Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
You can find anything on the Internet
Karen’s watching a National Geographic program on heroin. She asked, “I wonder if it’s possible to purify street heroin.” We’re both former chemists, so we knew that it had to be possible to recrystallize purified heroin from a dirty solution. And we were right.
The link is to Erowid. Here’s Erowid’s mission statement:
Erowid is a member-supported organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related issues. We work with academic, medical, and experiential experts to develop and publish new resources, as well as to improve and increase access to already existing resources. We also strive to ensure that these resources are maintained and preserved as a historical record for the future.
Is that cool or what? I’ve crossed paths with Erowid before, and it sure looks like a fun site to browse, oh, I don’t know, next time you’re wondering whether you can get high smoking banana peels.
Not surprisingly, the instructions for purifying street heroin utilizes reagents that are easy to come by: hydrochloric acid (muriatic acid, which is available at pool supply stores), household ammonia, ethyl ether (the trickiest reagent — the author claims that some diesel starters are ethyl ether) and baking soda. It’s the sort of purification we did a dozen times or more in Organic Chemistry Lab.
Isn’t the Internet a remarkable thing? We take it for granted, but think about it: nearly everything is out there. Knowledge has become democratized to a degree; you still need the education and access to a computer.
When I was a kid, we had to walk up to the TV to change channels (and programs were black-and-white). People spent hundreds of dollars buying multi-volume encyclopedias for their kids. Bookstores like Vroman’s could order books for you if they didn’t have them on the shelves, but you had to count on the completeness of the local library’s card catalog to tell you what was out there.
In the 1960s, this heroin question might have been answerable by organic chemists and, perhaps, educated users who had received the knowledge by oral tradition. And now it’s just a click away.
D.
Heh. It’s going around, evidently: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/07/28/a-passing-thought/
I promise you, I haven’t been reading Whatever. But I am curious: what is this computer of which he speaks, that has such great voice recognition software? I might just have to read Whatever.
It’s his new Droid X phone. Reco software has made great strides over the last 10 years. The Tablet Edition of Windows XP actually had a kick-ass handwriting recognizer. I developed a survey about risky sex at gay bathhouses on that platform, and we had 95% or so accuracy on hand-written responses. And that’s without being able to train the app, and with guys who were drunk/stoned/tweaking…
Bet it won’t recognize a doctor’s handwriting 🙂
Oh, and I’m hopeless. I went to the Motorola site to look at Droid X, and I can’t even figure out how much it costs.
There was an article in the 29Jul10 International Herald Tribune about Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software. It’s what our translation staff use for dictation. Apparently the new version is way fabulous.
I haven’t used it since 1998. When I started my private practice, I tried using it for about a week. Drove me batshit crazy because it kept screwing up on the little words — “he,” “a,” and so forth. Since I’m anal about such things I couldn’t wait until the end and go back to edit. No, I’d have to stop what I was doing and edit right away. Whole thing was NOT a time saver.
I, too, heard that the new version is great, so I’ve asked for an installation on my office computer. Still waiting for the training session.