Posts by James Green
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Nah it was too hot to do real work and it's a light-hearted subject to ran.. er discuss.
True that. It's now 5pm Friday. I'll have to deeply introspect about my motives if I end up having a beer with my colleagues before I go home ;)
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Is that sort of how it work?
Pretty much. It would be a major achievement if we as a society made it to that point. To further spell out the thing on alcopops.
People sometimes play poker for whole experience of playing poker, including the social element etc. People sometimes do the same with things like wine-drinking. On the other hand pokies are straight gambling (and are very behaviourally tuned to resist extinction/stopping), alcopops are straight drunking (and tuned for maximum alcohol and palatability per dollar). -
Simon, it is entirely possible that I have associated by pure chance with only the children who don't like alcohol my whole life.
Taste and smell are both strongly coded for in your genes (whereas vision, surprisingly, it not). Thus, it's entirely possibly that people's experiences are influenced by hanging out with people with whom they share genetic material. So I'm not sure that chance has a lot to do with it.
Otherwise I can't make head or tail of the antipathy towards alcopops or other 'targetted at children' drinks.
Alcopops are to alcoholic beverages what pokies are to gambling. They're optimised for suboptimal use.
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Having your reflexes slowed even a little bit in nature can be harmful. Why is it that no other animal will drink it unless it's been watered down, or added to something they really want to eat or drink?
Actually, a certain level of tipsiness actually facilitates co-ordination in humans. Higher order cognitive processes can interfere with the the motor planning in the cerebellum, and a little inhibition of the cortex can help (Possibly most noticed in the sweet spot between a certain number of drinks and playing pool).
Also, in the trawling through the science before there are a number cases where actually animals do quite like a drink.
Finally, in case you're not too familiar with fermentation, the ethanol kills the yeast around 14%. Thus, talking about animals only liking it watered down is crap. Humans and animals find naturally occurring ethanol solutions quite palatable (or at least a decent proportion of them). It is only through distillation that we can make ethanol strong enough for everyone to find it tastes nasty, and for it to have really serious toxic effects.
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I've just said some tastes are trained, alcohol being one of them. It's really a small point and I'm surprised you're disputing it.
Except the entire crux of your argument is that ethanol tastes bad, and that people habituate to the flavour. Except that ethanol doesn't taste bad for a lot of us.
In this study, approximately half of all participants found that aqueous solutions of ethanol varying from .3 to 10% tasted bitter alone (it seems safe to assume that Ben falls into this camp).
The other half variously found ethanol solutions to taste sweet, sour, salty and bitter alone, or various combinations of those flavours.
This isn't too much of a shock, as higher alcohol beers and wines are often perceptually 'sweet', even when fermented to dryness (ie no sugar).Also, in the second experiment, they had a taste-matching paradigm, and ethanol was indistinguishable from various combinations of quinine, citric acid, and sucrose. The latter sounds suspiciously like something that some people drink voluntarily with no ethanol in it (tonic water, perhaps with a twist of lemon?)
This experiment did not use alcohol naive subjects, so they could have habituated to the taste. HOWEVER, in the introduction they cite studies with alcohol naive subjects.
And convergent electrophysiology adds some further weight. Hellekant et al 1997: Electrophysiology in Rhesus monkeys, alcohol triggers the same nerves as sweet tasting solutions.
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Of course there is no non-arbitrary measure of yucky
That's wrong on a number of levels. There are some things in appropriate concentrations that most if not all people will find yucky.
There are plenty of smells, whose perceived yucky-ness is contingent on your genes. Hence, some people find musk pleasant, others like it, and others can't smell it. Depending on your genes, the same chemical has a categorically different perception. Similarly, some people can't tell mercaptan (the chemical they put in LPG so that you can smell it). People differ in the proportion of each type of taste bud they have, so some people prefer spicey, bitter or sweeter foods, all of which have a profound difference on what might be determined as unpalatable.
There is also a strong psychological role in the perception of flavours and odours. There are plenty of studies where people either like or find yucky things based on the manipulation of properties that don't impact on the chemical senses (from the brand name on the bottle, to the colour of the food). Kids even prefer carrots from McDonald packets.
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the best way to reduce alcohol related harm is to reduce the number of outlets selling alcohol in a community
The 'best' way to reduce the driving-related harm is to reduce the amount of driving in a community.
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It's the experience of everyone I grew up with when we came to alcohol drinking age.
Oh wait, so the plural of anecote is data? If only I'd known that before spending years studying social sciences...
I have time to prepare I do actually mix water, sugar and salt
I used to toss a pinch of salt into dilute raro, for much the same reason. Now that was something only worth drinking for it's benefits rather than the taste.
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Yes, the cost would be high. No argument.
The older banks might be in favour of it. I gather their back-ends are still largely in 80s era databases, hence the overnight processing time because everything is still a day-end process to update etc. Which is why ASB can brag about real time money movement, because their systems are 90s vintage...
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it is grocery stores with less than 150 sq m that the legislation targets. Your local bottle store should be unaffected
See this to me actually sounds worse. It's emphasising the disconnect between food&drink. I'm quite happy for a dairy to sell wine to go with food (cf. my european ramble before). I think it's much more toxic having a local booze barn. Interestingly, under current licensing laws, you can't sell spirits with food. I suspect most wine shops would happily forgo spirits(? just going on my preferred wine store). To me, wine shops, and dairies selling a limited amount of wine and probably beer is OK. More problematic are straight boozers. Perhaps we could have a stock ratio -- only allowed to have half as much beer as you have wine, and only a third of your wine can be under $10 (obviously I'm just making these numbers up, but an interesting idea).
Oh, and on acquiring a taste for wine. Sweetness is certainly a thing. Note how newby coffee drinkers also head for the sugar and milk.
This isn't too say sweet wine is bad. After being a dry-wine-nazi for some years, I've really come to appreciate prosecco, and some of the sweeter waipara and central rieslings (Main Divide/Peg Bay etc.)