Author: fledgling otaku

Mark is a Coke Fiend, like I am. That’s the kawaii-safe kind of Coke, mind you. My best friend from childhood and I had the same kind of Coke-Pepsi rivalry that Mark describes with his brother – in my case, I preferrred Coke not for the marketing but because Pepsi is just too sweet. There’s a bitter edge to Coke that gives it real flavor.

Truth be told though, I barely drink authentic Coke anymore. About three years ago I made the switch to Diet Coke, and subsequently lost ten pounds. The sugar was the culprit of course, but it wasn’t weight loss that motivated me – rather, it was that the sugar high and ensuing crash was swamping the desired physiological response of the caffeine. Simply put, Coke would put me to sleep rather than give me a boost. Switching to Diet made a big difference, and the associated drop in weight was just icing on the cake, so to speak.

Lately, I’ve been entranced with Diet Coke with Splenda. I love Splenda. It’s single-handedly allowed me to free myself of sugar’s utter dominance in most of my foods and coffee. It really is astounding just how much sugar you really are eating on a daily basis. I also like Coke Zero, which has an amusing “taste infringement” ad campaign (I’ve got a pic of a billboard to upload later). Mark refers to Passover Coke which is sweetened with pure cane sugar rather than corn syrup; that would probably be worth trying but is not really compatible with my sugarfree regime.

Intriguingly, I just noticed a few days ago that there’s a new Coke product on the shelves: Diet Coke Plus. It’s your standard Diet Coke but it’s got vitamin and mineral additives. Clearly a niche product but being the Coke connoisseur that I think I am, I’ll pick up a 12pack later this weekend. Must stay on top of things, after all.

via Mark, this fantastic flight of fancy, replete with graphs, deserves a standing ovation. Excerpt:

The launch tube for the burritos lies just under the tunnel mouth and looks like what it is: an enormous gun. Every four seconds a ‘slug’ of ten burritos, white with frost, ratchets into the breech. A moment later it flies into the tunnel with a loud hiss of compressed gas, and the lights dim briefly as banks of powerful electromagnets accelerate the burritos to over two hundred miles an hour. By the time they pass Stockton three minutes later the burritos will be traveling faster than the Concorde, floating on an invisible magnetic cushion as they plunge into the lithosphere.
[…]
Cavanaugh realized that the intense heat of the transit that had so beleaguered mail service would actually work to his advantage in a burrito tunnel. The burritos could be stored frozen on the Western end and arrive fully heated through in New Jersey. Furthermore, advances in electrical engineering meant that containers would no longer have to be propelled by compressed gas. The burritos already came conveniently wrapped in aluminum foil – it would be trivial to accelerate them with powerful magnets.

It’s the attention to physics detail that makes this thing great. Alas, I can’t put it in my “stranger than fiction” category, but I can dream…