In this video of an old Bill Maher standup act, Maher is doing what he does best in being blunt.

I do not agree with everything he has to say in this video. I also do not “agree” with the negative, possibly hateful tone.

Let me write that again so my message gets across.

I do not agree with everything he has to say in this video. I also do not “agree” with the negative, possibly hateful tone.

Maher’s message?

In the United States “the media” is engaged in a character assassination of men, in American culture men’s concerns are belittled, and men’s values are not given equal time.

Dr. Neil Fiore wrote what I thought was one of the best books on procrastination that I ever read.

I recently found this quote he posted on an email list concerning a study about procrastination.

Basically, people who feel more in control and more confident about their abilities are more likely to complete a task.

Dr. Fiore recommends keeping your attention focused only on starting, instead of finishing and focusing on only working for small amounts of time on a task to get yourself going. Once you get going, feelings of anxiety about the task will tend to disappear. Jump in the pool and the water will no longer feel cold.

Psychologist in Berlin’s Freie University, Ralf Schwarzer & Urte Scholz, found that feeling in control [perceived self-efficacy] is the opposite of [is negatively correlated with] procrastination at – .56 and with feelings of lack of achievement at -.75. They define Perceived Self-Efficacy as the belief that one can perform a novel or difficult task, or cope with adversity — in various domains of human functioning. So if you feel in control you’re less likely to procrastinate and your confidence about completing even difficult projects becomes stronger. You can feel in control/have self-efficacy by Choosing to Start at a specific time for 5, 15, or 30 minutes. When you actually show up at that chosen time you build Self-leadership neural pathways and discover that the overwhelmed, fearful parts of you are able to follow your lead and contribute to achieving your goals. Time Management can offer a structure—such as the Un-Schedule and Guilt-Free Play and Billable Minutes and 3 and 4-dimensional views of your goals—that require less will power or sense of being in control. I just tell my workers – my mind and body— WHEN to show up for 15-30 minutes to start on my top AAA priority task first [then choose when I will start again], follow it by a reward or by doing a simple B priority, mindless task such as

paying a few bills, preparing lunch or following up on emails.

This short article about a small study blows a significant amount of folklore away:

• black, green and white tea have the same amount of caffeine
• differing levels of oxidation do not account for differing caffeine levels in different teas.
• white “silver needle” tea ( made from tea leaf buds only) and Assam tea have the most caffeine
• it takes 6 minutes of steeping to get 80% of the caffeine out of tea leaves, not 30 seconds.

Too Easy to be True

De-bunking the At-Home Decaffeination Myth

Story by Bruce Richardson

Photos by Ben Richardson

It was too simple to be true.

For years, many of us in the tea industry have been guilty of touting an at-home decaffeination procedure that gave wide-eyed hope to tea lovers who wanted great taste and less caffeine. The modus operandi went something like this: Caffeine is water-soluble. Thus, it is one of the first ingredients released into the water during the steeping process. Be assured that 80% of the caffeine in either a teabag or loose tea leaves is released after a 30-second infusion. Simply pour off the initial wash and then re-infuse the tea leaves with hot water and brew as usual. You have saved yourself from 25mg of caffeine and your cardiologist will be happy.

If it was that easy, there would be little use for all the effort and money expended to commercially decaffeinate tea.

I first became aware of this “home wash” method in 1994 at a tea conference in New England. All of us in attendance made it a part of our teaching repertoire. I couldn’t wait to spread the caffeine-lite scheme.  I remember customers in my tearoom looking at me as if I were a genius when I told them that I could magically “de-caffeinate” any tea on my menu in the privacy of my kitchen. I don’t know how many customers’ sleepless nights I was responsible for during my 14 years of retail business.

All of us on the tea speaking circuit were guilty of spreading the myth. But, who can blame us? When the current tea renaissance began, there was little documented research and few reputable tea books to turn to for answers. We simply repeated much of tea’s oral tradition that had accumulated for centuries. We were all blissfully ignorant until science began to catch up with the growth in the specialty tea market.

After a few years, I became a doubter of the home decaffeination myth. A couple of scientific papers were rumored to have challenged the popular method. At the 2005 World Tea Expo, I asked the author of a best-selling caffeine book if the caffeine quick wash was reliable. Without hesitating, he told me “yes.”  But, where was the proof?

Alas, science at the college level has proven that author, and the rest of us “tea experts” wrong.

 

A college chemistry professor brews up a test.

In early 2008, Dr. Bruce Branan, Professor of Chemistry at Asbury College (Wilmore, KY) contacted me about the possibility of doing chemical analysis tests on tea using their newly acquired lab equipment. He had a few tea lovers in his family and he knew I lived nearby. He had been reading about the health benefits of tea polyphenols and he asked for suggestions on potential studies using tea.

