Teenagers Are So Boring
So what do teens do to be different from their parents these days? Write code? From the New York Times:
Every few years, parents find new reasons to worry about their teenagers. And while there is no question that some kids continue to experiment with sex and substance abuse, the latest data point to something perhaps more surprising: the current generation is, well, a bit boring when it comes to bad behavior.
By several noteworthy measures, today’s teenagers are growing increasingly conservative. While marijuana use has recently had an uptick, teenagers are smoking far less pot than their parents did at the same age. In 1980, about 60 percent of high-school seniors had tried marijuana and 9 percent smoked it daily. Among seniors today, according to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey, which has tracked teenage risk behaviors since 1975, 45.5 percent have tried the drug and 6.6 percent are…
Is It More Dangerous To Drive Drunk Or Stoned?
Brian Palmer discovers that it’s an open and shut case, for Slate:
A new study suggests that legalizing medical marijuana reduces traffic fatalities. The authors noted that legalizing marijuana reduces alcohol consumption, and people are more wary of driving high than drunk. Which drug is actually more dangerous on the road?
Alcohol, and it’s not even close. It’s hard to directly compare alcohol and marijuana, because driving impairment depends on dosage and the two drugs tend to affect different skills. (Pot makes drivers worse at mindless tasks like staying in a lane, while alcohol undermines behaviors that require more attention like yielding to pedestrians or taking note of stop signs.) Nevertheless, Yale psychiatrist Richard Sewell reviewed the academic literature on driving while intoxicated in a 2009 article, and found that alcohol is significantly more dangerous. Real-world data from auto accidents indicate that a drunk driver is approximately 10 times more likely to cause a…
U.S. Government Poisoned Booze to Enforce Prohibition
During Prohibition, crime syndicates were re-distilling industrial alcohol to supply their speakeasies. In an effort to “poison the well,” the federal government responded by requiring manufacturers to add new, deadly compounds to the industrial alcohol mix, leading to the deaths of thousands nationwide. In an article at Slate.com, Deborah Blum writes:
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was — the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom — the man died. So did another holiday party-goer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it.…
A Machine To Let You Taste Words
A nonsensical waste of time? Goofy conceptual art? Or a magical cross-sensory experiment? A device that converts any word that you type into a cocktail, via Morskoiboy:
My piece has buttons working as pumps and has pipes instead of wires. It also has a display like any other electronic panel board, but as opposed to using liquid crystals as in electronic displays, my machine’s display functions via multicoloured syrups. My machine converts words into cocktails. And, yes, it does work. Now I can literally taste the flavor of my words.
Pressing the buttons on the keyboard injects the corresponding ingredients into the display, which tints different segments of the display and thus produces letters. You can try to imagine that each letter can have a taste (L-Lime, A-Apple), a color (R-Red, G-Green), or a name (K-Kahlua, J-Jagermeister).
1000-Year-Old Aztec Brew Is Hottest Beverage In Mexico
As quoted by Reuters, Mexico City Museum Director, Salvador Zarco tells us that “Among the Aztecs the drink was reserved for the nobles and priests for ceremonial use and for pregnant women.” I have visions of hipster pregnant chicks in Williamsburg flocking to their local pulqueria…
How To Tell When You’re Drunk
Melinda Beck asks “How much alcohol does it take to get intoxicated?” for the Wall Street Journal:
Many people figure a few beers at a ballgame or a couple of glasses of wine with dinner won’t put them over the legal limit for driving. But how alcohol affects people is highly individual, with a number of factors in the mix.
Quick shots of liquor hit the bloodstream faster than slow sips of wine. Drinking on an empty stomach impairs reflexes more than consuming alcohol with food…
Legal Moonshine On Sale In South
If you’re hankering for some moonshine, head on down to South Carolina, where it’s finally legal, reports Harriet McLeod for Reuters:
Two entrepreneurs are taking advantage of new micro-distillery laws in South Carolina to make and sell traditional moonshine whiskey legally for the first time in the southern state.
The Dark Corner Distillery will open next month in Greenville, where engineer Joe Fenten, 27, and longtime home beer brewer Richard Wenger will produce and sell small batches of 100-proof moonshine from a custom-made copper still.
The distillery, housed in a 1925 building, will also include a tasting bar and a museum dedicated to the history of the Dark Corner, the local mountains that were once full of moonshiners, feud and mayhem, Fenten told Reuters.
