RTFA: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1912485…

Albert Hofmann was born at Baden, Switzerland, on January 11 1906, the elder of two children. Having graduated from Zürich University with a degree in chemistry in 1929 he took a doctorate on the gastro-intestinal juice of the vineyard snail.

After leaving university, he went to work for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals where he researched the medicinal properties of the Mediterranean squill (Scilla maritima), before moving on to the study of Claviceps purpurea (ergot).

Albert Hofmann RIP

RTFA: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/01/documentary-c…

Three years in the making, Jon Ronson’s Crazy Rulers of the World explores the apparent madness at the heart of US military intelligence. With first-hand access to the leading players in the story, Jon Ronson examines the extraordinary — and plain bizarre — national secrets at the core of George W Bush’s war on terror.

No comment. Oh - watch this.

RTFA: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item…

The original charter and by-laws for the League for Spiritual Discovery, founded by Timothy Leary in Millbrook, NY in October, 1966. Here, Leary and his cohort outline the structure of a new religious association that identifies LSD, peyote and psilocybin as The Sacraments used to commune with, “evolutionary wisdoms preserved in cellular and molecular structures”, and to facilitate the ritual, “to go out of the mind and to come to the senses”. Five - 8 1/2″ X 11″ pages total, with the first four pages stapled top-left, page 5 having come loose about 20 years ago.

Pretty sad, really… The way the owner acquired this was through Leary’s wife, who was selling stuff to pay for the prosecution of Timothy Leary. This document looks terrible, and should have been curated for the last 40 years, if it weren’t for circumstance which would necessitate its sale. Leary, by the way, was a very accomplished academic by the time he was ousted from Harvard. It is evident, in reading this charter document, that the premise is very sound and coherently presented.