Dr. Branan and I talked about several possibilities before I told him of my doubts concerning caffeine removal using the simple hot water wash. I told him the tea world would be grateful if he could conduct a study on caffeine content in several common loose leaf teas. He said it would be easy to analyze and that he had a student, Micah Buckel, who would make it his summer project. I supplied the teas and Micah ran the study.

Using standardized testing procedures, eight teas were brewed for three minutes in seven ounces of water. The infusions were then filtered and the liquid was analyzed using High Performance Liquid Chromatography with UV detection. The tea leaves were infused a second time, steeped three minutes, and analyzed. A similar third steeping and analysis followed.

Micah’s findings took the steam out of the simple caffeine wash assumption.

He found that a three-minute infusion removes 46-70% of the caffeine from a cup of tea. This is a far cry from our 30-second/80% removal claim. In fact, it would take a six-minute infusion to remove 80% of the caffeine!

Does green tea have less caffeine than black tea?

A by-product of the Asbury study deflated another popular tea caffeine misconception. Tea internet sites are filled with contradictory assumptions about caffeine content found in the four major tea families. Many claim that green teas have less caffeine than oolong or black tea, and white tea has the least of all. The theory assumes that oxidation is the key to caffeine intensification.

Again, modern laboratory equipment is able to disprove this assumption.

White tea does not have less caffeine than green, oolong, or black teas. Most of the tea studied in the Asbury lab (white, green or black) contained around 57-58 mg of caffeine per 7-ounce cup. The Chinese white tea and the Assam black tea both contained the highest caffeine content. Most tea drinkers would suspect those results from an Assam tea, but few would think a China white tea would have such high levels of caffeine. By the way, Camellia assamica plants, found in Assam, have higher caffeine content than Chinese varietals.

Before beginning the study, I turned to one of the tea industry’s most knowledgeable consultants, Nigel Melican, founder and managing director of Teacraft, Ltd. He has spent much of his life helping establish tea gardens and advising manufacturers in the art of producing teas for various markets around the world.

Nigel knows how to manipulate the caffeine content of tea bushes-both in the field and in the factory. He claims that several factors help determine caffeine content in tea. It begins with the propagation of the bush. Plants grown from seeds can produce twice as much tea caffeine as clonals. The addition of nitrogen fertilizer can add another 10% to the normal caffeine level. Caffeine also varies by the picking season. Teas plucked in cooler weather might produce less caffeine than those harvested in the fast growing hot months. Even the location of the leaf on the stem can be an indicator of caffeine potential.

“Caffeine varies in the fresh green leaf depending on fineness of pluck,” Nigel says. “For any tea, be it black, green or white, the caffeine is highest in the bud. Silver needle (white tea) is 100% bud and has the highest caffeine content.”

Nigel Melican’s caffeine percentage findings are:

Bud-6.3%
First leaf-4.6%
Second leaf- 3.6%
Third leaf-3.1%
Fourth leaf-2.7%
Leaf stalk-2.0%
Two leaves and a bud-4.2%

“If your white tea is 100% bud then it’s going to be one-third higher in caffeine content than green tea made from two leaves and a bud,” Nigel added.

He went on to point out that the caffeine level continues to change after the tea arrives in the factory due to the temperature and withering time.

What should tea consumers do?

Over 85% of Americans use significant amounts of caffeine on a daily basis. Most tea drinkers, assuming they are not prone to heart palpitations or other medical problems diagnosed by their physician, can easily handle 200mg of caffeine in their diet per day. If you are trying to cut down on caffeine, you should look at using the same tea leaves for multiple infusions because the caffeine content will be lower with each cup. High quality oolongs and green teas are perfect for this scenario.

If your doctor is asking you to cut caffeine completely out of your diet, you should switch to a commercially decaffeinated tea or a caffeine-free herbal. (Remember, caffeine is not present in herbals unless they are blended with tea leaves.) One should always consult with a doctor if you have any questions about caffeine’s effect upon your health. After all, until the FDA says we can label tea for its health benefits, tea will be considered a healthy beverage and not a medicine.

This article appears in the January 2009 edition of Fresh Cup magazine. Copyrighted material.

 

For further reading: ‘Tea preparation and its influence on methylxanthine concentration,’ appeared in Food Research International Vol 29, Nos 3-4, pp. 325-330. (FRI is copyright of the Canadian Institute of Food Science and Technology)

“Tea and the rate of its infusion” by Professor Michael Spiro. Published in Chemistry in New Zealand, 1981, pp172-174.

People who know a lot about green tea told me that I could get a lot better tasting green tea by ordering it directly from Asia.