The area was settled, along with the nearby Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Scots, Irish and Welsh who migrated down through the Appalachian…
Old Drinkers Protected Against Dementia
But you have to reach 75, life is not fair. Richard Alleyne writes in the Telegraph:
Scientists found pensioners aged 75 or over who like a daily pint or glass of wine are helping to stave off senility.
Those who drink alcohol are 30 per cent less likely to develop dementia and 40 per cent less likely to suffer Alzheimer’s than those who were teetotal, according to the research.
A study of more than 3,200 German people aged 75 or over attending GPs, who were free of dementia, were studied and checked 18 months and three years later.
Associations between alcohol consumption, type of alcohol – wine, beer, mixed alcohol beverages – and incident dementia were examined.
“People should be aware that we are talking about mild/moderate consumption of alcohol,” said Professor Siegfried Weyerer from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.
Over 570 Australians Arrested In Police Crackdown On “Booze-Fueled Violence and Anti-Social Behavior”
Marissa Calligeros writes for Brisbane Times:
More than 570 people, including seven juveniles, were arrested in Queensland as part of a two-day police blitz targeting booze-fuelled violence and anti-social behaviour.
Deputy Commissioner Ross Barnett said more than 1000 uniformed and plain-clothed police officers flooded potential trouble spots across the state, including bars, from 6pm on Friday.
Over the two nights, 574 people were charged, including seven juveniles who were apprehended over a combined total of 28 charges.
‘‘We’re disappointed that this level of police enforcement is necessary to ensure community standards of behaviour are being met,’’ Mr Barnett said.
Officers were forced to move 322 people to safety during a sweep of nightclub precincts, and issued 154 move-on directions.
‘‘We will continue to enforce the law to ensure that all members of the community can enjoy a night out in public places without their evening being ruined by a selfish few who have no regard for…
If It’s Not Scottish It’s Crap: Scotland Toasts New Whisky-Powered Bioenergy Plant
Nuff said. More power to alternative energy efforts. Kirsty Scott reports in the Guardian:
It is the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, and now whisky is to be used to create electricity for homes in a new bioenergy venture involving some of Scotland’s best-known distilleries.
Contracts have recently been awarded for the construction of a biomass combined heat and power plant at Rothes in Speyside that by 2013 will use the by-products of the whisky-making process for energy production.
Royal Virility Performance: The First Beer Brewed With Viagra
Royal Virility Performance by BrewDog. (BrewDog.com)
Because there isn’t enough alcohol and testosterone-influenced shennanigans at happy hour, BrewDog sells a beer laced with Viagra. Via FOX News:
Forget the little blue pill. A British company has brewed the first beer laced with Viagra.
The new brew is called Royal Virility Performance, and has been specially created to mark the upcoming Royal Wedding.
Downing just three bottles is equivalent to taking one pill of Viagra, which enhances men’s sexual performance.
The 7.5 percent alcohol India Pale Ale also contains extra aphrodisiacs including horny goat weed and even chocolate.
The makers of the beer, BrewDog, have even sent several bottles to Prince William for his wedding night.
Just 40 bottles of the beer will be produced initially, and will go on sale the day of the Royal Wedding, April 29, at BrewDog.com. All the proceeds go to the charity Centrepoint, which Prince William supports. But buyers will be limited to one…
Can Alcohol Help the Brain Remember? Science Now Says So!
Via ScienceDaily:
The common view that drinking is bad for learning and memory isn’t wrong, says neurobiologist Hitoshi Morikawa, but it highlights only one side of what ethanol consumption does to the brain.
“Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we’re talking about conscious memory,” says Morikawa, whose results were published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. “Alcohol diminishes our ability to hold on to pieces of information like your colleague’s name, or the definition of a word, or where you parked your car this morning. But our subconscious is learning and remembering too, and alcohol may actually increase our capacity to learn, or ‘conditionability,’ at that level.”
Morikawa’s study, which found that repeated ethanol exposure enhances synaptic plasticity in a key area in the brain, is further evidence toward an emerging consensus in the neuroscience community that drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a learning and memory disorder.
When we drink…
Police Warn Of Growing Teen ‘Vodka Tampon’ Use
Time to check in on the latest youth trends: teens (both girls and boys) are increasingly using liquor-soaked tampons as a novel and stealthy means of getting drunk. A number of Facebook pages have popped in honor of the practice, called “slimming”. Ah, kids with their crazy fads! The Local enlightens on the scourge every parent should be most worried about:
Police in southern Germany warned this week of a dangerous new form of alcohol abuse among teens – using tampons soaked in vodka to get drunk quickly and hide the smell. The practice poses grave health risks, they said.
