I have a Balmer Peak when golfing. Three beers in and i’m a scratch golfer. 4 and I’m Happy Gilmore on his first outing.
Science Memes
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I once worked in IT for an MSP that kept beer on tap in the office for this exact reason. Techs were encouraged to have a beer or two when stumped on an issue. It worked surprisingly well.
This did result in a few years of struggling with alcohol issues tho.
#1544 - I can no longer code without drinking at least 3 glasses of beer, am I becoming an alcoholic? - [Duplicate] [Won't fix]
Alcohol is considered a performance-enhancing drug in darts.
For programming, it works the same way as playing music: your focus narrows. Your brain can't do other stuff, either because it's busy moving your neck in time with Meshuggah, or because it's been lightly poisoned by delicious ethanol.
"Ancient Persians reportedly debated big decisions twice: once drunk and once sober."
The idea that drinking helps has been around a lot longer than 2007. Since basically the discovery of alcohol. Yes, it can help with nerves a little bit, but none of your skills are improved, and most are impaired.
Maybe it depends upon the person.
I have difficulty programming properly while listening to music so maybe I'd find it hard to do so with alcohol too.
In my case, it's probably because I tend to keep as much of the context as possible into my current memory, which gets reduced if I'm distracted by sounds (whether music or noise). The ADHD Relief music tracks tend to work well though, since they aren't very distracting and help get rid of other peoples' noise.
Knew a guy in university that looked like a young Prince Charles that would pop half a tab of LSD whenever he ran into an issue he couldn't solve. Somehow that worked.
This was in the late 90s early 00s, well before Randall made the comic about The Ballmer Peak
Microdosing LSD is a common thing nowadays in the tech world. It definitely increases your creativity and mental energy, so it makes sense. Your friend was probably ahead of the curve. I'm not sure if the idea was as popular back then.
The rest of use were tending towards macro dosing. He may have known about it, but he didn't really talk about it that much. Certainly wasn't encouraging other to try it.
Maybe his dose wasn't small enough to be considered micro. I'd wager half a tab would give a light trip instead of a full
I dunno. I never took less than 2 tabs even my first time, cause less than that didn't seem to do anything as far as visuals went. Just made me feel twitchy
I wonder if there's a comparable effect for machining
You should propose this research; maybe you can get a grant!
Eh I'd have to be in the control group
This also works for pool. Don't ask me how I know.
This applies to a lot of physical activities as well. I have a friend who's a really good bowler, and every one of his 300 games (perfect score for you non-bowlers) has been when he's had exactly 2 drinks. He can't do it with less because he gets too nervous - and more means he gets too sloppy and loses his edge.
We joke and call beer "bowling juice".
I've also found another peak somewhere after 6, I lost count. I couldn't stand straight but I went like 34 kills to 6 deaths in a vr shooter.
Apparently Mr. Ballmer is a real programmer at Microsoft. Even better, he was still working at Microsoft in 2007 when the comic came out, but retired a few years later.
He was the CEO at the time, and I don't know that he was ever involved with writing any code.
But he loved those DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!