My favorite April Fool's day hoax...

My favorite April Fool's day hoax ... perpetrated by the BBC:

What have we all been missing?

What have we all been missing?  Paragraph in a fascinating article:

In a 2011 study, 18 healthy volunteers were given four doses of psilocybin. The vast majority of participants reported prolonged positive changes in attitude and mood, feelings that lasted for at least 14 months. In follow-up research, scientists determined that many of the volunteers from both studies had undergone a change in personality, something that is supposed to remain relatively fixed after 30. Participants had become more open-minded, tolerant and interested in fantasy and imagination.

If you've been living under a rock for the past 50 or 60 years, psilocybin is the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”. 

It's encouraging (to me, anyway) to see a piece like this in the mainstream press, instead of in Rolling Stone.

I know a few people who admit to having used either psilocybin or LSD, and I've read about others (including Steve Jobs, famously).  None of these people have any observable negative effects.  Some of them are standout creative people, especially the engineers I've known.  Something I found interesting, though it may simply be coincidence: they were all particularly pleasant people to associate with.  It's experiences like this, rather than any personal experience with illegal drugs, that make me highly skeptical of the frightening stories that the government and other authority figures tell us.  My own observations negatively correlate with these stories...

Keep 'em out with a wall!

Keep 'em out with a wall!  Well, that didn't work so well, did it?

This is actually an interesting demonstration of what happens when you have a contest between a government project and a capitalist profit motive.  The latter's gonna win every time!