I am a caffeine addict, like you and the person over there with Starbucks paper cup. I know the undesirable side effects of caffeine, but abstaining from drinking coffee does not solve anything, because I will be still drinking lots of tea with even more chocolate. Right now, I am having tea and chocolate at the same time, and just found out that the nutrition facts sheet on the chocolate package does not include caffeine amount. So, I would like to share with you some facts I found by googling.
The following is a table on caffeine contents in chocolate, from https://www.amanochocolate.com/articles/caffeineinchocolate.html.
Chocolate Percentage
|
mg/pound
|
mg/3.5oz (100g)
|
mg/2oz (56g)
|
43% (Semi-Sweet)
|
353mg
|
77mg
|
44mg
|
50%
|
453mg
|
99mg
|
57mg
|
60% (Bittersweet)
|
544mg
|
119mg
|
68mg
|
70%
|
635mg
|
139mg
|
79mg
|
80%
|
725mg
|
159mg
|
91mg
|
90%
|
816mg
|
179mg
|
102mg
|
100%
|
907mg
|
198mg
|
113mg
|
What I am eating right now has 70% cacao, and I finished eating 75% of the whole, which is 35g. So, I’ve added 139mg * .35 * .75 = 35.44mg of caffeine into my system.
Also from the same webpage, the following is on caffeine amount in drinks:
| Food / Beverage | Serving Size (oz) | Caffeine (mg) | mg/oz |
| | | | |
| Coffee | | | |
| Coffee (Brewed) | 8 | 107.5 | 13.44 |
| Coffee (Decaf Instant) | 8 | 2.5 | 0.31 |
| Coffee (Decaf Brewed) | 8 | 5.6 | 0.70 |
| Coffee (Drip) | 8 | 145 | 18.13 |
| Coffee (Espresso) | 1.5 | 77 | 51.33 |
| Coffee (Instant) | 8 | 57 | 7.13 |
| | | | |
| Tea | | | |
| Tea (Brewed) | 8 | 47 | 5.88 |
| Tea (Green) | 8 | 25 | 3.13 |
| Tea (Instant) | 8 | 26 | 3.25 |
| Tea (Lipton Brisk) | 12 | 9 | 0.75 |
| Tea (Lipton Ice Teas) | 12 | 9 | 0.75 |
| Tea (Nestea Ice Tea) | 16 | 34 | 2.13 |
| | | | |
| Caffeinated Sodas | | | |
| Cocoa Cola Classic | 12 | 34.5 | 2.83 |
| Cocoa Cola Diet | 12 | 45 | 3.75 |
| Pepsi | 12 | 38 | 3.17 |
| Pepsi (Diet) | 12 | 36 | 3.00 |
| Dr. Pepper | 12 | 41 | 3.42 |
| Dr Pepper (Diet) | 12 | 41 | 3.42 |
| | | | |
| Highly Caffeinated Sodas | | | |
| Bawls | 10 | 66.7 | 6.67 |
| Jolt Cola | 23.5 | 220 | 9.36 |
| Mello Yello | 12 | 52.5 | 4.38 |
| Mountain Dew | 12 | 55 | 4.58 |
| Red Bull | 8.3 | 80 | 9.64 |
| RockStar | 16 | 160 | 10.00 |
Since I had two tea bags of green tea and one cup of tea today, 25*2+47 = 97mg of additional caffeine has come into my body from the tea drinking.
Then how much is OK? According to about.com, it is generally agreed that 300mg of caffeine per day is safe. I’ve already taken about 132mg of caffeine today, and most probably will drink one cup of coffee with some sweets this evening. That is additonal 77mg+ of caffeine. However, there will be some amount of caffeine in other foods, for example, the stir-fried noodle I had as lunch today, might also hold some caffeine in it, considering the various ingredients in it. According to some source, the caffeine in green tea is less absorbable into the body because of other substances in green tea. And I don’t have a clue whether the figures in the above table factors in this or not.
