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This Heroin Alternative “Eats Flesh” – But How?

June 27, 2011 / Klint Finley

Several people in my circle shared this article from the Independent about krokodil (pronounced crocodile), the street name for a home cooked heroin alternative in Russia. Krokodil is made by processing codeine into desomorphine, which is stronger than heroin but doesn’t last as long. According to the article, “It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly.” After that, the article says, their skin starts to literally rot off.

But how exactly is desomorphone turning people into lizards? I looked up desomorphine in Wikipedia and found this Time article on the same subject. The Time article says:

At the injection site, which can be anywhere from the feet to the forehead, the addict’s skin becomes greenish and scaly, like a crocodile’s, as blood vessels burst and the surrounding tissue dies. Gangrene and amputations are a common result, while porous bone tissue, especially in the lower jaw, often starts to dissipate, eaten up by the drug’s acidity.

Gangrene explains the “rotting,” but gangrene is caused by bacterial infection and is a potential side effect of any unsafe IV drug use. So what’s with the green, scaly skin that precedes the rotting? I couldn’t find anything. The Wikipedia entry and some commenters on the Independent article indicate that it’s not actually desomorphine (which was sold commercially under the name Permonid for some time), but the impurities of its extraction from codeine pills. According to Time, addicts use “gasoline, paint thinner, hydrochloric acid, iodine and red phosphorous, which they scrape from the striking pads on matchboxes” to make krokodil from codeine. As the Wikipedia entry points out, that sounds similar to one of the easiest ways of making methamphetamine from pseudoephedrine.

The Independent also mentions the frequency of administration, difficulties addicts face finding veins and the use of dirty needles. I suspect these details may help explain the damaging effects. Due to desomorphine’s short duration, users have to shoot up more frequently the users of other drugs. This leads to collapsed veins and injections that miss veins. Add dirty needles to the mix, and the risk for gangrene infection goes up. It’s also possible that impurities in krokidil lead to scaly skin before gangrene infection occurs.

Another note: perhaps the name doesn’t really derive from the effect it has on the skin. According to Wikipedia, desomorphine is derived from a chemical called a-chlorocodide. I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest “chlorocodide” as the source of the street name.

Latest Drug Scare: Oxi, a “Highly Addictive Hallucinogenic” That is “Twice as Powerful as Crack Cocaine”.

Does Religion Make People Happier – Or Conformity?

June 9, 2011 / Klint Finley

A couple months ago I linked to a story about the happiest guy in the world. One of the ways this was calculated was based on religion – religious people are typically assumed to be the happier than non-religious people. And apparently religious Jews are expected to be happiest of all.

But are religious people actually happier? According to Nigel Barber, an evolutionary psychologist, that might not be the case. Barber writes:

Much of the research linking religiosity and happiness was conducted in the U.S. where more religious people are slightly happier. Researchers saw this as evidence for the universal benefits of religion (a perspective that interests evolutionary psychologists like myself because it helps explain why religion is so common around the globe). Yet, there is no association between religiousness and happiness in either Denmark or the Netherlands (3).

Why the difference? Religious people are in the majority in the U.S., but in a minority in Denmark and the Netherlands. Feeling part of the mainstream may be comforting whereas being in the minority is potentially stressful. Ethnic minorities around the world tend to have higher blood pressure, for example – this being a reliable index of stress.

If religion contributes to happiness, then the most religious countries should be happiest. Yet, the opposite is true.

Psychology Today: Does religion make people happier?

Could it be then that the level of happiness enjoyed by religious people in the U.S. is a result of conformity, rather than religion itself? If that were the case, we should expect religious people in more secular countries, controlled for income, to be less happy than non-religious people in those countries. Is this the case?

Here’s a recent ranking of the top 10 happiest countries in the world.

The Masked Monkeys of Indonesia

May 27, 2011 / Klint Finley

masked monkey

masked monkeys

Ed Wray was terrified the first time he encountered a masked monkey. Having lived and worked in Jakarta as a freelance photographer for years, he was accustomed to seeing the animals, cruelly leashed by chains, jumping through hoops or riding trikes on the sidewalks. But for Wray, the mask was a terrifying twist.

“When I first saw a monkey with a rubber baby doll’s head stuck over its head as a mask, it immediately struck me as horrifying and beyond weird.” Wray said. “Something about the combination of the doll head – which I think is scary looking to begin with – and a long tail just struck a chord in me.”

Time: The Masked Monkeys of Indonesia

(Thanks Bill!)