That is partially because unlike black tea, green tea is a “perishable” product. Time, exposure to air and exposure to light degrades the quality of green tea. Appreciating tea can get as complex as appreciating wine. The green tea cognoscenti I conversed with told me that Asian tea farmers have the advantage of centuries of experience and the right kind of environment. Many of the Asian companies that ship green tea directly to customers refrigerate their tea after harvesting it, and then air mail the tea in vacuum packed envelopes.

I ordered a “green tea beginner’s kit” from one such Japanese company ( yes, Japanese tea has been tested by disinterested parties to be safe from radiation poisoning ). I ordered the cheapest of this better quality tea, “Sakura Sencha”, $6.76 for 50 grams ( about 1.8 ounces ). This tea is of high enough quality that you can use each serving of tea leaves 3 times. I also selected a fancy Japanese airtight tea jar and an 8 fluid ounce clay pot especially designed for making Japanese green tea.

When I finally got it all, the instructions on the tea envelope called for using 0.6 grams of tea per ounce of water. I knew that “a cup” is 8 fluid ounces. No problems there, but I had no idea how many grams of tea an American tea spoon holds. I wasn’t about to weigh out tea leaves every single time I wanted to drink tea, so I asked for an approximation on a web board devoted to tea aficionados. I got answers all over the map.

Enter the new scale:

According to wiki.answers.com a U.S. Quarter weighs 5.67 grams. This is where my directly out of box new scale is started from:

I had the intuition that shape matters. The Sakura Sencha green tea leaves are rolled into linear shapes and a round teaspoon may not fit as much as an oblong teaspoon. I did 3 weighings, one per each of these differently shaped teaspoons:

I started off with the cheapo, battered, round, white plastic teaspoon I use at work, where I do most of my tea drinking:

I got 1.72 grams per teaspoon:

Next, I moved on to a round steel teaspoon with a wider bowl:

I got 1.85 grams per teaspoon:

Finally, I moved on to a steel teaspoon with an oblong shape bowl:

I got the highest weight, with the widest teaspoon, at 1.93 grams per teaspoon:

So, to make a cup ( 8 fluid ounces ) of Sankura Sencha Green Tea using 0.6 grams of tea leaves per 1 fluid ounce of water, I would need 4.8 grams of tea leaves.

Dividing that by the 1.72 grams per my cheapo plastic work teaspoon I get 2.79 teaspoons.

That sounds about right. Before I got the scale I found 3 cheapo plastic teaspoons to be slightly too strong and 2 of those teaspoons to be just about right.

HTH

How to reduce unwanted noise is a question many people have these days.

There are many common issues ranging from the noisey coworker in the cube farm spoiling your concentration, to the immature neighbors without full time day-jobs keeping you up at night.

This short post will be about the best noise reductions options I have found so far.

The not-so-great news, and the bottom line, is that a reduction of about 30 decibels is the best noise reduction you are going to get with easy options.

Noise reduction products generally fall into two distinct groups: passive and non-passive. Passive products are things like ear plugs and ear muffs. Other products like ear phones may use powered technology to reduce, block or attenuate noise.

A coworker of mine introduced me to the Bose® QuietComfort® 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones:

Cost? About $300.

My coworker let me try them out in our noisey office. I found that the passive Pro Ears Ultra 33 worked about the same for me.

Cost? About $35.

After I bought Pro Ears. I repeated my test at the office trying those on, trying on my coworkers fancy electronic thing and trying out drug store ear plugs during someone’s conference call on speaker phone. They all seemed about equally effective for me. The Pro Ears Ultra 33 had the advantage of being easy to put on/take off and did not involve stuffing things in my ears.

Since I can’t sleep on my back remaining 100% still for a full night, I found myself returning to ear plugs to compensate for those noisey neighbors without day-jobs. Googling around, I couldn’t find any objective information on what made one ear plug more desirable than another. The best I got were comments like

“Try these! They are the best!”

Then I found “The Sound of Silence Sussing out the ear-plug market.” by Ulrich Boser on slate.com. The author methodically tested a large number of ear plugs for several different qualities, assigned a score for each quality and then gave each ear plug an overall score. It is the closest thing I found to an objective review of ear plugs on the internet.

Lastly, there is the Ear Plug Super Store, a family owned business that specializes in selling everything that will reduce, block or attenuate noise. There is a lot of useful information on the site and their knowledgeable customer service will gladly answer any questions you have about what the right product is for you to get.

Remember, parole for a life sentence on a murder charge is about 30 years. Tempting as it may be, homicide is the lesser option to one of these products, moving or finding another job.

HTH!

 How do you tell organic produce apart from commercial produce?

I was cleaning out some old files and I found some brief notes I jotted down about how to know from the SKU ( barcode ).

