Posts Tagged ‘Science’

Cafe Scientifique

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 | Events, Humanism

I went down to Leeds’ Cafe Scientifique last night to check out what it was all about as it comes highly recommended by Paul. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a monthly event where you can go for a coffee/beer/etc and there is a talk and discussion on some kind of scientific topic.

It’s all very laid back, the topic of yesterday’s meeting was “psychotherapy – science or religion?” which involved a 25 minute talk, an interval so we could get another round of drinks in and then a general discussion session where people could ask queations.

The talk wasn’t bad though I wasn’t overly impressed. While most people there seemed to have a fair grounding in psychotherapy, I felt a bit lost not knowing a whole lot about it. Having said that, it was fairly glossy, which is to be expected in a 25 minute talk but I thought there could have been a lot more complex detail for some of us to try and get our head round if we so wished to try.

It was all very middle class though the age range wasn’t too bad, there were plenty of “young” people there (people aged below 40 shall we say). It is hosted by 7Arts in Chapel Allerton which is a lovely new building that, I noted, would make an excellent venue for a fledgling Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that needed to hire a venue until his noodliness blessed us with huge amounts of finances.

Drug harm index

Monday, May 26th, 2008 | Religion & Politics

I recently watched the Horizon episode on research done by some of Britain’s top drug experts published last year in The Lancet, a medical journal, which offers an alternative system to the current ABC classification for drugs which is far more based on science and evidence.

The new system would rate the harm each drug causes based on a number of factors, most notably – physical harm (what it does to the user when they take it including the route of administration and long term effects), how much dependence the drug induces (and what dependent behaviour it leads to) and social harm in terms damaging family and social life as well as the social costs of medical treatement and policing a drug.

The study ranked 20 commonly abused substances and had some suprising results…

1. Heroin
2. Cocaine
3. Barbiturates
4. Street methadone
5. Alcohol
6. Ketamine
7. Benzodiazepines
8. Amphetamines
9. Tobacco
10. Buprenorphine
11. Cannabis
12. Solvents
13. 4-MTA
14. LSD
15. Methylphenidate
16. Anabolic steroids
17. GHB
18. Ecstasy
19. Alkyl Nitrates
20. Khat

So, anyone fancying dropping a few E next weekend? ;).

If you want more information the text is available online (you need to register but it’s free).