Bike Lock and Coffee

Thank goodness that I now use coffee strategically instead of drinking a cup a day (here and here). During busy times (like now) coffee becomes a valuable ally in my war on... time.

That being said I have been able to pick a few locks when I catch a free moment. I can pick an old bike lock in under a minute. It's was no problem - probably because it was so old and has a lot of give. It is definitely the easiest one yet.

The brand new pad lock I was telling you about, is terribly frustrating. I got it that first time very quickly but have not gotten it again since! My front door still takes time but I can consistently get it.

What I need now are more old locks that I can practice on.

Does anybody have any ideas about that? I don't want to go buy 10 brand new ones because a) they're harder and b) buying 10 locks for no purpose except to pick them seems more than little wasteful.

PS You really should be keeping up to date with the_dark_cat's Welcome to Wayne Manor.

Drink Up, Batman

I made a mistake yesterday.

I drank an espresso and an americano. They were decaf so it was ok, right?
Wrong!

Getting off of caffeine wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I had a couple of restless nights and a few days with minor headaches but really it wasn't so bad. Since quitting I had drank a few decafe coffees here and there when others went for coffee and I wanted a break.

If I had just checked Wikipedia first I would have known that the international standard of decaffeination is only 97%. That means that my espresso and americano gave me about 45mg worth of caffeine (calculated from this website) which is equivalent to about a can of diet coke.

This is terrible! I was up until early this morning (I read some of a book called Varieties of Religious Experience by William James which I would recommend highly as a must read to anyone who just loves lecture series from over a hundred years ago on the psychology related to religious experiences. Oh and I also reread Justice) and had to sleep in this morning all because of the equivalent of a pop?

So what do I do? Drink no coffee so that when I do finally drink it (as is bound to happen since its the most consumed drug in the world) I'm messed or need it every single day so that if I don't get a cup I have withdrawl?

It depends on the other side-effects of coffee. Are there long term problems? Long term benefits? Is there a way to be immune to caffeine? That last idea would be best but try as I might, I could not find a believable method of becoming immune (which is different than normalizing and being able to sleep again or drink more without getting jittery which is called caffeine intoxication).

It seems one major side-effect is that caffeine makes it harder for your body to retain calcium which means weak bones. But it sounds like this is not really serious if you drink milk. Despite your kidneys doing all the processing of caffeine, coffee doesn't seem to pose any health concerns for your kidneys.

Children and pregnant women might not want to drink tonnes of coffee since caffeine is a drug that primarily effects the nervous system and children's nervous systems are still developing. That being said there are no documented longer term effects due to drinking coffee while pregnant.

So what about benefits? Caffeine seems to have poorly understood but positive effects on athletes
and metabolisms. I suppose that this would appeal to a crimefighter without superpowers.

To the obvious benefit: caffeine is a stimulant. People use it to increase energy, decrease fatigue and make them more focused. Fine. But there is something else here. Studies seem to say that caffeine boosts short term memory retention.
That's amazing. Even better, not only does it improve short term memory, caffeine may also reduce memory decline in the elderly (especially women) and prevent memory loss.

Conclusions: There's enough benefits to caffeine not to stop. From this little experimental diet of mine, it seems that I can stop anytime I'd like given three or four days. But the moral of all this seems to be "All things in moderation." Governments seem to take a pretty conservative stance of saying that you shouldn't ingest over 400mg a day if you are a healthy adult (that's a venti at you local Starbucks). So here is my revised plan. I'll finish the month-of-no-caffeine but after that I won't be so strict. However, I won't drink coffee daily, making sure it isn't a habit. In this way, I'll cash in on the benefits by being able to chose when I wish to drink it instead of "needing my coffee to get through the day" while avoiding worrying about caffeine intoxication in everyday situations.

All One Big Batdream

My sleep the last couple of days has been fitful and littered with dreams. Now, I know that vivid dreams and restless nights are common if you've recently quit smoking cigarettes or pot but both of those have sedative properties. Caffeine is an upper and so if this isn't just a coincidence then I'm surprised. Perhaps vivid dreaming is associated with any change in chemicals that effects the way you think.

Every Day Poisons

I've mentioned that it's turning into a pretty busy time of the year which makes Bat-training that much more difficult. So in order to make the best use of my time, I tried to think of something I could try that wouldn't require practice (unlike boomerangs or ambidexterity) or really any time investment at all.

So I decided to get rid of any addictions in my life. It's pretty canonical that as Bruce Wayne, the Batman fakes drinking at parties so that he can keep up his playboy persona while being in peek physical condition.

What other drugs would Batman refuse? It depends a lot on who's writing the Batman character. Does he do drugs just to see what it's like to be the Joker? Maybe? Or does he take performance enhancing drugs? No? Then no drugs at all maybe? Not even coffee?

So here are my thoughts. Batman would never let allow himself to be addicted. The entire point of Bruce Wayne dressing up as a Bat and beating-up criminals is to feel like he has some measure of control over a world that he really feels he has no control over at all.

So this leads me to think that he would use whatever drugs necessary to make himself more effective but would never allow himself to become addicted to any of them. If he ever felt that any drug had gained power over him in any way, he would use some of that iron determination to break the addiction.

So here's what I've begun doing. I've thought about all the drugs that I take (mostly caffeine but also small amounts of nicotine and alcohol) and I stopped taking them. I stopped on the 1st of December and I will try to go for a whole month. Then at the end of that month I will binge on all the drugs that I had quit on and try to operate normally while intoxicated with these everyday drugs.

This personal experiment marks the start of gaining the toxicology knowledge that Batman must have.