Nassim Taleb Interview on His New Book Anti-Fragility

May 14, 2011 / Klint Finley

Nassim Taleb

Great new interview with Nassim Taleb by one of his former teachers at Wharton:

Taleb: The events in the Middle East are not black swans. They were predictable to those who know the region well. At most, they were gray swans or perhaps white swans. One of the lessons of “Wild vs. Mild Randomness,” my chapter with Benoit Mandelbrot in your book, is what happens before you go into a period of wild randomness. You will find a long quiet period that is punctuated with absolute total turmoil…. In The Black Swan, I discussed Saudi Arabia as a prime case of the calm before the storm and the Great Moderation [the perceived end of economic volatility due to the creation of 20th century banking laws] in the same breath. I was comparing Italy with Saudi Arabia. Italy is an example of mild randomness in comparison with Saudi Arabia and Syria, which are examples of wild randomness. Italy has had 60 changes in regime in the post-war era, but they are inconsequential…. It is a prime example of noise. It’s very Italian and so it’s elegant noise, but it’s noise nonetheless. In contrast, Saudi Arabia and Syria have had the same regime in place for 40 some years. You may think it is stability, but it’s not. Once you remove the lid, the thing explodes.

The same kind of thing happens in finance. Take the portfolio of banks. The environment seemed very placid — the Great Moderation — and then the thing explodes.

Herring: I would agree that people knew the Middle East was very vulnerable to turmoil because of the demographics, a very young population, and widespread unemployment, the dissatisfaction with the distribution of income and with regimes that were getting geriatric. But knowing how it would unfold and knowing that somebody immolating themselves in a market in Tunisia would lead to this widespread discontent — and we still don’t know how it will end — is a really remarkable occurrence that I think would be very difficult to predict in any way.

Taleb: Definitely, and it actually taught us to try not to predict the catalyst, which is the most foolish thing in the world, but to try to identify areas of vulnerability. [It’s] like saying a bridge is fragile. I can’t predict which truck is going to break it, so I have to look at it more in a structural form — what physicists call the percolation approach. You study the terrain. You don’t study the components. You see in finance, we study the random walk. Physicists study percolation. They study the terrain — not a drunk person walking around — but the evolution of the terrain itself. Everything is dynamic. That is percolation.

And then you learn not to try to predict which truck is going to break that bridge. But you just look at bridges and say, “Oh, this bridge doesn’t have a great foundation. This other one does. And this one needs to be reinforced.” We can do a lot with the notion of robustness.

Wharton: Nassim Taleb on Living with Black Swans

(via Chris Arkenberg)

Despite the Death of Osama bin Laden, the Terrorists are STILL Winning

May 8, 2011 / Klint Finley

A week ago today it was announced that the U.S. had assassinated Osama bin Laden – an unarmed, sickly 54-year-old man who had eluded us for 13 years. I shed no tears for bin Laden, and have no illusions about the practicality of putting him on trial (though I do think that would have been the right thing). But was it a triumph for the U.S.? Hardly. Before we managed to track this man down and kill him, we as a nation have spent trillions of dollars on a multi-front war, stripped our own citizens of civil liberties and generally made fools of ourselves.

The latest example: We have to take off our shoes to go through airport security. We can’t carry more than 3.4oz of liquids or gels. We go through full body scanners, or subject ourselves to pat-downs. And yet, we still don’t feel safe. When two guys dressed in traditional Muslim garb get on a plane, we lose our shit.

That’s not the sign of a brave, powerful country. It’s the sign of a nation of cowards. The death of Osama bin Laden wasn’t a great victory. I shed no tears for bin Laden, but it’s hard to feel triumphant today when he’s accomplished what he set out to do. The U.S. is an empire in decline – broke and both unable and unwilling to provide for its own people. Meanwhile, we cower in fear at the sight of unattended packages, blinking LEDs and dudes with beards. Putting a bullet in bin Laden’s brain at this point was an exercise in futility. It’s hard to look tough when you shoot an unarmed man and then refuse to get on an airplane, even after you’ve body scanned every single person boarding the plane.

In 2006 Bruce Schneier wrote that the only way to beat the terrorists is to refuse to be terrorized. It’s cliché to say at this point, but yes, the terrorists have won. Until we grow a proverbial pair, stop gloating about unremarkable political assassinations and get on a fucking plane with some people who look different than we do, they will continue to win.

What’s it going to be America?

20 Untranslatable Words from Around the World

January 18, 2011 / Klint Finley

Unusually interesting linkbait:

5. Litost
Czech – Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, remarked that “As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.” The closest definition is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

Matador Network: 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World

U.S. Government Subpoenaing Foreign Leader’s Twitter History as Part of WikiLeaks Investigation

January 8, 2011 / Klint Finley

Glenn Greenwald reports that the U.S. has subpoenaed Icelandic member of parliment and WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jónsdóttir’s Twitter history:

What hasn’t been reported is that the Subpoena served on Twitter — which is actually an Order from a federal court that the DOJ requested — seeks the same information for numerous other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Julian Assange. It also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks’ Twitter account.

