Coffee: even more amazing when you fudge data

I'm a big fan of caffeine  Huge fan.  Hell, I might be caffeine's biggest fan.  Yes, I know its an addictive drug, and yes, I'm probably addicted to it.

Doesn't everyone drink 24oz or so of coffee in the morning?  No?  huh.

I did have a lot of factors working against me, though.  I'm a computer science student after all- it would be weird if I didn't consume caffeine and cold pizza in massive, near lethal amounts.  Those are the two great things that fuel good code, after all.

For high octane code fuel, add nicotine and a touch of booze

At any rate, going a day without coffee to me is almost an alien concept.  I still do it every once and a while, but all in all, its something I generally avoid.  So, you can imagine how I felt when I found a study that claimed coffee is an antidepressant.... in women.  At first, I felt elated (COFFEE IS GOOD FOR MEEEEE) then cheated (only if I had a vagina) then curious (why does having a vagina make coffee good for you?)

I know, men and women are different and not all chemical reactions work the same on them.  I'm not retarded, but it did seem kinda odd that caffeine, a drug that works on several chemical signals your body uses to figure out if it wants to sleep or not, would work differently across genders.  Everyone gets tired, after all, and generally at the same rate.

Well, aside from Batman.  The Dark Night never sleeps

Turns out, sadly, that some people just suck at science.  Someone, who wasn't a equal opportunity hire from the media, took a long hard look at the paper.  First, all the women in question were nurses.  Which, unless I am far mistaken about the other gender, isn't actually a job that most women hold.  So, to correlate your findings with nurses across all women means you probably need to go meet some real women.

The main problem, however, is that the depression correlation isn't the only one the researches found... they found a whole lot of correlations between nurses habits and the amount of coffee they drunk.  The most hilarious one being that heavy coffee drinkers are less likely to attend church.

So, clearly, coffee prevents religion.  Which might explain why I will curse at any higher power I can think off when I'm pulling an all nighter at 3am.