A Long Way Home

by Wartoad

I was day tripping to Vancouver from Seattle and stopped in for lunch at a little cafe. From my window I saw a young teenage girl out in the cold, squatted down in a closed up businesses doorway, holding a small bundle in her arms. She was panhandling, people were mostly walking by ignoring her. She looked just broken.

I finished up my meal and went outside, went through my wallet and thought I'd give her $5 for some food. I got up to her and she was sobbing, she looked like she was 14-15. And that bundle in her arms was a baby wrapped up. I felt like I just got punched in the chest. She looked up putting on a game face and asked for any change, I asked her if she's like some lunch. Right next door was a small quick-Trip type grocery store, I got a can of formula for the baby (very young, maybe 2-3 months old.), and took her back to the cafe though I'd just eaten. She was very thankful, got a burger and just inhaled it. Got her some pie and ice cream. She opened up and we talked. She was 15, got pregnant, parents were angry and she was fighting with them. She ran away. She's been gone almost 1 full year.

I asked her if she's like to go home and she got silent. I coaxed her, she said her parents wouldn't want her back. I coaxed further, she admitted she stole 5k in cash from her Dad. Turns out 5k doesn't last long at all and the streets are tough on a 15 year old. Very tough. She did want to go back, but she was afraid no one wanted her back after what she did.

We talked more, I wanted her to use my phone to call home but she wouldn't. I told her I'd call and see if her folks wanted to talk to her, she hesitated and gave bad excuses but eventually agreed. She dialed the number and I took the phone, her Mom picked up and I said hello. Awkwardly introduced myself and said her daughter would like to speak to her, silence, and I heard crying. Gave the phone to the girl and she was just quiet listening to her Mom cry, and then said hello. And she cried. They talked, she gave the phone back to me, I talked to her Mom some more.

I drove her down to the bus station and bought her a bus ticket home. Gave her $100 cash for incidentals, and some formula, diapers, wipes, snacks for the road.

Got to the bus, and she just cried saying thank you over and over. I gave her a kiss on the forehead and a hug, kissed her baby, and she got on the bus.

I get a chistmas card every year from her. She's 21 now and in college.

Her name is Makayla and her baby was Joe.

I've never really told anyone about this. I just feel good knowing I did something good in this world. Maybe it'll make up for the things I've f-ed up.

Realistic Body Armor as an Example for Managing Design Space in Games

by Reddit4Play

A lot of creative disciplines share a very important aspect, which is the management of space. Napoleon was known to say that strategy is about management of space and time (he was also known to have said he was more keen about the latter, since space could always be recovered), and in a lot of ways that's what creative design is about. I'm a lot more amateur at music than I am at games as a field, but one of the first things you learn in digital music creation is that you only have a few dimensions to work in and once they're filled you are just adding what amounts to useless white noise that makes your sound bad, especially in a song (other audio may vary).

Here's what I mean, and forgive the tangent into music but trust me it'll make sense in a minute. In music you have three spatial dimensions you can fill, basically, until your track is "full". You have the in-out direction, or volume, which represents how close something is to you (louder is closer). A special thing about volume is that in digital recordings (and to an extent in analog recordings unless you're willing to go the extra mile and invent custom formats for getting crazy with) once you hit a certain threshold of volume, you're completely done. Above +-0dB? Nobody's going to hear it unless they're listening in an audio workstation that has a higher bit depth; to the normal man listening to the .mp3 at home that's just going to clip completely off and be a bad sounding noise. So, you always have to consider the volume dimension. The left-right axis is represented by panning, which quite literally moves the sound more left or more right. The up down axis is a little metaphorical, because we say a sound is high or low in pitch, but it helps to think of it as a third dimensional axis to go with in-and-out and left-to-right.

Just like in film (I swear that although this gets farther a-field it'll come back to games) if you place any element at the same intersection of these three points in space the more difficult it will be to resolve to the senses, so the same for music - if you have an actor behind another actor relative to the camera, the other actor may as well not be there because he is effectively invisible since the first actor is in the way of the shot, and this also works for sounds in music that share the same pitch, panning, and relative volume (although usually two of the three is enough to make it kind of muddy). Basically what I'm saying here is that in film and music, you need to manage space to make sure each thing has its place, and also that, just like in volume, you can't overload something with too much stuff, otherwise it gets bad (in the case of music it clips, in the case of film... well... I'd imagine it'd be distracting, but I'm not even a hobbyist when it comes to films so I won't pretend to be able to talk there).