Still, I think looking at a table like that once in a while will keep you from having another cup of coffee. Yes, only sometimes, but sometimes is better than never. :)
The moment Katniss explained what the hunger games are, Battle Royale (novel by Koushun Takami, published in 1999) came into my mind. I think that anybody who read the book or saw the movie will do the same, regardless she/he likes it or not. Battle Royale was made into movie in 2000 featuring, among others, Takeshi Kitano, and was a mega hit. A lot of people know the movie. I should admit the fact that I like Battle Royale a lot, both the novel and the movie, before putting forward this point of mine: The Hunger Games is a poor-quality carbon copy of Battle Royale.
I do not know whether Battle Royale had any influence on Suzanne Collins when she wrote The Hunger Games, and I am not attempting to make any judgment on that part. I would like to compare the two, simply from the perspective of a pop culture consumer.
The single most impactful difference between the two is the depth of the story. In Battle Royale, there are at least five (yes, 5) very deep plots that run intertwined with the main plot - those of Shuya, Shinji, Shogo, Kazuo, and Mitsuko. In addition to this, almost all the students are given characters deep enough to make readers think from the point of view of each character. In the movie, even the bad-ass teacher (Takeshi Kitano) is given a very deep character. On the other hand, in The Hunger Games, it is just Katniss and, to a much less degree, Peeta, who are given enough character to brood upon. The majority of the game participants are not even given a name, to begin with. Consequently, The Hunger Games feels like a shoot-them-all kind of video game, for which no literary plot is required.
However, The Hunger Games does not win even in terms of action. Even from the perspective of pure action (and gore), Battle Royale has a landslide victory over The Hunger Games. This is partly because of the difference in narration point of view - The Hunger Games is a first-person narrative while Battle Royale is a third-person one. However, the lack of more intense action is because of the lack of inter-relatedness of the game participants. In Battle Royale, the participants are from the same class in school - they know each other, and some of them are in more intense relationship such as love, friendship, or even feud. But this is not the case in The Hunger Games. In my opinion, Peeta is the only character that has the potential to move readers, and this is because of the conflict between his emotion and the situation. Other characters that show human emotion, such as Thresh, are not convincing enough to drive emotional response from readers because their stories lack depth.
The first-person point of view also brings many uncomfortable flaws to the novel. In a first-person narrative, the narrator is sometimes forced to make voice for the author, for example, to explain some background. This is done numerous times in The Hunger Games, and it hurts the character building of the heroine. For example, Katniss knows so much about details of past Hunger Games - which is not very convincing given that Katniss had to work so hard (with no holiday) to support her family. (Yes, watching the Hunger Games is mandatory, but will she remember all the details after all, when she have so much burden on her shoulder for daily survival?)
Another striking difference between the two novels is the setup of the characters. In The Hunger Games, it is apparent that both Katniss and Peeta are distinguished for their attractiveness. This is typical of novels these days, which presupposes multi-source use of its contents - especially for movies. So, in short, beautiful girls and handsome guys are our heroes in The Hunger Games. By contrast, this is not the case in Battle Royale. The most beautiful girl in the novel is one of the main villains. In the movie version of the novel, the main heroine is depicted to have some moral defects. Even the most intelligent and resourceful hero, Shinji, fails because of a flaw in his personality. Battle Royale has full and diverse plots because it is full of such multi-dimensional characters. Nobody’s one-dimensionally perfect like Katniss.
It is true that The Hunger Games is an enticing novel that drives you to read more. But the source of the power is the novel’s unique idea of a battle royal among attractive kids - which was already used in a novel that was written more than 10 years ago. Furthermore, the depth and intensity of the story, and the power to make readers think about human nature, is beyond comparison.
Tarrou says, “Each of us has the plague within him. No one on Earth is free from it.” This would be the punchline of the novel, regardless of whether Camus himself agrees or not. (Camus said he was not an existentialist, in an interview over the book, according to Wikipedia.) The plague, in Tarrou’s argument, is very close to the concept of Dasein (“Being there”) and Sein-in-der-Welt (“Being-in-the-world”) of the German existentialist Heidegger’s. We are confined to this, and only this condition of life. And we agonize ourselves with this confinement. Camus is more direct to this problem of existence in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, saying that the only question we human beings should ask is whether we should commit suicide or not.
