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gwern comments on LessWrong Help Desk - free paper downloads and more (2014) - Less Wrong
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Catnip papers:
Todd, Neil Bowman 1963. "The catnip response". Doctoral dissertation, Harvard (ocm05134795) (likewise, no joy on /r/scholar) EDIT: got it!
Maybe someone can get a scan via ILL? The library entry has an option 'Scan and deliver', which sounds promising, but requires a Harvard account. In general, Harvard seems to provide reasonable access: http://asklib.hcl.harvard.edu/faq/81789
Misc:
3. "The Placebo in medicine: Editorial", Medical Press, June 1890, pg 642 (volume unknown: vol 101?)
'Medical Press' here is the English journal Medical Press, sometimes also named London medical press and circular, which began as "Dublin Medical Press on January 9, 1839, later as the Dublin Medical Press and Circular and finally as the Medical Press and Circular".
There's no official site and almost the entire run of the journal would be public domain now, but the volumes for 1890 do not seem to have been digitized, going by HathiTrust & IA/Google Books. There are a few quotations from the editorial floating around (eg "We feel sorry for it, but apparently the law does not think well of placebos"), with a long quotation in ch1 of Follies and Fallacies in Medicine (pg3/15), but those don't turn up any copies anywhere. (/r/scholar)
Why the interest in catnip?
Thanks. I wasted a bunch of money on catnip when it turned out my cat was immune, which I didn't even know was a thing.
After reading up on it, it seemed like there were gaps in the research literature - most of it was hopelessly old and inaccessible, there was no single estimate for how frequently cats respond to catnip and substitutes (so I could meta-analyze/multilevel-model this easily), and no data on the relationships of responses within a cat (so if your cat is immune to catnip, what do you optimally try next?) but this is easy to experiment with since cats are common (I've already gotten set up with several cat toys impregnated with catnip/valerian/honeysuckle so I can test each cat I run into with a battery of stimulants).
So after jailbreaking all the relevant literature, maybe run an online survey of catowners, then combine everything to get the population frequency of catnip response, and then begin experimenting with available cats to get an idea of whether responses are correlated and how frequently cats respond to each stimulant. Then catowners will know the risk of catnip immunity and each stimulant they should try next. See http://www.gwern.net/catnip
A minor contribution, perhaps, but there are a lot of catowners out there and it would be nice to bring some clarity to this area.
An anecdote that probably tells you nothing you don't already know. My father has a chess set whose pieces are made of olive-wood and rosewood, and at least one cat my parents have owned has responded to the box (which I think is olive-wood, but I'm not certain) in the same sort of way as many cats respond to catnip. Googling suggests that other people have found that olive wood provokes a reaction from their cats. So you might consider adding olive wood to your battery of cat-tests.
It's worth testing if I can get a decently odorous chunk of olive wood. Not sure where, though, as it seems like the sort of thing usually sold in a manufactured form and I'd rather not pay for expensive end-consumer cutting boards or chess sets. There's also a lot of anecdotes that it works with plain old olives like, presumably, the ones you get in a can. Maybe that would work?
Maybe. I don't have a cat myself (my wife is allergic) so I've no way of testing myself, and I have no more information than what I've already said. Sorry not to be more help.
EVOO should be a much better bet than olives in a can. Good EVOO smells different than "regular" olive oil, and olives in a can are basically dead and don't smell of anything yummy.
There is also olio nuovo (or olio novello, depends on from which part of Italy) which is fresh unfiltered olive oil available only seasonally (around right now, for Italian olives) which is in entirely different class by taste and smell.
I thought of that, but if I was only going to get one thing, the google hits suggest that it would be much more reliable to go with olive wood, then olives themselves; most the of the hits concern constipation and things like that (only a few single out olive oil), which is inconsistent with what I would expect from a catnip substitute (firsthand, the effects of catnip, valerian, honeysuckle, and the silvervine I just got today, are all fairly noticeable) and suggests that whatever the active ingredient is (may not be the same as catnip, as some of the olive anecdotes claim catnip immunity in olive responders), it is lost or reduced in oil compared to the still relatively physically intact woods or olives.
That said, why not - if the EVOO does nothing, I can always eat it myself, and how expensive could it possibly be? Is there any specific brand or product you would recommend as particularly reliable?
I wonder if the olive wood reports are coming from the places (like Spain or Italy) where it's easy to get fresh olive wood... In the States kitchen supply stores (including Bed Bath & Beyond) sell olive-wood spoons ($5 or so), bowls and such, but I don't know how much processing (e.g. thermal) did that wood go through.