ANYWAY, back to games. You say you want a more realistic damage model? Great, so do I. For ages I've wanted to see a completely realistic implementation of modern body armor. You get shot? Does the armor catch the bullet? Broken rib at the worst; you're not going to be out of the fight if your life is at stake but you won't have a good couple weeks after that because of the bruising. You want evidence of that? Go check out the North Hollywood shootout, where the bank robbers were shot dozens of times in their body armor with nary a pause noted. Were they bruised to hell and back? Definitely yes. Did the body armor keep them in the fight? Also definitely yes (until the big guns arrived, at least). I'd give quite a lot of money to see a game that takes body armor beyond Counterstrike's primitive "damage ablater" model, but I am quite aware that this would end up a very niche game. Why?

Here's the connection you've read what is probably far too much text for me to get to. Just like in films and music, and even the strategy of war, in game design you need to manage space. Design space. That is to say, you need to manage the amount of crap in your game. Now I'm not just talking about budgetary and man-hour concerns, which are entirely valid meta-reasons to be concerned about how much stuff you put in your game to be fair, but that if you put too much stuff in a game it becomes a bad game.

Now I know /r/games is primarily devoted to digital games - ones that involve keyboards, mice, joysticks, CPUs, whatever, but this is actually a trend most evident in tabletop gaming. A lot of the biggest tabletop games, like war games or roleplaying games, generally tend to suffer from a condition known generally as "bloat", or perhaps "rules bloat", or "product bloat", or whatever is getting bloated but the point is it expands a lot. The single best example I know of this is in fact the archetypical Dungeons & Dragons, which beginning in its 2nd edition (a good clue here is that it even had two editions or more to begin with - you don't see Monopoly with more editions) began to release tooooooooooooooons of supplementary rules-based products. In part this was originally because the company that published the game, TSR, was going horribly horribly bankrupt and was clutching at straws at stay financially afloat (there's that meta-concern again!), ... but this process continued in the game's third edition (in fact the "d20 system" on which 3rd edition D&D was based became so prolific that it's hard to find a game that wasn't given an attempted conversion into d20, sort of like if somehow Crysis 3 would be a smash hit and everybody starts hopping on the CryEngine for their sequels instead of whatever engine they were using before) ... and the fourth edition ... and in fact is known to be such a problem that the game's designers are specifically trying to address "reducing rules bloat" in the fifth revision of the game all these years later.

So, what does this have to do with walking with a limp? Basically, walking with a limp takes space. Getting more damage when you're shot in the head takes space. More realistic damage models, by virtue of being more complicated, take more space. If you want to make a game that doesn't overflow into bloated land, and thus remains in the territory of "good", you need to cut other things to make space for this complex realism. This is why a game like ARMA II really doesn't appeal to most people, because even though it made some compromises (for instance its flight and vehicle models aren't particularly simulationist even compared to something like Battlefield 3, which is known to be an arcade style shooter not unlike Call of Duty, just with bigger maps and vehicles and some other fancy widgets tacked on) its core gameplay is still fairly dense and complicated because reality is fairly dense and complicated and that's what it is attempting to portray, a fictitious reality simulator.

Even in the realm of simulation games, then, there is no "everything simulator". There's a train simulator, there's a plane simulator, there's even a "mostly infantry combat with some vehicles and stuff thrown in there" simulator (the aforementioned ARMA II), but there's no "everything simulator" because there isn't enough room in a design paradigm to simulate everything.

So, and this is the end I promise, back to your question. Why are there no games that use injuries instead of a health system? Because stripping injuries from the game leaves the design space less cluttered and makes room for other more important core features that would be distracted (and thus after a fashion detracted) from if you included realistic injury models. Your given Call of Duty clone isn't concerned with the slow methodical gameplay that injury modelling is a large part of, and therefore they have no reason to clutter up their game by including it. They could, make no mistake. Call of Duty has an enormous budget and some of the most talented game designers on the planet working on it... which is precisely why they don't even though they could.

