Coffee drags down the web
I really was working when I came across this essay on a NASA study about the effects of drugs on spiders. The spider dosed with caffeine was by far the most disoriented and proved incapable of creating even a single organized cell. Its web showed no sign of the "hub and spokes" pattern fundamental to conventional web design.Unfortunately I discovered this with a cup of coffee by my side while trying to figure out how to get particular piece of web control code to work in ASP.NET! Perhaps this means one could blame one's inchoate code on the caffeine? In fact, perhaps we can blame all confusing and badly designed web sites out there on the effects of excessive coffee-drinking by the designer!
The spider on marijuana drifted off before finishing the job. The spider on benzedrine, an upper, worked energetically but without much planning. The spider dosed with chloral hydrate, a sedative, soon fell asleep.Categorised as: nature, technology
Technorati Tags: coffee, caffeine, cognition, spiders, drug use, LSD, marijuana, mescaline, web formation, science
posted by Lisa at 3:44 pm
9 Comments:
I was kinda surprised at the lack of effect of mescaline and lsd until i realised they don't have (i'm pretty sure) serotonin receptors. Would like to see something similar done with an organism that does, however! I like the fact that the spider treated with (to?) marijuana gave up on the whole idea... remarkable how something seemingly so unrelated to humans shows parallels like that.
This is off-topic Lisa, sorry, but I just HAVE to ask: Are you thrilled to have Mr. Rumsfeld in town?
Anthony, this topic is perhaps more relevant to an earlier post.
A good friend of mine once described the "ignore" approach which the media choose to use when they don't want to add any publicity negative or positive to something that doesn't deserve it. This is the approach I took on this topic.
It is a bit of a sore point for all Adelaideans at the moments with barbed wire everywhere and 500 police deployed to manage it. See AdelaideBlogs.com to see how other Adelaidean bloggers feel about the Rumsfeld visit and his playing squash in North Adelaide. A ton of them show pictures and provide commentary (eg. Stephen Lawrence's blog)
Or Drink Decaf and Die
http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/11/17/012256.shtml?tid=99&tid=14
Back on the spiders, the other webs may be arty and idealistic and stuff but I reckon the caffiene web get's the job done - not always the most elegant solution but if you need to meet a deadline...
Not sure if it's just due to the quality of the images (certainly not your fault, lisa, I think more to do with their age!), but I can't see that the finer web strands are there in the caffeine web, just drag line, and so I'm not sure it would get the job done. Nice pun, by the way.
oh jeezuz - I'm a caffine nut!
so interesting!
I wonder do spiders take their coffee black?
been trying to cut down on caffiene without much luck.. but this has been inspiring!
great post.
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