If you find a balloon, hide it and talk the people accompanying it into splitting the prize with you. Wait until the locations of the other balloons leaks. Collect prize. If people accompanying it won't play, kidnap them.

How do you suppose hospitals cover the cost of treating the uninsured?

Sorry, maybe I did overstate things. This is just a very emotional subject for me as you can probably understand. However, if you read this and other articles like it, can we agree the Prozac fad of the 1990's was overblown?

I took Prozac and other SSRIs. They had absolutely no positive effect on my depression. Instead I got little blistering bumps on my skin that itched like mad and lasted for months and all of the usual sexual side effects. Worse, they gave me a flat affect and occasional visual hallucinations upon waking up in the morning, which got me a misdiagnoses of schizophrenia which lead to me having to drop out of college due to the side effects of the schizophrenia medications (which incidentally did nothing for the flat affect or hallucinations.)

At one point a doctor made me abruptly quit the SSRI I was on. That seemed to lead to the worst depression I have ever experienced. The hallucinations stopped. The doctor put me on a different SSRI.

I ended up gradually weaning myself off of all of the drugs almost a decade ago. I haven't had schizophrenia-like symptoms since. Doctors since then agree I was misdiagnosed and just had an unexpected reaction to SSRIs.

My guess is that SSRIs seem to work mostly due to the placebo effect. Anything beyond the placebo effect is due to some people having just the right kind of depression that can benefit from what SSRIs do. When I quit the SSRIs cold turkey, I believe that rebound depression was of the neurochemical type that SSRIs can successfully treat. In other words, I think there are probably many biological causes of depression and SSRIs only treat one cause. For some, like me, SSRIs just throw our neuro-chemistry way out of wack by overstimulating parts of the seratoninergic neurotransmitter system.

In my opinion, sloppy science or fraud allowed SSRIs to get FDA approval as a treatment for many kinds of depression when it only really treats a subtype of depression. That lead to those drugs being promoted as a panacea for everything from major depression to just not being cheerful all the time. It cost me the education and career and better life I wanted and otherwise would have had. While massaging of data might sound like a faux pas to a non-scientist, it can have tragic consequences.

I think it is time to stop giving special status to delusions such as Scientology and Christianity. In the USA churches are tax exempt. Church businesses should pay a "sin tax," a higher than normal tax rate, the way tobacco is taxed because it too is harmful. It should also be illegal to give children religion just as it is illegal to sell a child a carton of cigarettes to smoke. Many parents actually force children to attend brainwashing events one to three times a week at their local church. That is just plain sick.

So fix the programming bug through genetic engineering. The tendency toward peace already seems to exist so it probably only needs to be enhanced a little so that we can more easily override our skull crushing tendencies.

Solution probably also is possible via uploading our mental software to non-brain computer hardware and redesigning the relevant code. That is probably a little further into the future though.

Both are probably easier to achieve than FTL travel.

Once upon a time I tried LSD. I would say it was the most profound experience of my life. The guy who went down the rabbit hole isn't quite the same guy who came out 12 hours later.

Good changes in no particular order:

• Increased self esteem because I saw past all the layers of garbage people told me about me, down to who I really am.
• Increased love and empathy for people and all life
• A better understanding of what makes people tick
• A nice feeling of interconnectedness with the universe
• Possible insights into how the brain works
• Was horrible at arithmetic but now I can multiply any two three digit numbers in my head.
• Many personal psychological insights
• Made me much more liberal
• I see many sides to issues now rather than just the ones I was conditioned to see.
• Improved artistic talent and computer coding abilities
• More in touch with my aesthetic sense
• Went from atheist to Buddhist atheist.
• Curious ability to make myself feel good even when things are going badly. The same ability also seems to get rid of headaches.
• Put a lot of childhood abuse behind me
• More varied imagination

Not so good stuff:

• I have difficulty putting on a persona when the situation (arguably) calls for one. They seem too fake and insincere for me to stomach now.
• More awareness of others' psychology which sometimes feels like an invasion of their privacy.
• Occasional emotions of being trapped in a tight place... difficult to explain. I think it has something to do with an incomplete rebirth I experienced as the drug was wearing off, got stuck in the birth canal and stayed there while returning to consensual reality. Maybe I should go to Mexico to finish being born again:-)

Overall, I think the world would be a better place if most people tried LSD at least once, providing they spent months of their free time learning all they could about LSD before using it and used it in a safe environment in a responsible way.

Hands

It was a brilliant idea to put them on the ends of my arms because they can reach most other body parts that way. I'm thankful that the Flying Spaghetti Monster came up with that bit of intelligent design.

I agree that libraries are wonderful places, temples of knowledge, one of the very few things I hold sacred. I love printed books. They are sensuous right down to their spicy scent between their leathery leaves. I have not yet been able to imagine the Internet providing the full sensory experience I get from books. Maybe in time...

However, it pains me that Mr. Bradbury, one of my all time favorite authors, has allowed himself to stop growing. I think it is very likely that some people reading this will never die unless they choose to. Imagine living to be 20,000 years old and hating whatever newfangled things replace the Internet, hating pretty much everything about the world because it has changed and you have not. Human history is tiny, the future potentially vast; why confine yourself to some small region of the past and let history race by you into the future?

I was just listening to something a little old, Alexander Scriabin's 2nd symphony. A month ago, I never even heard of Scriabin. I found him on the Internet and now have his music. I doubt I would have found him at the local library. Now I'm listening to Shpongle which is kind of new (2005) and goes shockingly well with mushroom soup and strolls through mossy eldritch forests as well as with computer programming. I wouldn't have found Shpongle at the library either. This Fall I hope to share my home with an 18 year old college student for the simple reason that she will bring novelty--both modern youth culture and her tribal culture which is completely and wonderfully alien to me. That's how I try to live, always throwing something new into the old brain pan so it never goes empty.

Now if you'll excuse me, my head feels like a Frisbee...

What does tuning involve?

I'll give parent post partial credit:-)

People did play a part in turning me on to science, but I mostly only know those people through books.

In 5th or 6th grade, my reading skills were abysmal because of dyslexia. To motivate me to read more, my teacher got me a "job" at the school library as a librarian's assistant. The librarian directed me to the Thomas Edison biographies and told me that old Tom was said to have had dyslexia too and that I could probably learn to help myself by studying his life. It probably took me a month or two to make it through that first book. Within a year, I had taken up Tom's (alleged) habit of reading a foot of books per week. By then my interests had branched from Edison worship to all things science. (If I ever run into Ms. Tysinger(sp?), the librarian, I'll plant a big kiss on her cheek and buy her dinner.)

Before people became overly obsessed with safety, there were some really good science project books on the shelves. I can't recall any of the titles. They had really interesting projects like how to build your own X-Ray machine, Tesla coils, fireworks, and the like that today might get a kid branded as a terrorist, but would give any red-blooded kid an interest in science. Look for stuff written prior to the 1970's, the older, the better. German authors were especially fun. Some of the science might be a little off, but the projects were a blast.

I also really liked "Cosmos" and other titles by Carl Sagan. Richard Dawkins was after my childhood, but I imagine everything by him would be motivational. Douglas Adams's fiction would be great for kids. Thomas Edison, Einstein, Tesla, George Washington Carver, Alan Turing, Fermi, Marconi, I fell madly in love with all of them.

I guess my father played a small part in my development as a geek. He made sure I got science-related gifts at Xmas, bought my copy of "Cosmos" and I remember him making an electromagnet for me when I was a toddler. He wasn't a scientist though, and I can't remember him discussing mathematical proofs at the dinner table.