So, back to me. I, like you, would love to see a more realistic injury model in a game. I'd love "Realistic Body Armor: The Game". But... that's exactly what it would be, and make no mistake. The game would be about having realistic body armor because that eats so much of the design space, especially since it's ground nobody's really trod on before so it'd take more effort (thus opening us back up to those meta-concerns again). It wouldn't be about a lot of other things because, again, there's no space for that. In my head I'm having a hard time taking the concept beyond "well, it's like Counterstrike, but the guns are like in Receiver and the body armor is realistic". So, basically, the reason that more games don't have more realistic damage models, even though they could, is because it unnecessarily clutters a design space that has no use for such a mechanism. Unless those injuries further the archetype the game is trying to promote? Basically wasted space.

Why we will never have true realistic first person shooters

by Megagun

We won't, because it won't really make any particular kind of sense in most modern popular multiplayer shooters.

You see, realism has some massive drabacks: it's slow, boring, and imbalanced. Think about what would happen if Battlefield had a realistic flight model with a realistic flight ceiling. A single jet or chopper pilot could dominate the battlefield without putting himself in much danger. Snipers could position themselves at strategic positions and only really have to worry about enemy snipers and vehicles. Close-quarters combat would be nearly nonexistant, and most engagements would be fought by eliminating all opposition from afar, and then slowly walking in to take over enemy bases.

But to improve the game, they've added respawning. They've lowered the flight ceiling so that everyone knows there's a jet around at all times, and so that anti-air could be a bit more effective. The battlefield is limited in landscape size so that the entire battle is focused around a few choke points. All of this has been done to improve the game experience; to make engagements between you and an enemy happen often, and with both players understanding that there's an engagement.

This last part is especially important. Games that have lots of 1v1 battles within a larger game are popular. I think it has to do with the adrenaline rush you get when you're walking around, spot an enemy, the enemy spots you, and it's a short one-versus-one match to the death, followed by the victor running off to find another target to kill. Even in games that aren't as fast-paced (ArmA, DayZ), these moments make the game. Nobody likes walking around and suddenly dying because an enemy shot you in the face without you being able to do anything about it. People like being put against an enemy and trying to out-skill him.

Now think about what happens if the damage model becomes more realistic. The first person to fire a bullet will have a far greater advantage, and will win a lot more engagements. Engagements will also be a lot shorter: the first proper hit will be fatal or incapacitating enough so that the opponent can't do anything anymore. Although this can be quite interesting and exciting (high tension level), it changes the entire nature of the game significantly.

In engagements where one person is left crippled, and the other is left dead, the game may become rather annoying. If the game has respawning, this means that even though one person was the victor of an engagement, his crippled state means that he'll spend the next few moments in the game being bored/annoyed at his character's health, especially if he has a broken bone and can't move effectively around the battlefield. The loser of the engagement died and lost the engagement, but he's able to respawn into a fresh body and continue to have fun! So, really, who was the victor in that engagement? The one who died, or the one who got crippled?

So, only having a realistic damage model in a multiplayer shooter won't really work, as respawning becomes an issue. Introducing a new feature (the realistic damage model) broke another. So now this problem has to be fixed, perhaps by removing respawning altogether, which will in turn create another problem (people being bored after dying). And so on, and so forth.

Perhaps there is a nice solution for this, but I doubt that it'll be able to break into mainstream multiplayer gaming, and I bet that these games with truly realistic damage models will continue to be a niche.

How 4.5 Petabytes can be compressed to 42 Kilobytes

Theoretical part by I_Wont_Draw_That

Compression comes down to information theory, which is the branch of mathematics and computer science devoted to describing the amount of information in some string of characters. The attack involves compressing a string which is extremely long, but also contains an extremely low amount of information.

Consider the string: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

That is 26 characters. However, the amount of information stored in it may be lower. I could instead represent it as "the english alphabet", which is only 20 characters, and you still know what I mean. Given enough context, I could represent it as "alphabet". And given a shared understand that "0 means abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", I could represent it as 0.

Now consider this string: aaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbb

That's 72 characters. But what if I gave you something like: 

0=aaa 1=bbb 010101010101010101010101

That's only 36 characters. Or what if I compressed it more? 

