Caffeine is a vaso-constrictor, which is very good for relieving headaches (in the right dose of course). Your body "mediates" this heavy stimulant by trying to keep the blood vessels at more of a normal size while on caffeine--like it has a tolerance. When the caffeine is not present the blood vessels dilate to the point where you get a splitting headache...then it is relieved by caffeine which constricts them. Caffeine is obviously a poison and isn't *great* for you but it's definitely not as pressing as cigarettes or heavy alcohol use.

Caffeine has a therapeutic index of about 100, which means that the LD50 (lethal dose for 50% of the population) is 100x what you would normally drink for the effects. 70-90 cups of coffee and you're probably dead. It is not a hard and fast rule, Rousseau drank ~72 cups of coffee every day after he'd built up a tolerance! :p Caffeine doesn't directly improve mental processing function--look to something like ephedra, adderall, etc. (amphetamine) for something that does. Caffeine just makes you more awake so your recall is faster, ideas seem to come quicker, etc. I, too, feel like I'm about to go back to bed unless I have a latte or some strong tea in the morning.

Chemical/brain interaction is fascinating...

lol..joe, you crack me up! :)

i don't even trust myself if i don't drink.

Very good post. Awhile ago, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ran a cover story about caffeine (was probably about 9 or 10 months ago). Stuff like this is very interesting to me as well... but then again I have an ecclectic group of interests: European sports cars, sabermetric baseball, postmodern literature, wines and microbrew beers...

Thanks for the post, though. Very informative.

sabermetric baseball is really cool. T Epstein hired two guys for the Red sox org I think.

yee haw *****es 2nd bottle of cab sav watching the pens whoop on the the leafs hell ya!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
my car is a hour away im geeked

It IS very cool, in that Bill James came up with it in the late 1970s and people in power are just starting to see things his way.

Simply stated, sabermetrics is a statistical approach to re-evaluating baseball talent. James's writing states, in a gross over-simplification, that RBIs, batting average, and errors are meaningless benchmarks; what we should be looking at are stats like OBP, SLG, OPS, total bases, and "range factor". For decades, various visionaries in baseball (John Henry, JP Ricchardi, Larry Lucchino) have attempted to implement sabermetric styles to assembling baseball teams. You see, there was a "traditional" way that scouts evaluated talent, and it had more to do with having a "baseball body" than having a good walk-to-K ratio.

When Billy Beane showed it is possible by, using sabermetrics, to have a small-market team that is competitive with the New York Yankees, other teams got wise. Another watershed was John Henry's purchase of the Boston Red Sox. Henry quickly hired Lucchino, James, and Theo Epstein (a Billy Beane disciple). When the Red Sox picked up players like Kevin Millar, David Ortiz, and Bill Mueller, a lot of Sox fans said "who the hell are these guys," but hindsight is 20-20.

There are, of course, inherent flaws in sabermetrics. Bill James, for example, argues that small ball is completely self-defeating; I would argue that there are situations in which it is appropriate to steal, bunt, or hit-and-run. James also claims there is no such thing as "clutch hitting"; Derek Jeter and David Ortiz are compelling arguments to the contrary.

I realize this started as a discussion on alcohol; sorry for the tangent SmileWavy If it helps, I am currently drinking the Stump Jump mixed red by D'Arenburg (south Australia).