I buy olio nuovo here and can attest that it's very different from the supermarket olive oil.
The anecdotes don't seem to specify that it must be fresh, no. Consider gjm's anecdote right here: I doubt a chess board made of olive wood is all that fresh when it's bought by the end-consumer, and if the freshness made a big difference and the chessboard was just months old, then the effect should've noticeably gone away. (That wood lasts a long time makes sense - the oils and other chemicals must be able to take a long time to leach out in at least some cases, because otherwise, there would be little point to things like cedar-lined closets.)
Mm. I was kind of hoping for an Amazon link, since I need to do an order on there soon anyway for Christmas gifts.
That place (olio2go) has an Amazon storefront, I think they have some but not all of their olive oils there. You want the 2015 harvest, of course.
Just to avoid misunderstandings: what the cat freaked out over was actually the box that held the pieces. I do not know for certain that the box is actually made of olive wood. I do not know for certain whether it's the wood of the box or the residual smell of one or other set of pieces.
I do agree, though, that it seems fairly clear that great freshness isn't needed. The set wasn't terribly new when the cat that freaked out over it joined the household.
3. Here.
Huh. I never knew there were so many other plants that had similar effects on cats.
Anyway, best of luck getting Todd's work… and getting cats high.
Thanks. Funny story - morphine addict with other issues for which the treatment was... morphine. Clever solution.
Thanks. As far as the Todd dissertation goes, I know someone who can request it for me and I've asked them, so hopefully! (I really want it since it seems to be the most comprehensive set of experiments ever done on catnip and any analysis of mine would be crippled without it.)
I got the following e-mail from the Harvard Library today:
I am not sure what is going on here: Since it is a Harvard thesis, they presumably hold the copyright themselves. I know they will make my own thesis available for free after a one-year embargo. This seems more like an excuse to not have to scan it manually
Ouch. That is weird. Perhaps there's something historical going on where they used to let Harvard students keep their own copyright but a few decades ago changed it to demand copyright, which is why they can't scan the entirety of an old thesis like Todd's. Hm. You could try replying and asking why they can't scan a Harvard thesis given your personal experience.
If that doesn't work and the other guy can't help, I wonder what I could do. Leaving that thesis out is a really big gap in the literature... Going to Harvard physically with a scanner is not an option since I don't know if they would even lend it out of the stacks to me, much less when I'll ever be in Boston again. In an instance of rather bad timing on my part, it turns out Todd died just last year so I can't simply email him and ask him to release it under CC-BY-SA or something and then the Harvard people could be told they have copyright clearance; his wife Joyce is still around, though, so I could try asking her to license the thesis.
Perhaps you could ask the scanners what they would accept as adequate proof of copyright safety, such as some sort of document signed by Joyce? (No point in bothering her if it wouldn't get them to unlock the thesis, after all.)
In my experience, the actual reason is probably not copyright, as was suggested. The ILL software likely has a few canned responses, and "this is too big, we don't want to scan it" likely rounds to the reason received. I've also had a librarian refuse to scan a relatively short document for "copyright" reasons, despite the document being in the public domain, though not obviously so.
I hope that's the explanation and a little pushback will motivate them into scanning it.
It's worth asking if they'll scan it again, but I'm fairly confident they would continue to refuse to scan it even if there were no copyright issues. My recommendation might be asking someone else to scan the entire dissertation on their own. The catalog record indicates the dissertation has 61 pages, which is totally doable.
On a side note, I wish there were a more formal way to exchange favors with regard to locating documents like this. Many documents are basically inaccessible because they are in libraries which won't provide scans. A website where you exchange credits of some sort would be really nice.
Incidentally, HathiTrust has it, but it's not available for download. In addition to Harvard, Cornell has a copy as well. Might be worth asking someone at Cornell if Harvard is a dead end.
I've requested the Todd dissertation from the scan and deliver link. The processing time is around 4 days.
Thanks. I hope yours and the other guy's request don't interfere or wind up wasting someone's time; hopefully the Harvard system is smart enough that whoever's request gets filled first for a scan will result in the second person immediately getting a copy, in which case no harm done.
Yes, sorry about duplicating your request. I sent my request in response to Vincent`s earlier post, I didn't realize you already had someone on it.
They managed to get a physical copy and scan it, so no harm done.