Posts Tagged ‘COFFEE’

Fun Friday – COFFEE Edition!

0 Commentsby   |  08.02.13  |  Fun

“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”  Alfréd Rényi

Coffee, the greatest addiction ever, has been making the news recently.  Join me for a run-down of this greatest of the warm liquids:

1) How Coffee Affects Your Brain – PhD Comics

PhD Comics - How Coffee Affects Your Brain

PhD Comics – How Coffee Affects Your Brain

Short answer: very nicely, thanks.

 

2) This is your brain on coffee – NYT. From the story:

In one large-scale epidemiological study from last year, researchers primarily at the National Cancer Institute parsed health information from more than 400,000 volunteers, ages 50 to 71, who were free of major diseases at the study’s start in 1995. By 2008, more than 50,000 of the participants had died. But men who reported drinking two or three cups of coffee a day were 10 percent less likely to have died than those who didn’t drink coffee, while women drinking the same amount had 13 percent less risk of dying during the study. It’s not clear exactly what coffee had to do with their longevity, but the correlation is striking.

Apparently coffee makes life worth living.

 

3) Correlation, causation, and a suicidal link with coffee – Improbable Research.  The highly improbable take on the above story:

This is one of the few reports to explicitly state that coffee seems to cause (“Drinking several cups of coffee daily appears to reduce”) a life-or-death effect in people who drink it. In so doing, this report may be a watershed (and/or coffeeshed) in the history of biomedical science, and in the field of biological psychiatry….
BONUS: The report also says, a few paragraphs later, “In spite of the findings, the authors do not recommend that depressed adults increase caffeine consumption…”

The obligatory insight from XKCD belongs here.

 

4)  We have the benefits from coffee, so what about the cost?  Well, DataGenetics has you covered.  Here you can calculate the cost of coffee (or any regular purchase) with surprising sophistication.  Of course, if you deduct the costs of premature suicide and lethargy then coffee always works out to be a surprising bargain.

Stay caffeinated, my friends.

-Dr. D