0=aaabbb 000000000000

That's only 21 characters. So we compressed our input from 72 characters to 21 characters without losing any information. This is effectively what zipping a file does. It builds a dictionary of common patterns, aliasing them to shorter strings, and then uses the aliases in their place.

The fewer unique substrings there are, the more compressible the data is, because the dictionary can be smaller, so each alias can be shorter. What happens, then, if the entire input is one pattern repeated many, many times?

For instance, suppose the original string had been 0 repeated a trillion times. To write that string out completely would require 1 terabyte (1 byte per "0" times a trillion of them). But as you just saw, I can easily represent it just as well as "0 repeated a trillion times", which is much, much shorter. That's basically what's happening here. The original content is extremely large, but equally simple, so it compresses into almost nothing. When inflated, it's gigantic.

This extreme runs the other way, as well. For any given compression algorithm, there are inputs which cannot be compressed at all.

Practical part by Rohaq

Basic zip bombs are pretty easy to make.

Create a massive file, let's say, a gig in size, which is full of zeroes, then zip it up. Because the content of the file is uniformly repeated throughout, it compresses very easily:

$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1000000 | zip zipbomb1.zip -
  adding: -1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 9.97309 s, 103 MB/s
 (deflated 100%)
$ ls -lh zipbomb1.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 971K 2012-08-01 18:21 zipbomb1.zip

(The above is under Linux, and pushes 1024*1000000 '0' characters into a zip file with standard compression)

Copy that zip file ten times over. Then add all of these zip files into a single zip file. Because the file content across each zip file is exactly the same, again, this compresses very well:

$ zip -9 zipbomb-lvl2-1.zip zipbomb*
  adding: zipbomb10.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb1.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb2.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb3.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb4.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb5.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb6.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb7.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb8.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb9.zip (deflated 100%)
$ ls -lh zipbomb-lvl2-1.zip 
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 28K 2012-08-01 18:26 zipbomb-lvl2-1.zip

(The above adds all of the copied zip files into the zip file zipbomb-lvl2-1.zip with the highest level of compression)

Now copy that zip file ten times over, and zip it them all up again. Rinse and repeat, let's say 10 layers deep.

So following from the compression basics people have been mentioning, ignoring individual file headers, etc. the above could be compressed as something as simple as:

[[[[[[[[[[[0]{1024000000}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}

Now a virus scanner comes along, and then attempts to scan the zip file. It decompresses the first set of zips, then decompresses each of those, then decompresses each of those. Eventually it gets to the lowest layer, and attempts to decompress these files into memory. At this point you're attempting to decompress 10¹⁰ 1GB files into memory, so unless you have about 9.3 exabytes of RAM at hand, you're in trouble, and since some scanners automatically scan new files, well, you could be in trouble as soon as you receive or open the file.

Scanners nowadays generally have checks in place to make sure that they're not affected by zip bombs, however, which is probably why MSE is no longer detecting it as a threat.

The Four Forces of Nature

by bkanber

There are four "fundamental interactions" -- these are the four very basic types of forces that affect particles. They are the strong interaction, the weak interaction, the electromagnetic interaction, and the gravitational interaction.

Electromagnetic: we're most familiar with this interaction, and it has the most direct effect on our day to day lives. It is very, very strong -- many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. The EM interaction dictates all of chemistry. If you've ever picked something up, or felt friction, or drank water, oranything that has nothing to do with radiation, nuclear forces, or gravity, then it's dictated by the electromagnetic interaction. The study of the electromagnetic interaction at the quantum level is called QED: [1] Quantum Electrodynamics, and is mediated by the photon. Richard Feynman made a lot of progress here.

Strong Interaction: if we look closely at the nucleus of an atom, we'll find that the strong interaction shows up in two places: it holds protons and neutrons together inside the nucleus, and it also holds quarks together to form protons and neutrons and other hadrons. The strong interaction is even stronger than EM--but its effects fall off very quickly with distance so we don't really experience it at the macroscopic scale. We discovered the strong interaction because we couldn't figure out how EM could hold things together inside the nucleus. The study of the strong interaction is called [2] Quantum Chromodynamics, and is very interesting.

Weak Interaction: This one dictates radioactive decay; the forces are mediated by the W and Z bosons.

