The BBC says a man in France has documented how a drug can suppress the urge to drink:
Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, one of France’s top heart specialists, says he overcame his own addiction to alcohol by self-administering doses of a muscle-relaxant called baclofen.
He has now written a book about his experience – Le Dernier Verre (The Last Glass) – in which he calls for clinical trials to test his theory that baclofen suppresses the craving for drink.
I can’t help but notice a phrase offered by Dr. Pascal Garche in Geneva, as quoted by the BBC: “the book is going to set the cat among the pigeons”. Nice marketing.
On my way to meet [the FBI agent] the next morning, I realized that I didn’t know what he looked like. Not to worry: I was in Adams Morgan, D.C.’s original hippie/hipster neighborhood, and he and his colleague were FBI agents straight out of central casting, with dark-blue suits and close-cropped hair. They wanted to know everything I knew about Vladimir. I had assumed that he was a spy. But I was pretty confident that there was nothing illegal about our conversations. So I spent about 45 minutes telling them what I could. I learned my experience was not that unusual: Cactus Cantina, the agents told me, was the favorite haunt of Russian spooks (and the cringe-worthy tipping I had observed was standard practice).
How much is cringe-worthy tipping?
Do the Russians like Mexican food or are they trying to blend in? It sounds like pizza is acceptable to them also, especially if the name of the pizza includes the letters P-U-T-I-N. The FBI on the other hand go for Starbucks. The American agent’s choice might seem as obvious to us Americans as their stereotypical clothes, but maybe it looks to Muscovites like fancy taco joints are where Americans want to go for lunch.
I can just imagine a KGB bulletin describing the current administration’s culture of tex-mex preferences, with a potential shift coming towards deep-dish (Chicago-style) pizza.
Gee, either it’s lunch time or I’m getting hungry just reading about national security…perhaps one of these savvy beltway insiders/journalists could put together a spook’s guide to dining?
Marty Ottenheimer pointed out to me the other day that Carrots do not actually help vision. Rather, the story we often hear is a result of a rumor from WWII. ABC Science explains:
…if you don’t get enough carotenes or Vitamin A in your diet, eventually you will suffer problems in your vision. This was the basis of the myth started by the Royal Air Force, the RAF.
In the Battle of Britain, in 1940, the British fighter pilot, John Cunningham, became the first person to shoot down an enemy plane with the help of radar. In fact, in WW II, he was the RAF’s top-scoring night fighter pilot, with a total of 20 kills. Some pilots were better flying in daylight, while others, like Cunningham, were better at night. His nickname was “Cats’ Eyes”. The RAF put out the story in the British newspapers that he, and his fellow night pilots, owed their exceptional night vision to carrots. People believed this to the extent that they started growing and eating more carrots, so that they could better navigate at night during the blackouts that were compulsory during WW II.
But this story was a myth invented by the RAF to hide their use of radar, which was what really located the Luftwaffe bombers at night – not human carrot-assisted super-vision.
The punch-line is that German folklore already held that carrots would make eyes better. Susceptibility to fraud is usually rooted in pre-existing beliefs and prejudice.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995