General – Erowid Crew Blog

Xiao Ren Ren : The “Little People” of Yunnan

This is a very fun paper.

Xiao Ren Ren : The “Little People” of Yunnan by David Arora in 2008. It’s about his visit to Yunnan, China where he encountered edible boletes (mushrooms with spore pores instead of gills) that stained blue and reportedly caused people to see “little people”.

Also on ResearchGate.

“And if I don’t stir-fry [the mushrooms] for ten minutes?”

“Ahhh,” the man said, his eyes bright and mischievous and his wide grin punctuated by a massive, gleaming metal molar. “Well, then of course ‘ni kan xiao ren ren’ (you will see the little people).”

I don’t understand why Arora wouldn’t have collected dry and wet samples of each, sent parts to a lab, and saved parts for later confirmation. Even tiny parts of biomaterial can have the DNA sequenced relatively cheaply these days.

But, regardless, there are many fungal mysteries still to be worked out in the world.

Additional Backing Drive Funding

A couple more folks have stepped up and added to our matching drive. Today we got an additional $2,500 in matching funds. Right now, at midnight west coast time, we have $17,002 in matching funds and have used about $7,000. We’re hoping maybe to get another couple thousand in backing over the next few days, but it will be a stretch.

But, a longer stretch is to keep building momentum with next Friday as our end date.

CDC : Start Low. Go Slow.

It’s nice to see the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), use the harm reduction message: “Start Low. Go Slow.” The concept nor phrasing are new, but we don’t know of any federal government education programs that have used this sane approach wording before. Anyone know of any government programs that have used “Start Low, Go Slow” before?

Main Extracts 27 Sprint Final Night: Snacks, Vitamins, Calcium Carbonate, and an Anxiolytic

All praise to a finger of Laphroaig 10.

Served with a some B-vitamins, a couple grams of amino acids, boysenberry-flavored calcium carbonate, and chunks of two flavors of Strong and Kind bars: Jalapeno and Mustard.

Blood Sugar, Acid, and Stress Moderators

The last few days of getting the newsletter ready for the printer are always stressful. One develops coping strategies.

Erowid Crew Blog

The Erowid team has used a lot of different communication methods for internal and external info over the years, but we’ve never had a public crew blog. We’ve had a dozen wikis, a number of blogs, CRM ticketing systems, email, forums, Twitter, plain text, HTML, absurdly complicated database systems, IRC, other chat formats, posting through other organization’s publications and systems, interviews, and conferences.

The plan is to use this crew blog as a random mix of items that will provide additional public visibility of what it is we’re working on. It is likely to be extremely boring, mixed with rants, system updates, and commentary about anything the main Erowid crew decides to post.

We will, as always, try to keep the tone respectful and upbeat, but most of us can’t actually contain our disdain for people, organizations, and publications that lie publicly. Personal attacks are off limits except for critiques of top-tier public officials who abuse their bullypulpits.