Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Inbox

This could explain the few pieces of always anonymous, nasty-bad unfan mail I get from time to time:

Research by King's College London says addiction to email is doubly worrying because such technology depletes cognitive abilities more rapidly than drugs.

Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users.

but this was really the part that warmed the carefully counted chambers of my OCD-suffering heart:

Others wait for emails and send themselves a message if one hasn't shown up for several minutes...
What do those say? Is it an invitation to a wonderful new life via stock tips? Are they offering themselves a limited time only deal on Viagra, or HOTSLUTCHIX? Do they put a subject line? What about chain forwards? Do you count as one of the people you have to forward it to, or do you then have to re-forward it to ten more people in order to avoid instantaneous death? I have so many questions. Hold on a sec, I'll email them to myself and let you know what I come up with.

used to refresh the page on the way back from the bathroom in the middle of the night at: mb@blondechampagne.com

4 comments:

Dantelope said...

This lady(???) suffered a much larger drop after reading said study. I highly suggest you stop reading research by "King's College London" -- who uses terms like "drugs" but really means "aspirin".

Bah. Research shows that research shows nothing.

Anonymous said...

Actually, sending yourself email is often the fastest way to verify that the mail system is working. When you have troublesome email service a self-addressed email is a suprisingly complete test of many layers of the system. And that doesn't even begin to address the verification of *non* delivery, ie., sending yourself a message that should trigger spam filters to see if the filter agent is up to date. The only problem I see with the "study" is a common one. The researchers didn't understand the underlying mechanism (though I image from the description the subjects did) thus there was no differentiation between data, noise, and information ... between aberrant behavior and artifacts of the system itself.

Anonymous said...

Well, sure, I've sent myself emails to preserve links and test the system. But THESE people? Do it because *they didn't get any email in the past four seconds and need something to open*. Dumptrucks of issues, my friend. Dumptrucks.

Anonymous said...

Before, it was "cogito, ergo sum"

So now it is like "Recepto posto subito, ergo sum"?

Yeah I know, my latin blows, and I'm blaming YOU personally Mb, for the depletion of my Iq, which was already pretty low to start with!!!

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