Gravity: gravity is very, very weak -- many orders of magnitude weaker than the strong force. We don't see gravity at human scales; it only appears at galactic sizes (planets, stars, etc). Because it's so weak, it's exceedingly hard to study. When looking at subatomic particles, the EM and Strong forces are so much more powerful than gravity that it's nearly impossible to see the effects of gravity at a small scale. Because of gravity's weakness, we have not been able to study it closely at the quantum level. Gravity is "split off" because it's too weak to study at a quantum scale. It's hard to see and it's hard to study. Perhaps if we understood more of its characteristics at the quantum scale we'd get some more hints about how to reconcile the maths.

Now it turns out that some very smart people discovered that Electromagnetism and the Weak interaction are actually two aspects of a single interaction which we call "the electroweak". Electromagnetism and radioactive decay are therefore two facets of one "parent" interaction -- leaving us with only 3 fundamental interactions! We also have strong evidence to suspect that the Strong interaction can be combined with the Electroweak interaction, and I think we've made progress there, but I'm not up to date on this.

So there's evidence that the Strong, Weak, and EM interactions can be combined into one. Given that, whywouldn't we be able to bring gravity into the mix? We should be able to unify the four into one big theory, and show each one as a different facet of the "unified field theory". The main problem is that we don't understand gravity as much as we'd like to, because it's too weak to study. We haven't figured out the math yet -- because with our current understanding of gravity, the math doesn't work out correctly. If we could more accurately characterize gravity (perhaps there's something that's too small to see yet), our understand of gravity might change slightly and we'd be able to fit it in with the others.

Slight clarification: We don't understand quantumgravity as much as we'd like to. General relativity, however, gives us an excellent framework for macroscopic gravity. Our main issue is using what we know from relativity in conjunction with quantum physics. Einstein's relativity works so well that it's hard to imagine describing gravity any other way; this is what I mean when I say "we don't understand quantum gravity well enough"--we understand gravity excellently, but we don't understand it at the quantum level.

Why don't hair cells heal themselves like cuts and scrapes do? Will we have solutions to this soon?

by Uncle-Dads-Whistle

I work on the development of neurosensory cells in the cochlea, with the goal being figuring out the secret to hair cell regeneration.

Mammals have lost the ability to regenerate hair cells (the types of cells that translate sound waves into a neural signal) after damage. Birds and reptiles, however, have maintained that ability, and after enduring trauma or infection, or drug-induced hair cell loss, a non-sensory supporting cell will transdifferentiate (change from one differentiated cell type to another) into a mechanosensory hair cell. Why exactly can't mammals do this? Well, we're not exactly sure. There are all sorts of inhibitory signals within the mature mammalian cochlea that prevent cell division or transdifferentiation (which is also one reason why we never see any cancer in this system; the body basically has all the proliferation completely shut off). So we try to figure out if there are ways around this apparent moratorium on proliferation/differentiation in mammalian cochleae, and if there's a way to open up the possibility of regenerating hair cells in mature mammalian cochlea.

With gene therapy or viral vectors, we have been able to grow hair cells in vitro. That's true, in fact it doesn't even take anything that complicated to grow hair cells in culture - you just need to dump atoh1 protein (the master gene for hair cell development) on some competent cells and they will turn into hair cells (they'll even recruit neighboring cells to become supporting cells). But that doesn't really help us regenerate hair cells in mature mammalian cochlea - those cells aren't really competent to respond to that signal once they're past a certain point. There's been a few studies that have succeeded in generating transdifferentiated hair cells from support cells using genetic systems to overexpress those genes that direct a hair cell fate - but this only lasts about a month after birth before you start losing that effect. And on top of that, the functionality of the hair cells that were generated was questionable. And of course, these animals were genetically engineered to have these genes turned on at certain points, this is obviously not a viable option to translate into human treatment.

So it still remains that gene therapy is probably our best shot to regenerate hair cells in a mature human cochlea. The only problem is we don't know exactly what combination of genes will do the trick on a mature cochlea. So a lot of work is done on figuring out how this happens normally, then trying to find a way to manipulate that system. Since this is my field, I could go on forever about this, but I don't want to start getting too tangential or far out, especially since I don't have time to look up sources (gotta go work on some of my mice right now) but if y'all have any questions I'll do my best to answer them when I get a chance.

