Thursday, June 30, 2005
No More Caffeine For Me
I went on a search today after Eliot Miranda told a hilarious story about the goverment giving various drugs to spiders and observing the results. I found several pictures of the webs and it was shocked. The LSD web is the most articulate while the caffeine web is a mess. The study sounded funny, but I must admit that the results are revealing. I know I don't want to ingest anymore caffeine now. And it gives me excuse for the coding competition: I was drinking too much coffee. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the ticket.
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2 comments:
The thing that prompted me to recollect drug studies on spiders, something I first saw in a time-life book over twenty years ago, was reading John Markoff's excellent book "What The Doormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer" which describes how in the late 50's/early 60's LSD was tested on engineers like Doug Englebart to see if it increased their creativity; this at the height of the cold war, several years before LSD became the drug of choice b pranksters. Markoff's book is the best history of the arc that included Augment, PARC and Smalltalk, starting early enough, and ending with the home-brew-computer-club, not wasting time on Apple and Microsoft.
I ordered that book the next day after you talked about it. It seemed like a fun read. They talked about the 60's hippie culture and hackers in the PBS special, "Triumph of the Nerds" as well. The book arrived today and I can't wait to start reading it! Thanks for the recommendation and the talk. I just thought the spiders study was too funny. The whole giving engineers LSD to increase creativity is something that proves that reality is stranger than fiction.
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