In early March a 14-year-old girl collapsed during a street festival in Konstanz, apparently highly intoxicated from using a vodka tampon, the paper reported. Youth researchers have since found out that this form of alcohol abuse is trendy in the region.
The trend arose among teens in the United States, where it is known as…
Too Much Alcohol May Cause Cancer
Photo: André Karwath aka Aka (CC)
Just when you thought that drinking a few glasses of red wine every day was going to prolong your life comes this report in the British Medical Journal that it raises the risk of cancer. From AFP:
About one in 10 cancers in men and one in 33 in women in western European countries are caused by current and past alcohol consumption, according to a study released on Friday.
For some types of cancer, the rates are significantly higher, it said.
In 2008, for men, 44, 25 and 33 percent of upper digestive track, liver and colon cancers respectively were caused by alcohol in six of the countries examined, the study found.
The countries were Britain, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany and Denmark.
The study also showed that half of these cancer cases occurred in men who drank more than a recommended daily limit of 24 grammes of alcohol, roughly two…
Imagine Free Beer At Your Office, But You Are Recorded For How Much You Drink…
Photo: Strom Carlson (CC)
Ryan Flinn reports for Bloomberg:
At Yelp Inc.’s San Francisco headquarters, a keg refrigerator provides a never-ending supply of beer to employees, letting them drink as much as they like.
They just have to be comfortable with full disclosure: Workers badge in to an iPad application attached to the keg that records every ounce they drink.
“If you’re at the top of the leader board consistently, I don’t know if that’s a place that you’d want to be,” said Eric Singley, director of Yelp consumer and mobile products. “Luckily, that hasn’t really even been an issue.”
In a contemporary version of “Mad Men” and its bibulous ad executives, more dot-coms are embracing the idea of drinking at work. That means keeping bars stocked at all hours, installing kegerators and letting programmers tip back a few while they code. It also raises questions about the effect of alcohol on productivity and the safety of…
Beer To Be Classified as Alcohol for First Time in Russia
Andrew Osborn writes in the Telegraph:
The beverage is technically classified as a foodstuff for now, an anomaly that has allowed producers to avoid a sweeping new crackdown on alcohol advertising and night-time sales.
But a new Kremlin-backed bill that passed its first reading in the lower house of the Russian parliament on Tuesday will abolish beer’s special status, dragging Russian alcohol regulation into the 21st century.
“Normalising the beer production market and classifying it as alcohol is totally the right thing to do and will boost the health of our population,” Yevgeny Bryun, the ministry of health’s chief specialist on alcohol and drug abuse, said.
“We have been talking about and have wanted such a measure for ages. I take my hat off to the parliament.”
The new law would restrict beer sales at night, ban its sale in or close to many public places such as schools, and limit cans and bottles to…
This Is What Global Alcohol Consumption Looks Like (Map)
Who knew? Moldovans are the heaviest drinkers in the world, downing more than 18 liters/person every year. And the United States is well behind Europe, with most Europeans drinking nearly double as much as Americans.
So you’re not #1 in this respect, USA. Americans, what are you going to do about this? Via the Economist:
Another “fun” fact: Moonshine accounts for almost 30% of the world’s drinking…
U.S. Government Proposes In-Car Alcohol Detection Device To Stop Drunk Driving
This is sure to divide opinion nationwide. Is it a great idea to stop potentially homicidal behavior, or Big Brother-like governmental restriction on personal freedom? The in-vehicle Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS), prevents a car from moving if the driver is above the .08 legal limit and “may hold the promise for stopping drunk driving before it happens,” according to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. AP reports on a prototype that uses automatic sensors to instantly gauge a driver’s fitness.
NYC’s Ilicit Four Loko Underground
Since the FDA outlawed the sickly-sweet, caffeinated, vomit-inducing alcoholic drink Four Loko, a brisk black market has sprung up on the internet. Twelve-packs readily available, at inflated prices that will only rise, NBC New York reports:
It may be banned from store shelves but Four Loko is one of the hottest products on Craigslist.
A 4NewYork hidden-camera investigation exposed just how easy it is to buy the alcoholic energy drink from private dealers who stocked up before the FDA forced Four Loko manufacturers to eliminate caffeine from their recipe.
After responding to posting from an Upper East Side Four Loko dealer, WNBC was able to purchase a case of twelve cans for $80, a mark-up of more than 300 percent. Since November, dozens of sellers have posted craigslist ads charging anywhere from $4 to $8 per can. When the drink was legal, buyers paid only $2 to $3 per can.
The controversial drink, nicknamed “Alcopop”…
