I'm moving up and down (out and in as Buckynauts say), between rooms and screens, with an interesting talk on amphetamine and other drug-induced psychoses in the kitchen, the BBC Proms, and the Dalai Lama preaching on Facebook, upstairs (outstairs) in the office.
The point Bucky was making with "instairs versus outstairs" is you want to school your intuitions (gut feelings) with what's intuitively important knowledge, or watch them become obsolete reflexes leading you astray.
If you're not thinking of your planet as a spheroid, quite commonly, meaning quite frequently during the day, then try some of these mental exercises he recommends.
Sydney the dog also follows me between floors. I do kitchen work in the kitchen, or other tasks, as I take in the pharmacology.
The pharmacology talk is critical of the spread of epidemics, which often have to do with companies working backwards from new patents they've gotten. Now that we own this intellectual property, lets find out what it cures. In the case of psychotropics, ADHD has been a target, enlarging, according to our narrator, because many more patented amphetamine-like drugs now crowd the shelves.
Lets definitely accept the hypothesis, offered in the talk as well-proved, that drug abuse correlates with a mental illness pattern. One slide links Cannabis, assigning a likelihood of a long term diagnosis of some 34%. What about the remaining 57%, what happens with them? Might some have special gifts? Why do we always only look at the downside, right? Sure drugs are dangerous, lets not kid ourselves.
Also, what is the background likelihood of a long term diagnosis in the general population absent drug use / abuse? I'll need to go back to see what's given, or do some more digging.
There's also the chicken-egg question of aren't those prone to mental instability the same demographic more likely to experiment with controlled substances? Why not see Cannabis use as part of the descending / ascending spiral, not the cause but the symptom? Like I said: chicken-egg.
Any skepticism aside, however, my hypothesis is the Roaring Twenties maybe had more to do with the later outbreak of amphetamine abuse than we normally let on. I'll be reading more on these topics as I enlarge my echo chamber in American Studies.
I haven't had enough time in the heartland, both figuratively and literally. More blues and more jazz would be welcome.
For sure Benzedrine abuse was a side-effect of World War 2, when it was widely introduced to the military. Was it also a contributing cause? War is a groupthink psychosis and/or the search for a cure, depending on one's mindset.
The upstairs screen also has had my Jupyter going, the notebook environment available for several computer languages, Python most famously, but also Julia and R (hence the name: JuPyteR). I've been doodling with the Mandelbrot Set again, producing another one of those low resolution ASCII art renderings characteristic of my Just Use It ad campaign (pro Python).
The occasion this time is M4W and an upcoming meetup on complex numbers.