Why do you like your own mirror image but hate your photo image?

by sychosomat

It is an extension of the mere-exposure effect/hypothesis. Very basically, it states that the more you see or hear something, the more you like it. Because we see our "reflected" image far more than our "photo" image, we subjectively like it more.

Here is one study from the literature that found support for the hypothesis - Reversed facial images and the mere-exposure hypothesis. (Warning: possible pay-wall for full article, abstract can be viewed by anyone however).

As a summary, the abstract states that they took 33 female college students and a close female friend (in study 1) or a lover (study 2) and had them rate a picture of the participant as well as an image like one that the participant would see in a mirror as well as a "true" picture, like one would see in a photo/real-life. As the researchers hypothesized, the participant rated their "mirror" image as preferable, while their friend/lover rated their "photo" image as preferable, supporting the mere-exposure hypothesis.

For those behind the paywall: In study 1, the participant preferred their mirror print 21-12, the friend preferred the photo print 20 to 13. In study 2, (different as instead of friends, the girls identified and brought lovers) the participant preferred their mirror print 20-8, the lover preferred the photo print 17-11 (only 28 continued in the study). Note that by the statistics, the difference between lovers and friends in their preference of the photo image is non-significant.

I also wonder if beyond simply mere-exposure, some element of self-image is involved. People may self-identify with their mirror images far more than their photo images and thus become disconcerted when seeing themselves "looking wrong" due to the reflection of the minor imperfections in symmetry most of our faces contain. Pure speculation on my part if this cognitive connection exists, however, so take it with a grain of salt.

As a note to anyone interested, google has a great academic search function called Google scholar (http://scholar.google.com). You may only get access to abstracts, but it is a great first source to go to beyond wikipedia.

The Two Sides of Marijuana

by Staying_On_Topic

If you want to be educated on why drugs are illegal read this The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States by Charles Whitebread, Professor of Law, USC Law School

There is increasing evidence that marijuana can cause long term damage to young people, namely teens.

There is truth in both sides of the spectrum. There are limited studies done on Schedule I drugs, because of it's listing it is considered to have no medicinal value. To understand why Marijuana was listed as a Schedule I drug you have to look back through history to the early 1900's. The medical problems with marijuana stem from side effects, long term and some that only affect some users and addiction. The societal problems extend far beyond that. It is best to take what information is available, from both sides, and come to conclusions from the facts.

Is a good pro marijuana advocacy groups listing of studies relating to marijuana:

http://norml.org/component/zoo/category/recent-research-on-medical-marijuana

The National Institute of Drug Abuse:

http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana

There was a study done on the effects of marijuana use on youth in Canada. They found that smoking marijuana before the brain is fully formed (The medical community agrees that your brain fully forms around the years of 18 to 25) can create long term issues. Here is a quote from the researchers study:

“Teenagers who are exposed to marijuana have decreased serotonin transmission, which leads to mood disorders, as well as increased norepinephrine transmission, which leads to greater long-term susceptibility to stress,” Dr. Gobbi stated.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091217115834.htm

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/pot_smoking_could_leave_lasting_neurological_impression_teenagers

Interesting the second link from the same doctor and resource states that in another study they found that synthetic THC in low doses was a potent anti-depressant, but that in high doses it reversed itself and can worsen depression and other psychiatric conditions like psychosis.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071023183937.htm

http://www.mpp.org/states/wisconsin/news/pot-ingredient-eases-worsens-1.html

This recent study from the University of New South Wales finds that

Heavy teenage cannabis use linked with anxiety disorders in late 20s

http://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/news/heavy-teenage-cannabis-use-linked-anxiety-disorders-late-20s

Here is a CBC Nature of Things documentary that. explores studies on teens who start smoking marijuana before the age of sixteen are four times more likely to become schizophrenic. That's the startling conclusion of some of the world's top schizophrenia experts, whose research is featured in the new documentary The Downside of High

We should legalize it, tax it, and regulate it so teenagers under a certain age aren't legally able to buy it. Drug dealers have no regulated body to manage them, or any formal code of ethics. The major problem, both from the standpoint of marijuana being bad, and it being good, is the absurd declaration of making marijuana a schedule I drug, which means it has no health benefits and thus no studies will be done on it's benefits or dangers. Let us not forget that the marijuana prohibition laws were passed largely due to racism and as a means to keep poor minorities below the white man. This is why there is such a large black and latino population still in jails, many for non violent drug offences.

