eu-jin’s posterous

Many years ago when I was taking part in competitive sports, I learnt about the beneficial effects of caffeine on exercise performance. Back then, the research seemed to indicate that you had to wean yourself off caffeine on a daily basis, so that your coffee just before an important race gives you the maximum effect of caffeine. It appears that weaning yourself off caffeine may actually detract from the beneficial effects of caffeine during the important race because caffeine makes both your heart rate and blood pressure spike, as well as increases the urge to pee, but only if you're not habituated to caffeine on a daily basis. The beneficial effects of caffeine are still there even if you're a habitual consumer of caffeine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/health/nutrition/26best.html?ref=fashion&pagewanted=all

I knew there was a reason why I disliked drinking alcohol, other than the unpleasant taste and the itching that I get after a small amount. Apparently I was saving myself from throat cancer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/health/research/21alcohol.html

Dan Boneh was my advisor in grad school. He is, by a rather large margin, the smartest person that I personally know, and he combines that intelligence with great practical knowledge, as well as having good taste in problems to work on. When I was in grad school, we (students in his group) used to joke that almost none of us even applied to faculty jobs because we could not even approach the standard set by him. Here's a blog post written by Dan's former grad school advisor at Princeton.

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/factoring-could-be-easy/

A hilarious story of the writer's 36 hour traffic jam in the Bolivian highlands. Having been to South America, including Bolivia, multiple times, the hilarious details narrated in the story have the ring of authenticity; I can see everything narrated happening to the author. Experiences like these are part of the fun of traveling in South America.

http://www.smh.com.au/travel/a-gringos-trip-to-hell-20090311-8upe.html?page=-1

I thought I was familiar with most forms of mosquito killing techniques, but this new technique that uses lasers to zap mosquitoes takes the cake.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html

This clip is one of the best sport climbing videos I've seen. Great cinematography, music, and climbing. The climber has really delicate and precise feet, just a joy to watch.

An interesting interview with a retail consultant about how consumers shop differently today during the crisis. Oddly enough except to my friends, the way I've always shopped appear to be inline with current trends.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1881098,00.html

I enjoyed reading this interview with Niall Ferguson, a Harvard economic historian, on the current crisis. The bad times are here and it's only just beginning, and the US is the safest place in the world right now despite the crisis originating here.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090223.wferguson0223/BNStory/crashandrecovery/home?pageRequested=all&print=true

I'm not sure this is actually a fail, it seems more like an efficiency win.

New research indicates that perfumes for men apparently work by boosting their self-confidence and as a result improve their bearing and movement.

In addition, research also indicates that women choose perfumes that match their own "major histocompatibility complex (MHC). [The MHC] region of the genome encodes part of the immune system. It turns out that one of the most important aspects of mate choice in mammals, humans included, is to make sure that your mate's MHC is different from your own ... people are able to sniff out suitable MHC genomes in prospective partners."

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12811377