• conventionally farmed produce has an item-dependent, fixed, 4-digit numbering system (ex. bananas are #4011)
• organic produce is marked by 5-digit SKU beginning with the number 9 (#94011)
• genetically modified produce is marked by 5-digit SKU beginning with the number 8 (#84011)

HTH

What if instead of throwing old cell phones into the trash those phones could be turned into trees?

From a friend:

Plant My Phone is a new company designed to reduce the very large number of old cell phones that end up in landfills. The idea is both simple and potentially far-reaching. You send them your old, unwanted cell phone for free using their postage-paid self-mailer bags. The free postage-paid plastic bags are available in cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Medford, MA, Corvallis, and New Orleans. If you don’t live in these cities, you can print a free shipping label from their website, or request a free self-mailer bag to be sent to you. Then mail in your old phone.

Their site says mailing in an average two-year old phone will result in the planting of fifteen trees. A first generation Apple iPhone in good condition equates to the planting of 79 trees, and a Nokia80 equals about 30, (depending on the condition). You can look at the phone to trees conversion table to see if your phone is there.

The mailed phones are recycled, and their materials are sold to fund tree planting. They say focusing on cell phone recycling is important because, “…of the 140 Million old cellphones each year, only 10% get recycled.” Cell phones contain heavy metals which are toxic to the environment.

The types of trees planted are: Cocoa, Coffee, Banana, Orange, Cedar, Teak, Mahogany, Oak, Acacia, Eucalyptus, Laurel and Leucaena. Their trees are planted in twelve countries: Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Burundi, Senegal, Zambia, India, Philippines and Haiti.

PlantMyPhone has a goal of planting seven billion trees. They are an official partner of the United Nations Environment Programme’s: Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign.

I like a lot of Christmas music. I think it is best enjoyed a week before Christmas. In my area there are several radio stations that start playing Christmas music 24/7, at Thanksgiving. A full month before Christmas.

I wrote to one station I had on the presets in my car radio.

They told me that it was a money maker for them. Many area stores set their stereos to play their station exclusively during the Christmas shopping season.

Okay, that is bad enough, but now there are some radio stations in my area still playing Christmas music, though Christmas has ended. I’m guessing it will run through New Years Day.

Ironically, the content of those songs often have nothing do with commemorating Christ or Christianity. The bulk of the songs are about the trappings of Yule, an ancient European pagan holiday. “Christmas trees”, misletoe, etc.

Next year, when someone complains about the “war on Christmas” that person, IMHO, should be asked:

1. Do you plan to spend Christmas day in church?
2. Do you plan to join the crowds on Black Friday, shoving other people for a piece of plastic crap from China, in the spirit of Christ?
3. Have you read the entire Bible? If not, do you plan to start on Christmas?

Okay, I am ranting, but *ENOUGH* with the Christmas music already. Christmas is over.

Many of the Republicans responsible for the ample FAIL of 2012 will be going up for reelection in 2013 & 2014. Do your country a favor and do not forget what they did:

Bills Republicans Voted Down In 2012:

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1. A minimum wage increase.
House Democrats proposed legislation in June that would have raised the national minimum wage to $10 an hour, but Republicans blocked it. The minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, even though it would need to be raised to $9.92 to match the borrowing power it had in 1968. If it was indexed to inflation, it would be $10.40 today.

2. Campaign finance transparency.
The DISCLOSE Act of 2012, repeatedly blocked by Congressional Republicans, would have allowed voters to know who was funding the attack ads that flooded the airways from secretive groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.

3. The Buffett Rule.
Senate Republicans in April filibustered the Buffet Rule, which would have set a minimum tax on millionaires. Huge majorities of Americans consistently support the rule, which would raise tens of billions of dollars per year from Americans who have seen their incomes explode while their tax rates plummeted.

4. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
ENDA, which would prohibit discrimination in hiring and employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, has languished in Congress for decades, and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) “hasn’t thought much” about bringing it to a vote.

5. U.N. treaty to protect the equal rights of the disabled.
Republicans blocked ratification of the United Nations treaty to protect the rights of disabled people around the world, falsely claiming it would undermine parents of disabled children. In fact, the treaty would require other nations to revise their laws to resemble the Americans With Disabilities Act and had overwhelming support from veterans and disabilities groups. It failed by 5 votes.

6. The Paycheck Fairness Act.
It’s about to be 2013, and women are still getting paid less than men for the same job. This year the Paycheck Fairness Act came up for a vote again (previous efforts to pass the law have been unsuccessful), but the Senate GOP still couldn’t get it together to pass the legislation. Republicans oppose the measure, saying it helps trial lawyers instead of women. But the country’s female doctors, lawyers, and CEOs might be inclined to disagree.

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