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Those who complain about how the internet or advances in technology haven't done enough to make us smarter or better may not truly remember what life was like before either. For one, digging up any type of public or private information took loads more work, especially when offending parties, from governments to free-marketers, were allowed to hide behind arbitrary legalese and the lawyers who enforce it. Before the internet, offenders worked in the shadows while their consumers and citizens were overexposed in the light.
But with organizations like the non-profit Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and their various exercises in citizen journalism, those unhappy days have thankfully passed. Check out one of their more interesting wiki projects called Maximum Weirdness, which rifles through declassified files from University of California, San Francisco's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and posts both the boring and bizarre results on a wikipedia dedicated strictly to Big Tobacco's metaverse. It might sound like wonk work on paper, but the right mixture of keyword searches can produce some eye-opening, lung-crushing laughs. Or is that cries? You decide.
Consider the machines with electrostatic traps used to conduct analysis of tobacco smoke. On the surface it may read like science, but pulled roughly from a library file it feels like something out of the Terminator:
The machine is equipped with special controls for parameters such as puff duration, interval between puffs, number of puffs, automatic interruption of the puffs at a given butt length, expulsion of the butt, control of puff volume ... At the same time up to twenty cigarettes from different samples can be smoked ... The machine is suitable for both restricted and free smoking and a change between these two conditions can mechanically be achieved in a few seconds.
Whatever floats your boat, dude. That's tame compared to trying to give cats hard-ons, which is what scientists at Tulane University did while trying to study the effects of nitric oxide on erections. At least they gave the cats some Special K before slicing and needling their manhood: "Twenty-six mature male cats … were sedated with ketamine hydrochloride…and anesthetized with sodium pentobarbital. A vertical, circumcision-like incision was made to expose the two ventral corpora cavernosa and the dorsal corpus spongiosum. A 30-gauge needle was placed into the right corpus to permit administration of the drug into the penis. A 25-gauge needle was placed midway into the left corpus for the measurement of intracavernous pressure."
See more stories tagged with: research, quack science, tobacco companies, cigarettes
Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.
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