In case you haven't seen this in a while, please to enjoy this highly bizarre music video by Emergency Broadcast Network, for their track "Psychoactive Drugs."

Via MilkandCookies.

I know this has been around for a number of years at this point (and some of the graphics are a bit dated - Mac OS 9!) but I bet I'm not the only one who hasn't read e-sheep before now. I'm starting with Spiders, which is a sci-fi alternate-history story of the Afghanistan War on the Taliban, where Al Gore is president and the war is decidedly high-tech, open-source, network distributed neuroengineering oriented. Non-lethal weaponry is in heavy use, including ecstasy bombs to pacify enemy combatants. The plot revolves around the experience of one soldier accidentally exposed to the gas; and things start to get interesting.

The story is psychologically, and psychopharmacologically, insightful. The graphic design and layout is, in addition to "awesome", also decidedly psychedelic where appropriate; the artist has a psychedelic bent for sure, especially considering the one episode of another title, Delta Thrives I read, which is DMT all the way.

I've been reading Spiders compulsively the last couple of hours, with another highly recommended piece of media in the background: the internet radio station Dream Factory at HBR1 on Futurenet. This is far and away my favorite radio station; non-stop commercial-free DJ-mixed downtempo trance/chill music. Unfortunately they stream only in Ogg Vorbis, or rather, unfortunately iTunes doesn't support Ogg streams, so I have to listen to it in some other player. However, psychedelic music, late into the night, compressed well and cleanly, as a backdrop to mind-bending, graphically intensely innovative future tech is a recipe for a good time.

So consider this to be a "thumbs up" for a plus-two for the combo HBR1 plus e-sheep. :)

Now that I think of it, since I like HBR1 so much, I should have given it its own listing to promote it better. Oh well! With me, marketing is secondary to thematic integration, I guess.

P.S. e-sheep is by Berkeley-based Patrick Farley, and yes, it is a PKD reference, to the original title of Bladerunner.

Normally we editors of DoseNation wouldn't be so cheesy as to post a ROXXOR SKREEN SAVR D00D but I thought the developer's description of this made it topical:

Here is this thing that does stuff in iTunes. There is magnetism, there is gravity, but on top of all of that, there is awesomeness. Watch as all the dots and ribbons go bouncy bouncy when you play music and trigger this mo-fo of a visualizer. This is the future of visuals. God help you if you smoke the reefer cause you can kiss your productivity goodbye.

Ha ha!

I know everyone is into that electric sheep thing nowadays, but frankly if I'm going to be tripping out to visuals I want something a bit more consistent. Sheep has a tendency to jump from one theme to another unpredictably; it's highly cool from a technical point of view, and from a global-meme-engineering-overlord point of view, but it doesn't interact with the music, and it doesn't put me in a trance...

I haven't played with this one (magnetosphere) much yet, so I can't say how AWESOME it is or isn't. Sorry! I will say that the demo video at the link is pretty cool, though.

You know, it just occurred to me, at this point it should be possible to run independent component analysis on an audio signal to pick out some approximation of the individual instruments, and then write visualizer code that would actually respond separately to the elements of the music which would be perceived as separate. I'll have to look into that...

Here's an enjoyably silly clip from an episode of Conan O'Brien's talk show, in which he and Hunter S. Thompson go out to a farm in upstate New York, in order to drink whiskey and shoot guns. "Hilarity ensues!"

Via MilkandCookies.

A new anti-marijuana advertising campaign gets high marks from Slate's "Ad Report Card" column. Indeed, the campaign is described as "very possibly the most effective, and least offensive, anti-marijuana campaign ever created." It relies on very simple sketch animation and "sweetly quirky" music. In one ad, a pot smoker is confronted by his dog. In another, a space alien swoops in and steal's a pot smoker's girlfriend.

I don't know much about advertising (except, as the t-shirt says, that it helps me decide!), but I'm having a hard time imagining how a teenager would find themselves moved to quit smoking pot by this campaign. Slate's take on it:

The lovely, doodle-y animation (by animator "Pistachios"*) helps sidestep most of the pitfalls that endanger any work aimed at teens. (The "that kid's not me, he's wearing the wrong kind of T-shirt" problem, as described by Robinson and Fogarty.) Similarly, casting an alien as the guy who sweeps the girl off her feet, while the stoner feebly looks on, eliminates the need to decide what sort of person the girl would be likely to find more appealing than a pot user. Having her new suitor be a drug-free preppie (or jock, or musician, or whatever) would be fraught with all kinds of peril. Not so with an alien—because aliens are always cool.

Oh. I guess that explains it. Anyway, it's definitely worth heading over to the column and viewing the two embedded ads they're highlighting from this campaign; it's always nice to see what the ONDCP is up to...

A recent editorial in Nature recommends that performance-enhancing drugs for athletes be legalized. You can't read it online without spending $30, but Salon sports columnist King Kaufmann summarizes the key points for us:

"To cheat in a sporting event is a loathsome thing," the editorial says. "For as long as the rules of the Tour de France or any sporting event ban the use of performance-enhancing drugs, those who break the rules must be punished whenever possible. But this does not preclude the idea that it may, in time, be necessary to readdress the rules themselves."

