Ah, those were the days...

Via Bedazzled.

Uh oh... if you believe the latest reports, the FDA is in the hot seat as prescription and over-the-counter drug side effects and deaths have tripled since 1998:

The number of deaths and serious injuries from prescription and over-the-counter drugs climbed from 34,966 to 89,842 during the study of reports to the Food and Drug Administration.

Potent narcotic painkillers including Oxycontin, sold generically as oxycodone, were among 15 drugs most often linked with deaths in the study. Drugs frequently linked with serious nonfatal complications included insulin, the arthritis drugs Vioxx and Remicade, and the antidepressant Paxil.

Naturally the FDA would like us to believe that the increase is primarily due to improved reporting of these types of incidents. However:

When commenting on the study’s findings, the FDA tried to blame a new system that makes it easier to report drug side effects as the reason for the nearly three-fold increase. But the report’s authors, while conceding that the new reporting system did account for some of the increase, said that it could not be blamed for such high numbers. Rather, the researchers said that findings showing that a small minority of medications were responsible for a majority of adverse event reports suggested problems in the way high-risk drugs are monitored for safety. Drugs like fentanyl and oxycodone – both highly addictive narcotic pain killers – probably deserve more scrutiny than other medications. And the fact that a drug like insulin was high on the list of drugs responsible for side effect reports indicates that health care providers might be ill-equipped to manage some medications, as problems with insulin are usually the result of poor management.

Nobody ever said the FDA had it easy...

Another episode of Slappy Pinchbottom's Odd Preoccupation has hit the intertubes:

this week’s episode of the Odd Preoccupation features as a theme one of my lifelong fascinations: coincidence. herein i spin a series of connected moments about the subject, including along the way:

• another segment in our recurring feature moore meets merwin


• ken nordine relating the odd tale of the man who always knew what time is was


• eugene mirman vs. the gays, or more accurately eugene mirman vs. the telephone solicitor for the antigay Christian telephone company


• and the debut of features from two foreign correspondents:
  
  • from all the way up on the lonesome plains of Ioway, dating advice from our friends at cryptonarrative — yes, it’s the series premiere of If A Dude Wants To Watch A Rabbit Fuck A Lemon, He’s Not A Scientist, He’s A Pirate!
  
  
  • from all the way over in the bustling metropolis of Taipei, Taiwan, comes the latest in intellectual property news from our extremely foreign correspondent Russell Case. in this segment he demonstrates how to get your illegally downloaded copy of the new videogame Hitman to run successfully, on a computer screen that you can’t see (because it’s the RADIO.)

This may come as a shock, but a recent article breathlessly reports on the news that Goa is a transit hub for - wait for it - illegal drugs. It's true! In addition to learning about a "ketamine smuggling mafia involv[ing] Italian, German, English and Scottish drug dealers," I learned about an exciting new street combo as well:

The CK1 pill is one of those trendy party drugs manufactured locally. The pill is a combination of cocaine and the anesthetic ketamine. CK1, also known by its street names Blizzard and Calvin Klein, is easily available in the North Goa beach belt.

There's nothing I like more than a drug whose very name brings to mind images of underwear models!

Researchers in Australia have identified a key neurological indicator which signals that a person is headed for schizophrenia:

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor is found in the hippocampus, cortex and basal forebrain and is vital to learning, memory and higher thinking. Low levels have been linked with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease and dementia. Mice born without brain-derived neurotrophic factor suffer developmental defects in the brain and the nervous system, and usually die soon after birth.

"We now know we have this window where we can reverse this disorder so we really need to start focusing on early intervention," she said. "People at risk need to start taking antidepressants as early as possible."

And though we might all bemoan the zombification of the body politic through a liberal application of SSRIs, in this case it looks as though it could prevent a great deal of human suffering.

I recently moved to a quiet, medium-sized Midwestern town to go back to school. My encyclopedic knowledge of mind-altering drugs, transmitted to me in DoseNation editor boot camp, rarely serves any purpose here other than generating awkward silences and adverse notches in my social reputation, but today I was at least able to amuse myself with an observation.