The story has many characters with different views about life - the plague. The way they deal with the plague is the way they face their lives - their existences. Some acts upon moral codes, some derives the meaning of life from religion, and some - the main character Dr. Rieux - just lives on. Some sees it as being extremely unfair, while some others take courage (even delight) facing the revelation of the fact that everyone must face death. In this aspect, the novel is a wonder with allegorical mastery.
Then what about the realism? Jean Paul Sartre once wrote a short story called The Wall, where he audaciously claimed that he would describe the last day of a prisoner who faced an execution the next morning. But, I would like to ask, how? What does Mr. Sartre know about this particularly intriguing situation? The short story is a miserable piece of crap, due to this very apparent reason - he dared to write on a thing he knows nothing about. Albert Camus, in this regard, is not free from the same kind of criticism.
My final verdict about this novel is this: it is a very good piece of literature if it is an allegory. However, should it be in the form of a novel? He could have achieved what he aimed at by writing a play - like The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco, or a more allegorical novel - like Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. This means, of course, Albert Camus is a lesser talent compared to Eugene Ionesco or Thomas Hardy as a literary writer.
The book aims to change the popular view about the native American people before the advent of the Europeans. (I do not think Indians are the right term to denote them, despite the author’s rationale.) There are two popular views about the native Americans: 1) uncultivated primitive people with a wretched level of technology, or 2) the noble savages. Roughly, my view about them was aligned with the second category, even though my view differs a lot from the vanilla version of the noble savages. I thought of them as people who gained wisdom to live with the nature, rather than being ignorant of living in the capitalistic ways.
The big questions are as follows: 1) was America really a vacant place with small populace? 2) were the native Americans technologically behind the old world? 3) did the Europeans enlighten the native Americans, leading to a better way of life?
Of course, the answers to all those questions are NO. The population of the Americas before Columbus is an on-going issue of debate, but many evidences show that the continent was rather densely populated. The massacre by the European diseases was of a magnitude much bigger than usually imagined. It is almost sure that the population was reduced to less than half the original size solely due to the epidemic. In some extreme cases like Plymouth, the death ratio was roughly 95%. I am sure nobody these days buys into the rationale of the Europeans settling in a vacant continent, but the take-away should be realizing the magnitude of the tragedy done by the separately developed diseases and viruses. As the author says, if the Americas had had their own hoofed creatures like pigs, the pandemic would have been two-directional instead, killing much of the population in Eurasia as well.
About the second question, the author’s exemplification with the case of plow is very cogent. Before they adopted the Chinese version, the European plow was extremely inefficient, even though it is so hard to imagine that the Europeans could not discover the simple twitch. The same goes for the American civilizations. They had wheels, but only for children’s toys! Though unimaginable to us who are accustomed to the use of wheels, things can happen that way. Another insight is, like anything else, technological and scientific advancement is also relative. For example, the super-complex alloying technology the Incans used for their gold ornaments are simply amazing. As an even more important example, the North American natives’ political systems of having each gender taking care of different affairs of social life, is at least much more advanced than the political systems of most European countries in the 19th century.
The answer to the final question is apparent when we have answers for the first two questions. Ben Franklin wrote the following: Native Americans who were kidnapped early in their lives who were educated in the European way, will desert into the wild once they know of the way of living of her native people. On the other hand, European people who were kidnapped young to live among the natives, even though they learn about the European way of living, will not change the way of their lives. Even though they are taken by force to join their European relatives, they will seek opportunities to escape and return to the native American’s way of life. One might recall the move Dance with Wolves. The reason behind this phenomenon would be apparent: human beings seek happiness by nature.
