I’ll just have to copy and paste this one from boingboing. Sorry for that, I’m normally (a little) more creative.

New research shows that one of the cannabinoid found in marijuana is an anti-inflammatory that doesn’t have the side effect of getting you high. THC also combats inflammation, but that’s the stuff that gets you high. However, experiments at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology showed that another cannabis compound, (E)-BCP (beta-caryophyllene), is also an anti-inflammatory but doesn’t affect the molecular receptor that makes you feel stoned. Instead it activates only the CB2 receptor which plays a key role in alleviating inflammation. From National Geographic:

Essential oils from cannabis plants — whose leaves and flowers are used to make the marijuana drug — contain up to 35 percent (E)-BCP…

“Our interest is to exploit the pharmacological nature of the CB2 receptor,” because it does not have psychotropic side effects, (study author Jürg) Gertsch explained in an email.

For my German readers: anti-inflammatory = entzündungshemmend.

Link to the article on boingboing.

Link to the article on National Geographic.

Today I stumbled upon neave.com and found this very fine retro game.

There is a lot more to explore on the neave website. Including a nice earth browser and a very freaky tv channel.

Denon has these wonderful (probably UTP) cables on offer for $500. The cable has the following benefits (taken from the Denon product page):

Attention to detail when building this cable was used by employing high quality insulation, tin-bearing alloy shielding and woven jacketing to reduce vibration and to add durability.  Additionally, signal directional markings are provided for optimum signal transfer.

Amazon has the cable on sale and the comments people give there are just hilarious. Here are a couple of good examples:

A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the “directional markings” on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews.

If I could use a rusty boxcutter to carve a new orifice in my body that’s compatible with this link cable, I would already be doing it. I can just imagine the pure musical goodness that would flow through this cable into the wound and fill me completely — like white, holy light. Holding this cable in my hands actually makes me feel that much closer to the Lord Jesus Christ.

For $500 I would have expected these cables to be worn in. They aren’t. The procedure for pre use wear in of digital cables is significantly different to analog cables. They should be worn in for a period of 24 hours in each direction. Use a unidirectional protocol! _Never_ use TCP for wearing in digital cables, as TCP uses return packets for acknowledging, causing interference in the uplink channel being pre worn.

I’m an engineer, so trust me on this one. Sound is a wave, moving in one direction. A uni-directional cable such as this is needed for optimum listening pleasure. Some other poster, incorrectly I might humbly add, said using it backwards causes the music to play backwards. Installing it in reverse causes the 1’s and 0’s to start to clog the line since they have no where to go. As a result, you’ll get no sound at all. If you do that, be careful when you turn the cable around as all the 1’s and 0’s will come out at once, potentially overloading your ethernet connection and exceeding your ISP’s bandwidth caps.

Link.

I have been thinking about cutting the amount of tax I need to pay. I finally decided that opening my own church was one of the best ways of achieving this goal. Picking a name was relatively easy: jordism wasn’t taken and due to the Scandinavian roots of the word ‘Jord’ a nice connection with mother earth was included for free (Jord is Swedish for Earth).

But before one can start a church you need a lot of followers. Luckily boingboing came to the rescue:

Carey Burtt’s superb “Mind Control Made Easy or How to Become a Cult Leader” (2000). It may be fun, but this is no comedy, it’s more like a documentary. Cults thrive on our vulnerabilities, and a good demonstration of just how vulnerable we all are was given in a series of experiments conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s.

As Will Smith once said: “I got to have me one of these”:

This software enables almost any pc with a webcam to behave like the Wii. The camera enables you to control your computer with about any object you have. And the good thing for me is they are working on a Linux release as well.

Link.

Since there is no soccer on ‘the island’ (no England, not Scotland, no Wales and no Ireland) what to do during the European championship?

Why not go Dutch some guys thought and created a website well worth visiting.

www.justgodutch.com