The information demanded by the DOJ is sweeping in scope. It includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the “means and source of payment,” including banking records and credit cards. It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009, through the present. A copy of the Order served on Twitter, obtained exclusively by Salon, is here.

The Order was signed by a federal Magistrate Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, Theresa Buchanan, and served on Twitter by the DOJ division for that district. It states that there is “reasonable ground to believe that the records or other information sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation,” the language required by the relevant statute. It was issued on December 14 and ordered sealed — i.e., kept secret from the targets of the Order. It gave Twitter three days to respond and barred the company from notifying anyone, including the users, of the existence of the Order. On January 5, the same judge directed that the Order be unsealed at Twitter’s request in order to inform the users and give them 10 days to object; had Twitter not so requested, it would have been compelled to turn over this information without the knowledge of its users.

It’s possible other companies like Facebook, Google and Skype were subpoenaed and complied with the requests silently.

Matthew Ingram writes for Gigaom:

The fact that Twitter is being targeted by the government is another sign of how important the network has become as a real-time publishing platform, and also of how centralized the service is — something that could spark interest in distributed and open-source alternatives such as Status.net, just as the downtime suffered by the network early last year did. It is another sign of how much we rely on networks that are controlled by a single corporate entity, as Global Voices founder Ethan Zuckerman pointed out when WikiLeaks was ejected from Amazon’s servers and had its DNS service shut down.

See also this post about Douglas Rushkoff’s call to abandon the corporate Internet and the supplemental links I supplied there. I’m tagging further links on the subject of a decentralized Internet with decentralized net.

Pay the Poor

January 5, 2011 / Klint Finley

The program, called Bolsa Familia (Family Grant) in Brazil, goes by different names in different places. In Mexico, where it first began on a national scale and has been equally successful at reducing poverty, it is Oportunidades. The generic term for the program is conditional cash transfers. The idea is to give regular payments to poor families, in the form of cash or electronic transfers into their bank accounts, if they meet certain requirements. The requirements vary, but many countries employ those used by Mexico: families must keep their children in school and go for regular medical checkups, and mom must attend workshops on subjects like nutrition or disease prevention. The payments almost always go to women, as they are the most likely to spend the money on their families. The elegant idea behind conditional cash transfers is to combat poverty today while breaking the cycle of poverty for tomorrow. […]

The program fights poverty in two ways. One is straightforward: it gives money to the poor. This works. And no, the money tends not to be stolen or diverted to the better-off. Brazil and Mexico have been very successful at including only the poor. In both countries it has reduced poverty, especially extreme poverty, and has begun to close the inequality gap.

The idea’s other purpose — to give children more education and better health — is longer term and harder to measure. But measured it is — Oportunidades is probably the most-studied social program on the planet. The program has an evaluation unit and publishes all data. There have also been hundreds of studies by independent academics. The research indicates that conditional cash transfer programs in Mexico and Brazil do keep people healthier, and keep kids in school.

New York Times: To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor

The criticism I’ve heard of this sort of program from the hard left is that the money is essentially a small bribe to keep the poor from rising up and affecting real change. That may be true – but it’s hard to argue with with real results.

My biggest concern is the fact that the World Bank is financing all of this in the form of loans. What happens when it’s time for the countries to pay up?

I’d be interested in seeing a comparison of these conditional transfers with the U.S. welfare system.

Scientists in Abu Dhabi Control the Weather

January 4, 2011 / Klint Finley

Abu Dhabi rain

Hail, lightning and gales came through the state’s eastern region this summer thanks to scientist-puppetmasters.

As part of a secret program to control the weather in the Middle East, scientists working for the United Arab Emirates government artificially created rain where rain is generally nowhere to be found. The $11 million project, which began in July, put steel lampshade-looking ionizers in the desert to produce charged particles. The negatively charged ions rose with the hot air, attracting dust. Moisture then condensed around the dust and eventually produced a rain cloud. A bunch of rain clouds.

Time: Scientists Create 52 Artificial Rain Storms in Abu Dhabi Desert

(Thanks Bill)

Japanese Scientist Produces an Artificial Alternative to Rare Earth Minerals (Specifically Palladium)

January 3, 2011 / Klint Finley

Palladium

The world–and particularly the Japanese–may be in a frenzy over China’s newly announced 35% cut in rare earth exports, those used to produce many high-tech devices, in the first half of this year. But a Japanese scientist has found one answer: Create the metals artificially.

Professor Hiroshi Kitagawa of Kyoto University has announced that he and his team of researchers have artificially produced a metal similar to palladium, a material commonly used in catalytic converters. In his lab, Kitagawa used a heating method to produce ultramicroscopic metal particles, ultimately mixing the usually resistant rhodium and silver to create the palladium-like metal.

Fast Company: Rare Earth Race: A Japanese Scientist Produces an Artificial Alternative

Meanwhile: U.S. rare earth mine resumes active mining

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