Scientopia

As you say, when it comes to the brain, there is only a modest relationship between how things feel and what damage is being done to neurons. Neurons themselves do not feel pain, so it is quite possible that you could take drugs that severely damage your brain without feeling their effects. Conversely, headaches and hangovers reflect irritation of the tissue surrounding your brain or of the nerves leading to it. While in some cases a headache can reflect a serious problem that affects or could affect the brain itself (e.g. meningitis), in most cases headaches don't imply damage to the central nervous system.

I am a neuroscientist (in training, at least, in a subdiscipline that's only somewhat related but does occasionally involve drugging monkeys). There is good evidence that frequent use and probably even rare use of MDMA is bad for brains. Neurons don't necessarily die, but axons disappear. It is not clear that rare use of MDMA can cause lasting cognitive impairment in humans.

While DrugMonkey is sometimes a bit of an asshole, I don't find much fault with his assessment of the current state of MDMA research in this post: http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2012/07/25/single-oral-dose-mdma-neurotoxicity-revisited/. Note the caveat in the comments: although MDMA is probably neurotoxic, it is still not clear that the neurotoxicity translates to behaviorally meaningful deficits. There exist studies that have shown such deficits, but there also exist studies that have not.…

If you have failed to grok vi[m], you need two things. First, to understand just a little of two other editors, ed and TECO. Second, to know that vi's real modes are not what the naïve user, and sadly most documentation, call ‘modes’; they are line mode (ed mode) and visual mode (TECO mode).

ed is a line editor based on search-and-replace using regular expressions. To edit existing text, you typically locate it with a search and change it with a replace. Sometimes you refer to nearby lines with .±n addressing, and sometimes by absolute line number (having printed a few lines with the ‘n’ command); and sometimes you change entire lines (with ‘c') rather than doing a replacement; but really, search-and-replace is where it's at. vi's line mode, which you enter with ‘Q’ or more commonly one-off with ‘:', is just ed on steroids.

TECO is a character stream oriented editor, or, if you prefer, a programming language for manipulating streams of text. http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2010/11/30/the-glorious-horror-of-teco/ is a decent short introduction. TECO text manipulation functions have an optional count, a function name (one or two characters), and an optional argument terminated by ESC. That should already look familiar; vi's visual mode is watered-down TECO. Sure, many of the functions have different names — vim's ‘h’ and ‘l’ are TECO's ‘r’ and ‘c’ — but some are the same: ‘i’ followed by an argument (i.e. some text) terminated by ESC is the function that inserts its…

"Impossible matter"? What's "impossible" about it? That we don't know what it is, and that it isn't predicted by our current models, doesn't make it "impossible." It means we're going to need to extend our models, which we've been doing on a regular basis for hundreds of years. Rob Knop sums this up nicely:

"In the face of evidence otherwise, many still insist that most of the Universe must be made up of baryonic stuff that interacts with other baryons and our familiar photons. Is this not just as much hubris as insisting that the Earth, where we live, must be the center about which all the other Solar System bodies orbit?" (http://scientopia.org/blogs/galacticinteractions/2011/08/14/in-which-i-compare-the-slashdot-commentariat-to-the-17th-century-catholic-church/)

The dark matter hypothesis seems to have a great deal of explanatory power. The antigravity hypothesis, like other MOND theories, has a good fit for the specific phenomenon it was designed to tackle, but doesn't explain a lot of the other things that dark matter does. Ethan Siegel has a good post on "What Dark Matter's Alternatives Must Do" (http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/08/what_dark_matters_alternatives.php) which points out some of the stuff that dark matter explains and rival theories don't (e.g. temperature fluctuations, hydrogen/helium ratio). He does presciently note that 'antimatter has negative mass' could explain more than traditional MOND theories but claims that this impacts…

I have heard it complained that we scientists don't "talk to the general public" enough. I would very much welcome specific suggestions for how to do this.

That's very commendable. I am a nonmathematician who has become a mathematics teacher as part of figuring out why so few learners in the United States succeed in learning mathematics well. Here are some examples for you.

Good mathematicians (some Fields medalists) with readable blogs:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/

http://gowers.wordpress.com/

http://www.arsmathematica.net/

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/

http://wildaboutmath.com/

http://micromath.wordpress.com/

A list found by a Google search

http://www.onlinedegree.net/50-best-blogs-for-math-majors/

suggests more.

A few popular authors who are mathematicians write very approachable books about mathematics.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Ian%20Stewart

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Keith%20Devlin

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=William%20Dunham

Following links from links to the books by those authors will reveal other books by mathematicians who write for popular audiences.

Best wishes in gaining readers other than your mother (like me, for instance) as you communicate your…

Maybe not "daily", but very frequently: here is a small selection of some of the small sites on my newsblur newsfeed list: [0]

http://www.jamesaltucher.com : Much self-pity, but also sometimes quite funny.

http://www.astrobio.net/latestnews_rss/news.xml : Is there life on other planets?

http://kaygun.tumblr.com/

http://www.friday.com/bbum : Coding, hardware projects, generally interesting.

http://bestyoucanbe.blogspot.com/ : Insights into the education system in regard to the raising of his neurologically non-typical son.

http://blog.lmorchard.com

http://ex-muslim.org.uk : Oppression of atheists in the Muslim world.

http://clojurefun.wordpress.com : Clojure!

http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath : Bad science, denialism.

http://blog.willbenton.com : Music, logic, programming, etc.

http://www.groklaw.net : Maybe not "small"; detailed analysis of important legal cases.

http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal : Web design.

http://www.holovaty.com/ : "I'm co-creator and co-Benevolent Dictator For Life of the open-source Django Web framework"

http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones : Combines talented photography, photoessays, and study of the retina.

http://lee-phillips.org : I regularly check my site to see if it's still working.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca : Language issues; can be amusing or stupid.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie : Freedom for women in the Muslim world.

http://math-blog.com : Infrequently updated, but often…

That's why best practices for human studies is to manage projects like this in the context of an Institutional Review Board. It's required for "federally funded projects, clinical trials, and those who seek publication in peer-reviewed journals." (quoting http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/22/crowdfunding-and-irbs-the-case-of-ubiome/ ).

It's not required for a company, but if it doesn't exist then I think it's okay to assume that they are not following the highest ethical guidelines.

Back in 2010, the company "23 And Me" caused an uproar because they were gathering data without an IRB. They instead got a post-hoc review when, during a publication peer review, they were asked about the missing IRB. Their board said basically that since the data isn't traceable to an individual, it falls outside of the requirements for an IRB.

People are still pissed off about this. See http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2013/02/21/plos-genetics-blew-it-by-publishing-a-23andme-paper/ . I agree - the IRB exception must be done before the data is gathered, not afterwards.