Even though this book aims to repel the myth of noble savage concept of native Americans, I believe we are back to about the same position in the altitude/latitude. The native American people, living by themselves for thousands of years, acquired a different way of living - which might be less desirable for some of us, but more so for some others. Understanding and accepting differences is the least we human beings must be able to do to call ourselves sentient beings, I believe.
Whatever the result, I’ve finished reading The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, on January 28th, 2012. It was a difficult book to follow, primarily because the theory itself is difficult, but also because the book is poorly written. Quite often the author says something he want to communicate is easily demonstrated mathematically, but hard to show in any other way. Of course, that is a valid statement because string theory has so much math in it: it almost started with mathematics. However, I would like to ask Mr. Greene, what are you doing here? Wasn’t this a science book for laymen?
I just encountered so many additional question marks while I was reading this book. So I googled about this and that - for example, Calabi-Yau spaces, and even watched the TBC documentaries starring Brian Greene. We learn better by teaching - communicating what we understand. I will attempt that in the following paragraphs.
1. Theory of Everything
Superstring theory is one of the contenders to become the Theories of Everything (TOE), which tries to fill the gap between quantum physics and general relativity. Three out of four basic forces in nature - strong and weak interactions and electromagnetic forces - are unified under the standard model of elementary particle physics. However, gravity could not be unified in the standard model. TOE is expected to do this task, and the Superstring theory is one candidate for the job. I like the Superstring theory explanation on the zero mass of graviton. Strings can perfectly eradicate mass when two (or more, in a collective manner) strings cancel each other out to become zero wave magnitude. As per Fineman’s theory, wave patterns spread to all directions at the same time. Hence, zero wave amplitude (i.e. zero mass) for the particle that mediates gravity.
2. Dimensions
There are 10 or 11 dimensions in the universe according to the Superstring theory. To be more exact, 10 according to vanilla String theory, and 11 for the M-Theory. Since 1 dimension is for time, there are still 9 or 10 spatial dimensions in the universe. Why six more? Greene says it’s math. Anyway, only three dimensions expanded in the inflation phase of the Big Bang, and the remnant remained curled in the tiny tiny space of the pre-Big Bang universe.
3. Black Holes
Brian Greene allocates a whole chapter to the black holes. Black holes are indeed the testing ground for a Theory of Everything, since the black holes are where the theory of general relativity and that of quantum physics must meet. In general, general relativity deals with the vast universe - the macro level of the universe, while the quantum physics deals with the microworld of Planck scale. They do not cross each other. However, in a black hole, which has super massive mass-energy in a ultra tiny dimension, the two theories must come up with a coherent explanation that does not counter each other. The standard model could not do this, so there are several contenders for the Theory of Everything - including the Superstring theory. According to the Superstring theory, a possible wreck of the space-time dimension - i.e. a singularity point - can be described as being looped by a single string. This can explain the stability of a singularity point existing in the universe. What if the singularity point is too large to be covered by a single string? Here comes the (to my thought) the most thrilling part of the theory.
4. T-Duality
A very surprising revelation by the Superstring theory is that there is no measurable difference between a really small universe and an extremely large one. More exactly, the theory states that a string that loops around a dimension smaller than itself and a string that move along larger dimensions do not have measurable differences. In technical terms, a string with a wavelength of x and momentum y in a universe with radius R, will be basically identical to a string with a wavelength of y, a momentum of x in a universe with a radius of 1/R. See the picture below.
(Picture courtesy of http://www.slimy.com/~steuard/research/MITClub2004/slide29.html)
In other words once more, things happening in a dimension of R does not differ from things happening in a dimension of 1/R. To illustrate this in an interesting way, we might actually be living in a tiny universe with a infinitesimally small size. This micro universe does not show any detectable difference from a immensely vast universe.
5. Criticism
Superstring theory has many shortfalls as well. Most notably, the formulas for Superstring theory yields infinite numbers of solutions. Another problem is this theory is almost impossible to test via experiments. The energy level required to test the theory is said to require a particle accelerator with the size of our Solar system!