The drug policy of the United States and the eagerness of it's allies to adopt it's policies has done nothing to prevent the usage of drugs or prevent it being sold. If anything it has criminalized it, glamorized it, made it taboo, and thus there is no education.

The drug policies of the future focus on education, health, and science.Like with Portugals staggering results. The drug policies of today are archaic machinations of a predominately racist white power structure that permeates the United States Government and most western nations.

People who pick a side tend to stick with information that confirms their ideas, instead of reasoning and science. Unbiased facts.

I would also like to state than when quantifying the dangers of a drug you have to look at it from a few different angles, addiction, side effects, long term effects, and how dangerous a lethal dose would be for each drug. Obviously drugs like alcohol, and nicotine via tobacco on an overall scale can cause a lot more damage than marijuana, but marijuana shouldn't be free from the scrutiny of science just because of a previous and currently flawed policy.

This picture displays the Active/Lethal Dose Ration and Dependence potential of Psychoactive Drugs 

This rates the harmfulness of 20 psychoactive drugs according to 16 criteria and finds that alcohol comes out on top. 

Members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, including two invited specialists, met in a 1-day interactive workshop to score 20 drugs on 16 criteria: nine related to the harms that a drug produces in the individual and seven to the harms to others. Drugs were scored out of 100 points, and the criteria were weighted to indicate their relative importance.

http://reason.com/blog/2010/11/01/the-most-dangerous-drug

Now look at the current drug scheduling in the USA compared to toxicity 

Here are possible uses for marijuana in the medical industry 

A recent study suggests CBD is safe and non toxic and numerous studies on it's effects on cancer

There are instances where psychotropics are used to treat addiction from drugs or alcohol. A doctor in BC Canada was shut down by government officials after treating 150-200 patients using ayahuasca with some success.

And instances like this, where a team of researchers in Norway have analyzed previous research into LSD and have come to the conclusion that a single dose of the drug may work just as well against alcohol addiction as daily doses of medications currently in use today.. There are cases like in this documentary that explores the potential medicinal value of LSD and psilocybin for people suffering from cluster headaches but can't because it's illegal. It is time to give up our idea that legal drugs are ok and illegal ones have no value, because it isn't rooted in science. We must look at the potential of drugs previously found to have no value, because it has the power to change the way we look at addictions and drugs.

Watch this documentary about LSD, Albert Hofmann, and it's use in Canadian Psychiatric Institutions in the 50's and 60's, as well as a brief history on LSD. The Doctors from the institutions treated severe alcoholism with LSD, and found it to work quite well. The patients having a psychedelic experience saw how much they were hurting their family, and the harm they were doing to their lives. The Doctors themselves ingest LSD to see what it might be like for a patient suffering from schizophrenia. It is wild watching these old, scientific men, recount their experience of LSD. A beautiful documentary in a sober or non sober state.

Watch on the Canadian National Film Board.

Watch on youtube

Here is a torrent (TPB).

If you are really interested in the history of drug prohibition in the USA, the issues with the legal system, and want to watch documentaries about these issues, this comment has a long list of them.

I envision marijuana horticulturalists to work closely with scientists and the medical community in the future because they are an untapped resource when it comes to the studies. There is also limited research into CBD and CBC, but studies are slowly being done.

I have a huge problem with both the culture of misinformation and prohibition, as well as the modern drug culture that fosters no respect for drugs.

I disagree with the recreational use without the awareness that it is medicine and that you are self medicating, and from the standpoint of media glorifying it to teens in music, movies the internet, and television, without them having proper understanding of what it does.

I approach drug use from an anthropological standpoint, that human beings have been experimenting for thousands of years with them, and previous to this generation of drug use, drug use in almost all areas of the world was regarded as spiritual, a source of knowledge. People who were witch doctors, or medicine men, had intimate knowledge of powerful plants. This knowledge has come and gone in cycles, wiped out only to resurface.

In closing, we know a little about cannabis, and new studies are done all the time. Imagine though, if we started studying this plant during the spiritual awakening of the 60's. How much more we would know about it, it's effects, and what potential uses it could have as medicine.