Carl Sagan On Marijuana

eldavojohn writes "BoingBoing is reporting that, allegedly, Carl Sagan wrote a piece for 'Marihuana Reconsidered' under the pseudonym Mr. X that appears to look fondly upon the science of trippin' balls. Puff the Magic Sagan's full piece can be found here. It opens with 'It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life — a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences.' Too bad old Mr. Cosmos couldn't enjoy his latest vocals."

Comments

That's all very well but..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all very well, but could he actually do any work without it?

-- Grinspoon shared the joints with Sagan and his last wife, Ann Druyan. Afterward Sagan said, "Lester, I know you've only got one left, but could I have it? I've got serious work to do tomorrow and I could really use it." --

http://www.druglibrary.org/think/~jnr/sagan.htm

Extrapolating a little

[NotBornYesterday]

Written in 1969: " ... it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 10^8 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies."

Assuming uncompressed 24-bit color bmp:

100,000,000 / 24 = 4,166,666 pixels

So, mentally, he was shooting with a 4.2 megapixel camera

100,000,000 bits / 8 = 12,500,000 bytes

1.25e7 / 1024 = 12207

12207 / 1024 = 11.92

11.92 MB file

He doesn't state what fraction of a second this "flash" occupies, but let's assume that it is about 1/3rd of a second. So, he's pegging the bandwidth of human visual perception at less than 12MB/flash, or 12MB/(1/3 / sec), or 36MB/sec.

Puff???

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to popular belief the Peter, Paul, and Mary song "Puff the Magic Dragon" was NOT about drugs. It was about lost childhood. (And no, you can't argue otherwise just because Wikipedia says so! If it does.).