The journal acknowledges that "there would need to be special protection for children," but doesn't begin to address what form that protection might take. It also concedes that some athletes would no-doubt hurt themselves by using PEDs.

"That said, athletes harm themselves in other forms of training, too," it says. "They may harm themselves less with drugs when doctors can be openly involved and masking agents dispensed with."

Kaufmann indicates he himself has gone back and forth on the issue, at times being gung ho for legalizing all PEDs, at other times feeling nervous about "the Hobson's choice that would give kids -- juice up or don't bother competing." The Nature editorial suggests that legalization is inevitable; Kaufmann is skeptical.

Inevitable sounds like a strong word, maybe a crazy one. It's hard to think of drug legalization as inevitable, in sports or elsewhere. Then again, Nature points out that women and professionals were once banished from sport, and attitudes changed.

A Blog Soup is featuring an excellent little EP called A Perfect Drug, by a downtempo artist called DJ Haze. It's been a long time since any new downtempo really caught my attention, but this stuff has a vaguely retro feel, kind of Lemon Jelly-ish in a certain way, that makes it quite enjoyable. The track listing:

1. vicoden
2. percocet
3. heroin
4. oxycontin
5. nitrous
6. alcohol
7. marijuana
8. valium

The entire EP can be downloaded for free, so hop on over and grab it.

This article in the New York Times describes a recent medical breakthrough in deep brain stimulation. A man who was marginally conscious (one step up from Terry Schiavo) for five years after a mugging was treated with electrodes implanted directly into his thalamus, which is usually referred to as the "central switchboard" of the brain. Almost immediately when the electrodes were switched on, he showed a remarkable return to some semblance of consciousness.

This of course raises, or at least perpetuates, interesting philosophical and ethical questions about end-of-life care and marginally conscious patients. Of course, the fundamental problem with all these issues is caused by the mind that acts as if categories are real, rather than human conveniences; in truth, life is very complicated, and there's no reason to believe that any rule will lead to optimal decisions in every situation. But that's a story for another day.

In general, I want to know what the stuff I'm studying really is, and the only way to know that is to try everything myself. I'm sort of the opposite of my old grandma who would say to the doctor "I'll take those pills if I see you take one first!" Anyway, I've had chances to play with the scanner a little bit so far, and probably more will come as time goes on. But one thing that seems very interesting to me is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). This is, literally, a focused electromagnetic pulse directed at a precise area of the brain; the pulse induces electrical current in the neurons in that area, which causes them to fire. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS; for some reason brain researchers are fond of the lowercase acronym prefix, like fMRI, even though it's completely stupid) extends this by providing a series of pulses in rapid succession, perhaps 10 per second. This has the effect of making the neurons fire all at once, but then preventing them from firing after that. So, in effect, by varying the pulse timing, you can do either excitation or inhibition. The particular study I volunteered for is using rTMS to try to show that certain areas of the brain, when inhibited, reduce performance on a simple working memory task, remembering the locations of dots on the computer screen. But that is beside the point; I volunteered for the sake of the experience, for my own knowledge.

The grad student running the study is very cool, and very inquisitive himself. I asked if we could play with the equipment after the experiment, and he was all in favor; he scheduled us for a big open slot on the equipment so we'd have plenty of time.

How do you know where in the brain you're pointing the stimulator's paddle? This is addressed with some remarkable technological wizardry. The setup is controlled by a computer system with a pair of infrared cameras mounted a fixed distance apart on a positionable arm. The subject (me) wears a pair of dorky glasses with a triad of retroreflective spheres, and the computer system uses essentially the same technology as Hollywood motion capture for computer special effects. There is also a wand with spheres on it that the operator uses to identify landmarks on the subjects head. The camera position data is combined with a high-resolution MRI scan of the head, including the skin surface as well as the brain; the scan is reconstructed into a bust floating on the screen; the operator touches the tips of the tragi in the ears (the pointy part in the middle that holds earplugs in place) and the bridge of the nose with the wand; and the computer then instantly positions the bust relative to the stimulation wand, which is also tagged with retroreflective spheres. After that, the operator can peel the surface layers off the bust to expose a view of the brain (it's kind of fun watching your own head get peeled down on the computer screen) and the computer shows a color-coded display of magnetic pulse location and intensity overlaid on the surface of the brain, which tracks the motion of the paddle in real time, even if your head moves. Very cool!

The Psychedelic Pioneers is one of many feature films and documentaries being shown at Pacific Cinmathque during its Summer of Love series, which starts Friday (Aug. 2) and runs until Aug. 16.

The Psychedelic Pioneers is being shown Wednesday, Aug. 8 at 7:30 p.m. It will be preceded by two shorts: Sal Mineo narrating LSD: Insight or Insanity?, a scare film about the dangers of LSD, and LSD: The Trip to Where?, which includes Leary talking about the difference between a good and bad trip on acid.

For more info hit the story at the Vancouver sun, or visit the Pacific Cinematheque calendar to see a full list of all upcoming shows, including hippie classics like "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!" and "Wild in the Streets."