An anonymous tipster spotted the pictured stack of books in the Butler computer lab. "If only my finals were this interesting!" he laments. The books include:

Cannabis Culture
Marijuana
Marijuana-The New Prohibition
Sexual Power of Marijuana
Man and Marijuana
Marihuana Reconsidered
Marihuana Papers
Bitter Pill
Birth Control
From Private Vice to Public Virtue
New Concepts in Contraception
National Com. on Marijuana and Drug Abuse

It looks like there may be at least one student who's a little less stressed than the rest of us.

Two Bwoggers report on a disturbing journey to the center of the mind...

Our reasons for doing Salvia had as much to do with irony as they did with recreation. Free of associations with the 1960s counterculture, the perfectly legal psychoactive escaped the social retrenchment our nation experienced during the 70s and 80s. So while Salvia gets you high on one of the most powerful hallucinogens known to man, it also gets you high on contradiction: going by our current standards (you know, the ones that don't let you drink 'til you're 21), there is no conceivable justification for keeping this stuff legal. None. It's like hypocrisy you can smoke.

I, however, was a bit confused when my co-experimentalist first floated the idea. A visit to Wikipedia turned up the following information (here I paraphrase):

Salvia divinorum is a naturally occurring herb related to mint and capable of producing strong psychoactive effects for a short amount of time when smoked and inhaled. Its twenty-minute trip has characteristics of both weed and stronger drugs, like shrooms. Salvia's Latin name means "sage of the seers"; the word salvia is related to salve, used by the ancient Romans to mean "hello," "be well," and possibly ""care for a smoke?."

After digesting this new knowledge, I thought for a few seconds, reveled in the narcissism of enlightened drug use, and replied: "Sure, why the hell not?" After all, I was in need of a psychoactively novel experience, and I didn't see myself making it down to the Navajo Nation any time in the near future. So a few weeks later he and I, after pushing through throngs of hipsters and goths on St. Mark's Place and purchasing our wares in a seedy yet comforting headshop (Addiction NYC, for the curious), found ourselves loading surprisingly odorless, fine brown leaves into a knobby and voluminous bubbler.

For anyone who's spent any time at Columbia beyond Days on Campus or a guided tour, this article says nothing new. The Arkansas kid who claims that Adderall users are "nonstinky," however, has clearly not been in an environment (read: Butler) where a thousand souls are pulling their second all-nighters with the aid of their favorite speed-like substance. As we know, those kids get funky.

But wait! Columbia kids also use happy little pills for another noble purpose: to combat the unpleasant warning-sign side-effects of drinking! Here we find OTC methods to deal with "the Asian sensation, Asian explosion, Asian flush and Asian blush." And a posh snap-shot of Calvin Sun.

Columbia-sponsored high school, created as Manhattanville quid pro quo, evicted, now homeless: ironic?

CU formally apologizes to Minutemen: reactions predictable

Barnard career services better than Columbia's...unless you want to be a bartender

Speaking of which: bars crack down on legal IDs, but hire illegal bouncers

Revelation of the day: "in certain cases drug use destroys lives, but in a lot of cases they help out a whole bunch"

Columbia's alphabet soup of schools: doomed to "sad and paradoxical reality" of awkward coexistence - forever. Which, according to this, is a good thing. We think.

While you're in Butler cramming — or simply shitfaced at 1020 — your university is actively engaging with that frightening specter beyond the 116th Street Gates: the wide, weird world. Below, Bwog presents some of the most recent (yet unheralded!) findings and goings on from the realm of science and technology to have occurred at Columbia over the last few days.

Seismic Shi(f)t Happens

When some seisometers placed by Lamont-Doherty researchers along the sea floor of the Pacific near the Mexican coast found themselves stuck in fresh lava flows 8,000 feet below underwater, the university's bursars were surely shaking their heads in disbelief that they had surrendered any funds to a project advocated by the curious novelty of an "Earth Observatory" again. That is, until Lamont scientists Maya Tolstoy and Felix Waldhauser discovered that the seisometers were still transmitting, and became the first to closely record micro-earthquakes resulting from underwater eruptions. Good news, especially if it means Columbia research vessels won't be returning to the area to install new devices— and making enough noise to kill whales again.

Gateway Lab con Stile?

Italian artists Eva and Franco Mattes have two obsessions in life: Andy Warhol is one, the other is the virtual online community Second Life. Bwog has no doubt that if cultural critics had the time, the patience, or the lack of lives these two must in order to have endured a year in this hyper-aestheticised neighborhood of cyberspace, they would fall into paroxysms of glee before scribing fascinating tomes on this binarially-circumscribed subculture. Instead, we're left with Warholesque portraits of the artists' favorite virtual avatars. Oh, and they're going on display at Casa Italiana. We get the Italian connection, but wonder if the location has more to do with Mudd being too crowded with Halo fans?

Columbia's myriad of research institutes helped Bwog to realize that not only will studying PE or blebs in college prove fruitful some day, but that every research, however small, can be funded if need be. Even if you have to ask reactionary drug war people for the money.

A few favorite centers:

Center for the Active Life of Minority Elders

Center for Decision Sciences

Fecal Incontinence Center

Institute for Tele-Information (CITI)

Langmuir Center for Colloids and Interfaces

Center on Medicine as a Profession

Renal Transplantation Center

Center for Resilient Networks