iPhone 4S Test Notes: Asking Siri for Sex and Drugs [Video]

By Sam Biddle Oct 14, 2011 8:00 PM 67,135 85

After a little while it gets boring asking Siri to text people and convert gallons to quarts. It's been a long day. I'm a little delirious. Help me, Siri. God, just help me.

It can't get me drugs. It can't understand my need. But at least it'll tell me what it's wearing without any questions. [iPhone 4S on Giz]

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This Is How 72 Bags of Cocaine Look Inside Your Intestines [Drugs]

A 20-year-old Irish man was caught by the Brazilian Federal Police with 72 bags of cocaine inside his intestines. This is how he looked inside, using a three-dimensional computed tomography body scanner. It's actually more disgusting than I expected.

I would never look at Cheetos in the same way again.

In total, he was carrying 830 grams (1.8 pounds) of coke when he was arrested on September 12 at Congonhas Airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil, when he was about to take a flight to Brussels, Belgium. That's $207,000 in the market.

Drug mules get paid from $1600 to more than $8000 per trip. [Independent via MSNBC]

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Smoking Weed Is Really Bad for the Environment (Doing Other Drugs Is Less Bad) [Factoid]

Marijuana, hue notwithstanding, is not exactly new school green. In fact, it's the worst drug for the environment. Marijuana growers use $5 billion worth of electricity to power lightbulbs, fans, dehumidifiers and whatever else it takes to grow weed. That's 1% of the national electricity consumption.

Not only that, smoking a joint is worth two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. Who knew getting high could have such environmental consequences! We'll ignore the fact that if it was legal, growers could grow out in the open and not damage the environment with energy consumption. Thanks lawmakers. As for the other drugs: Cocaine powers the deforestation of rain forests, as farmers chop down trees to grow the coca. Also, according to National Geographic:

Farmers also use a number of harmful insecticides, fungicides, and fertilizers to grow the [coca] plants. Petroleum products are also a key ingredient in the process of turning coca into cocaine. To extract the drug from the plant, farmers mash coca leaves and soak the paste in petroleum products such as gasoline or kerosene. According to the U.S. State Department, as many as 85 quarts (80 liters) of kerosene are used to manufacture every kilogram of cocaine that makes its way to the street market.

Making meth uses energy, along with toxic ingredients like drain cleaner, lye, camping stove fuel and more. According to the EPA, the production of a pound of methamphetamine creates five or six pounds of toxic waste. Extracting heroin requires toxic substances like ammonia, acetone, hydrochloric acid, etc. that often ruins the environment the process takes place in.

Basically, any illegal drug you take to gets high, takes a toll on Mother Earth too. Think about the planet the next time you smoke/snort/tweak/shoot drugs. Or just eat shrooms. [National Geographic, Image Credit: Pashabo/Shutterstock]

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Map Proves You Are Paying Too Much For Marijuana [Drugs]

The September issue of Wired has a nationwide map of marijuana prices (excluding Alaska and Hawaii, where people apparently don't smoke weed.) It's fascinating to see the price differences nationwide, but there are interesting economic points as well.

The map was put together by FloatingSheep, a group that maps and analyzes location-specific data. In this case, it took data from the Price of Weed website, which crowd-sources marijuana prices. As Floating Sheep explains, using that data it was pretty easy to create a weed price map:

After cleaning the data to get rid of the outliers, we created a continuous surface using a statistical interpolation technique known as kriging to identify the average variance among price differences through a spherical semivariogram model. To obtain a price for each location show in the map above, an interpolated value was estimated as a weighted average of prices from its twelve neighboring points.

Gah! Wait, did I say easy? I meant complicated. But either way, the results are kind of amazing. And looking closely, you can actually learn something from them.

Okay, yes, if you live in the Dakotas, you are paying too much for pot. Let's establish that first of all. But that's not what you can learn. What you can learn is that harsh drug laws have little influence on price or availability.

Look at Kentucky, for example. Kentucky's pot laws are not at all kind, bra. Nor are Tennessee's, mang. And yet both have price comparability to northern California where marijuana is more or less mandatory. (Or at least, everyone in San Francisco seems very high to me.) Likewise, it's less expensive in Texas and Florida. What do all of those spots have in common? Either a lot of marijuana is grown or imported there.

Or check out Minnesota, man. Check it out! Minnesota has decriminalized marijuana. If you have less than an ounce and a half, you just pay a small fine and do no time. And yet the price of marijuana there is very high. I expect that's because it's far from any growing or import regions, and because Prince and Bob Mould are snapping up whatever available supply there is.

Simply put, no matter what kind of legal codes you pass, the laws of supply and demand will supersede them. (Sorry, Minnesota.) [FloatingSheep]

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