Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Coffee Addicts? Not really.

I just saw a number of articles that hit the presses today about caffeine addiction and withdrawal. So, I'm here to state that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CAFFEINE ADDICTION. Sure your body can indeed have after-effects of having caffeine present, but after 8-10 hours 75% percent of the caffeine you took in is gone from your system. Any longing for a caffeine fix is gone within a day or two of not taking caffeine. It just isn't correct to call this sort of experience an addiction.

I would suggest that what most people call a caffeine addiction is actually either a sugar-need, or dehydration...or both in combination. I.e...if you can't want up until you have your can of Mountain Dew, which has 55mg of caffeine...are probably more needing of sugar and hydration than they are in need of the caffeine.

Anyway...here are a couple decent articles concerning the myths and facts about caffeine, and another about the caffeine content of common drinks.



Energy Fiend: Caffeine Content of Drinks


WebMD: Caffeine Myths and Facts


Sorting Out Coffee's Contradictions

Published: August 5, 2008
New York Times





Caffeine Myths














Health Benefits






Saturday, April 04, 2009

No more social websites

I finally saw the light with social websites and networks, including micro-blogging, which isn't really doing a web-article or web-log at all, but just a string of status updates and nonsensical gibberish.

As more and more people get in an electronic social circle, more and more the quality of the communication you have goes down. Slowly, but surely, it became easier for people to just check my 'status', as opposed to calling or actually being interested in real life. People who used to call me and ask about life now don't call at all, but rather check Facebook and leave a little comment there.

So, my conclusion with MySpace and Facebook are that they cheapen communication, and ultimately cheapen relationships. Twitter is essentially running 'texting' logs for the web, and 'texting' was never considered anything more than cheap communication. So, why would Tweeting be anything more than that?

The 'drama' part of this is how I arrived at that conclusion. I wrote a status 'complaint' about people writing nonsense statuses or tweets, inside comments, or things that should have been messaged to just one or two people but instead were sent to everyone's feed. A friend of mine wrote me messages saying that I shouldn't take social websites so seriously, and that they exist purely for fun. Of course he is one of the people who writes the posts I have a problem with. So, I did a little experiment. I started posting a series of nonsense postings or ones that didn't have anything to do with me or him. He promptly removed me from his the people who he follows. Apparently still not getting that I was only doing what he was doing to me.

I hadn't looked into some of the harm noticed by other people and professionals really until now. I'll list a few articles that I happened to find recently:


Social Networking Sites and Social Theory

Bye Bye Facebook

Thursday, April 02, 2009