I boarded my bus as the driver got off to use the restroom in the convenience store next to the stop. He came back after a minute or so, sprang into his seat, and floored the accelerator. So far not so bad; everyone wants their bus to stay on schedule. He got up to the intersection of the next right turn. There was a car waiting to turn left. The bus, of course, can't turn right past the car in the left lane. The driver honked the horn once; twice, three times. Then he jumped out of his seat, ran down the steps of the bus and approached the car. The car was already starting its turn, so bus driver turned around and jumped back into the driver's seat and pulled the right turn, accelerating sharply again. We came barreling up behind a woman riding a bicycle, rapidly decelerating at the last possible moment that allowed us to merely tailgate rather than collide per se. The driver pulled that weaving maneuver you do when you're really anxious to pass someone but there isn't quite a clear spot for it (still tailgating!). After a few hundred yards of this, there was a clear spot and he tore out and around. Two or three stops later, we came to another right turn where traffic was backed up. We waited at the corner for a few seconds; then bus driver was up and out of his seat, running around the corner to inspect, I don't know, the likelihood of his being able to shove all the other cars off the road with his bare hands?? He came running back on to the bus, but didn't get back into the driver seat; he had noticed a few small fragments of debris on one of the front seats, which he picked up and tossed out the window. He proceeded to the back of the bus; I didn't turn around but it sounded like he was performing further sanitary inspection. Then he dashed back up to the front and took out a lunch box from the rack behind the driver's station, and took out a nalgene bottle full of... could it be? Emergen-C perhaps? Something like that. He took a deep, healthy swig, and then put it away and sat down again just as traffic cleared.

My stop was the next stop. I was so amused by his perfect portrayal of the archetypal tweaking bus driver that I almost missed it.

An interesting article in the New Zealand Herald highlights the growing trend of "wannabe" teen gangs who copy American inner-city trends of wearing colors and getting into fights.

"Most of the parties I've been to, kids show up looking for trouble," says Brendan. "They think they're copying the LA gangs, they show up wearing bandannas."

This is a very long article written from the perspective of a teen, and apparently this craze of partying and fighting has taken over all of NZ, to the point where concerned adults are at wits end trying to deal with it.

"Kids booze till they drop, throw up and keep going," says an Auckland teacher. "These are kids whose parents are pillars of the community. The binge-drinking culture is alive and well."

"You're a teenager - you're meant to get drunk," said Crystel, 17. "The first time I got drunk it was 'cos everyone else was doing it. It was just what you're meant to do."

Too true. Too true...

Reviewers have been comparing the movie 'Across the Universe' (a musical odyssey about the '60s set to Beatles music) to a cross between 'Moulin Rouge' and 'Hair', so there's your target audience: Arty hippie types who love the Beatles. Although it looks a little schmaltzy in the trailer, it promises to deliver great music and some trippy psychedelic visuals (which are only teased at in the trailer). It opens in the US on Sept. 21st. Has anyone seen this film? Any thoughts?

Click through to the review at Canada.com for initial press reaction.

What goes together better than drugs and money? It's um... More drugs and more money! And according to a story and the BBC, the money in the UK is covered with drugs! The exact findings show that, "We are pretty much talking about all banknotes being contaminated with cocaine; one in 20 are contaminated with heroin or cannabis; and on average less than half are contaminated with ecstasy and amphetamines."

Although the press is quick to hype this finding as a possible crime prevention scheme -- linking drug covered bills to problem drug areas or organized crime, for example -- the study showed that all bills, no matter where they're from or how long they have been in circulation, have about the same level of contamination, simply from being rubbed up against other bills in stacks. Which makes me wonder, why is there so much cocaine floating around in our money? Is it because we like to toot blow through rolled up bills? There's nothing like the smell of coke and fresh money after breakfast.

Mmm... Fresh money.

According to the Flickr page I grabbed this from, this photo of a simple bookcase has been turned into a work of art via conformational transformation. From the notes at Flickr:

A conformal transformation is a kind of function defined over all complex numbers that has the basic property of being differentiable, i.e. continuous and smoothly varying. Such a function defines a transformation on the plane that has the property of conserving the angles. This implies that on a very small scale shape is preserved in such a transformation.

Almost all these images are done with a Gimp plug-in called Mathmap. Then it is just a matter of finding an interesting transformation.

Check the link for a bunch more trippy conformations. Thanks to the.bricoleur for pointing this out!