Category: Cool

The Gaslight Café

We spent the New Year holiday hanging out with Johann and Hazel, proprietors of the Gaslight Café, and good friend Shahid, one of the many musicians who call the Gaslight home.

This has been my go-to place for the last year. I’ve seen many perform here, and I’ve even been on stage myself. It’s a wonderful community, and if you should ever find yourself in Kuala Lumpur, it’s worth checking their calendar to see if you can catch a show.

More Coffee, Please

Another entry in “Why Coffee is Awesome”:

“Coffee and caffeine have been inexorably intertwined in our thinking, but truth is coffee contains a whole lot of other stuff with biological benefits,” said Martin. And most concerns about caffeine’s negative effects on the heart have been dispelled. In June, a meta-analysis of ten years of research went so far as to find an inverse association between habitual, moderate consumption and risk of heart failure. The association peaked at four cups per day, and coffee didn’t stop being beneficial until subjects had increased their daily consumption to beyond ten cups.

Caffeine might also function as a pain reliever. A study from September suggested as much when its authors stumbled across caffeinated coffee as a possible confounding variable in its study of the back, neck, and shoulder pains plaguing office drones: Those who reported drinking coffee before the experiment experienced less intense pain.

The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like, The Atlantic

Walking in an Exploding Volcano

Photographer Carsten Peter tests the thermal suit that Sims used to get close to the lava lake. “It can protect you from the radiant heat, but if you get hit with a lava splatter, the force will likely kill you,” he says. For 30 years Peter has explored volcanoes around the world. “Seeing at close range the primal forces that shaped the planet can be hypnotic. You cannot allow yourself to fall under a volcano’s spell, especially one as unpredictable as Nyiragongo. That can be a fatal mistake.”

Photographer Carsten Peter walks in a volcano
Photographer Carsten Peter walks in a volcano

This caught my attention in National Geographic.