comes with "Density Energy Strap Control System" !

C.

I've always hated techno music, but I have lots of sentiment for this video. I remember it as if it had been yesterday (mainly because I wrote about it in my diary): summer of 1997, I'm 16 years old, spending a part of my holiday at my Granny's home, watching the German music channel TV Viva when I get bored (I must have also perceived it as some kind of learning, since I had advanced German at school)... At that time I was struggling with my inner conflict between the desire to try a psychedelic and the feeling that I have to renounce, so I was extremely responsive to psychedelic motives, which reminded me of this inner fight...

Now it's long over, I can watch the video with sentiment, on my computer I can even watch it without music... So enjoy this girl's unexpected psychedelic adventures as I have enjoyed them. :)

Arguably the trippiest of the first generation of SF writers - setting the stage for Brunner, Vinge, Spinrad, Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson and Stross - Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at his home in Sri Lanka at the age of 90:

Mr. Clarke’s influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like the astronomer Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene Roddenberry credited Mr. Clarke’s writings with giving him courage to pursue his “Star Trek” project in the face of indifference, even ridicule, from television executives.

Hmm, let's see: 2001: A Space Odyssey and global communication satellites? That's a legacy that's going to be very hard to beat.

Here's a story from Americans United for Separation of Church and State that demonstrates the strangeness of drug policy and "faith-based initiatives" that supposedly help wayward drug users clean up their act:

In 2001, a young man in Michigan named Joseph R. Hanas was arrested for possession of marijuana. He pleaded guilty and was told he could avoid prison by entering a drug rehabilitation program.

The program Hanas ended up in is called Inner City Christian Outreach. It is sponsored by a Pentecostal church. Hanas is Catholic, and upon his arrival at the program, his rosary and prayer book were confiscated. He was told Catholicism is a form of witchcraft and that he would not be allowed to see a priest.

When a relative of Hanas’s complained, she was told the young man had given up his religious freedom when he signed up for the program.

Hanas says he was indoctrinated with Pentecostalism. He was forced to attend worship services, read the Bible for hours a day and denied access to his attorney. He wasn’t offered any actual drug rehabilitation; the program merely referred clients to another religious provider for rehab.

Umm... okay? If the people at Inner City Christian Outreach think Catholicism is witchcraft, I wonder what they'd think about my new occult system of ritual bong magic, which works wonders in helping me forgive the ignorance and intolerance of others. O heavenly virtues, take me away.,.

A recent wandering discussion on meditation, mental illness, and dreaming over at the MAPS list produced this great post from Jean-Sébastien Roy summarizing modern hypothoses for the origins of dream-content.

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I recently did a research project where I had to present my findings on closed-loop dreaming in front of my university class. I read articles on activation-synthesis hypothesis and how that totally destroyed the previous conceptions of dreaming which were based on Freudian theories. Although the activation-synthesis hypothesis created a new direction for research that was based more on biology than psychology, certain criticisms were raised about the conclusions of the study. The Hobson & McCarley conclusions in the study titled "The Brain as a Dream-state Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process" was that everything present in the dream content were merely a result of random electrical activation of brain areas during dreaming and has nothing to do with psychology. Recent criticism includes questions of why there is residual content that is manifested in dreams that were part of the waking reality and also reoccuring dream themes. People with PTSD also report dreams that are related to their disorder, so with all these claims, one must ask if there is influences from the outside world into the internal world of dreaming. I would argue that the answer is yes, because clearly these criticisms are well founded. I will also state that the dreaming process is still a closed loop but it is subject to exceptions. Although we are closed off to the outside world while dreaming, stimuli can still filter into our sleeping, the difference is that our threshold for these stimuli are much more elevated. It would be maladaptive for us not to be roused by a strong auditory stimulus as an example, however it would be even more maladaptive to have a dreaming process which was effectively an open-loop.

There is a reason that we are in a state of paralysis when we are in REM stage sleep, it is to prevent us from acting out our dreams. Imagine if dreaming was an open-loop subject to programing from the outside world, we would interact with the outside world much more and would act out our dreams. When people sleep walk, they are not actually in REM stage sleep, they are usually in stage 4 sleep. I hypothesize that when people experience residual content being summoned in dreams, its because our brain is programmed into schemas and neural networks of memory that are created by the environment and when dreaming our brain activates these schemas and reorganizes them into more effective networks (similar to defragmenting your hard-drive on your computer). Some theorize that the brain is going through fight or flight responses that might help our waking survival by practicing certain scenarios. Goal directed behavior is very salient in dreams and this is because the mesolimbic pathways which have many dopaminergic neurons are very activated during dreaming. The frontal lobes which are responsible for reasoning, time perception, and many other logical operations is disabled during REM stage sleep.

A machine so life-like it makes us reconsider what life means...

Not exactly on topic, but trippy as hell.

This one is blowing up the international wires today:

Indian police arrested at least 40 people in an overnight crackdown on suspected drug dealers and other criminals in Goa following a rash of attacks on tourists, a top police officer said.

Scarlett Keeling, a 15-year-old British girl, was raped and murdered last month prompting criticism of the police for failing to protect her and others visiting the popular tourist destination.

A German woman was molested in a beach last week, police said.

"I will be ruthless, no one can take Goa for granted," Kishan Kumar, the Inspector general of police told Reuters, referring to the drive against criminals.

"Anybody lurking in the beaches after midnight with suspicious intent will have to face lot of questioning from now on."

Where's the love Goa? Has the vibe turned ugly? I can draw a comparison between the Goa transition from the '90 to the '00s and the Berkeley transition between the '60s to the '70s (groups of happy hippies giving way to gangs of sexual predators and drug slingers; addicts and PTSD war vets suddenly stumbling into the scene; news of violence and crime overshadowing the trademark 'peace & love' vibe, etc.) but that would just be empty commentary. A better way to put it is that Goa is cracked out y'all.

I finally got around to reading the print version of the recent Newsweek cover story about the development of effective addiction vaccines. The article was quite informative, well worth a look:

fMRI and PET scans are forcing that infuriating organ, the addicted brain, to yield up its secrets. Geneticists have found the first few (of what is likely to be many) gene variants that predispose people to addiction, helping explain why only about one person in 10 who tries an addictive drug actually becomes hooked on it. Neuroscientists are mapping the intricate network of triggers and feedback loops that are set in motion by the taste—or, for that matter, the sight or thought—of a beer or a cigarette; they have learned to identify the signal that an alcoholic is about to pour a drink even before he's aware of it himself, and trace the impulse back to its origins in the primitive midbrain. And they are learning to interrupt and control these processes at numerous points along the way. Among more than 200 compounds being developed or tested by NIDA are ones that block the intoxicating effects of drugs, including vaccines that train the body's own immune system to bar them from the brain. Other compounds have the amazing ability to intervene in the cortex in the last milliseconds before the impulse to reach for a glass translates into action. To the extent that "willpower" is a meaningful concept at all, the era of willpower-in-a-pill may be just over the horizon.

For some reason, when I was first introduced to the concept of addiction vaccines, my suspicious nature immediately leapt to the Orwellian conclusion that these vaccines would be used preemptively on non-addicted populations someday, and my hackles were always raised by that. Over time, I came to realize how naive that view was. For people whose lives are controlled or nearly destroyed by drug addiction, the extra boost provided by an effective vaccine might literally be the thing that saves them, and gives them another chance at normalcy.