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Optimizing Your Caffeine Intake With an App
MrSeb writes "Two doctors at Penn State University have developed Caffeine Zone, a free iOS app that tells you the perfect time to take a coffee break to maintain an optimal amount of caffeine in your blood — and, perhaps more importantly, it also tells you when to stop drinking tea and coffee, so that caffeine doesn't interrupt your sleep. By reading through lots of peer-reviewed studies, doctors Frank E. Ritter and Kuo-Chuan Yeh found that a caffeine level of between 200 and 400mg in your bloodstream provides optimal mental alertness, and that you should be below 100mg when you try to sleep. Caffeine Zone plots your caffeination level after you consume caffeine, and warns you if that big afternoon coffee will keep you up at night. It also lets you change the 'optimal' and 'sleep' values if you're particularly resistant or weak to caffeine."
Than I can use an Arduino with a bluetooth shield and make it control my IV Drip Mr. Coffee machine?
Hold on, I am not thinking clearly, my iBarista seems to have crashed.
Silence is a state of mime.
that's why the heavy caffeine drinkers make sweden and switzerland near the bottom of the list of all country's life expectancies.......oh wait.
better take up the hobby, and *LIVE* boy.....
Realize I'm getting edgy and having trouble concentrating --- Stop drinking coffee.
I've had caffeine problems in the past and am now rolling back to Green Tea. Just enough of a prod. The problem with Coffee is it's a big hit and the subsequent sips provide a declining return on alertness, but an increase in fidgeting, anxiety, etc. A more modest dose from tea and I'm less likely to become accustomed to high levels of caffeine which only serve to keep me at a body-acclimated "normal".
I appreciate what they're trying to do, but really, each person has their own caffeine profile and has to find where it works and where it doesn't.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Does it come with testing hardware so that it can determine precisely how strong your coffee is, and thus more accurately calculate your intake? Does it come with measuring tools to know how much you're pouring into your mug? How about accountability for the additional influence of sugar? What about people who have become desensitized to caffeine? There are too many factors they haven't considered, not least of which being how they're going to convince me to jam a needle in my liver so they can determine how well it's working.
Which is worse: caffeine, or falling asleep at my desk every day until I get fired, run out of unemployment, and starve to death?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
No, it's because decaf inherently tastes bad.
Basically, when making coffee, the idea is to extract some chemicals from the coffee beans using hot water. Those chemicals are volatile organic compounds, for the most part. If you leave a coffee bean exposed to the air for a while (or a ground coffee bean exposed to the air for an hour), most of those chemicals will evaporate. The resulting coffee would taste terrible - much of what makes it taste like coffee would have evaporated.
Something similar happens with decaf. You have to try to extract the caffeine, without extracting the other compounds that make it taste like coffee. That's really difficult, because any process you might use to extract caffeine will extract other chemicals as well. Much of what makes it taste like coffee would be lost - you can take some decent coffee, decaffeinate it, and it'll end up tasting bad.
You can work around that by using much higher quality coffee beans - you take coffee that would taste really good, and it'd end up tasting OK. The problem with that is economics.
It turns out that people aren't willing to pay any extra for decaf compared to regular coffee. Since the decaffeination process itself adds cost, the only way to sell decaf for the same price as regular coffee is to use lower quality (cheaper) coffee beans. So now you're taking bad coffee, and making it worse. Aside from which, if you're producing coffee beans, why would you take the best you have and ruin it, when you could sell it as-is for a much higher price?
It is possible to have decaf coffee that doesn't taste like crap. It's just difficult.
making-love-in-a-canoe coffee.
Hey, I thought that comment ("fucking close to water") applied to our beer, not our coffee. :P
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
...that can keep me at the Ballmer peak? Now THAT would be useful.