Coffee (again) and Anonymity Issues

Well, damn. No sooner do I write a post explaining how my distaste for coffee has put me at risk for Alzheimer’s, but yet another article shows up describing how coffee can help prevent MS. I’m beginning to feel as though I’ve been putting my health in jeopardy all these years by not drinking the stuff. Fortunately, it seems that it’s the caffeine which is responsible for the benefits… again. Since I still cannot stomach coffee, I guess I’m just going to have to increase my uptake of soda and tea.
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A few weeks ago, I mentioned a new technique which allowed synthetic enzymes to undergo 'evolution in a test tube' that mimics natural evolution. The resulting enzymes were apparently 1,000,000 times faster than the original enzyme. Here is a much more detailed explanation of the technique by Ed Yong over at “Not Exactly Rocket Science.”
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Several weeks ago, I mentioned that Kyle over at the Chem Blog was considering shutting down his blog. His reason for doing so was due to the grief he was taking from colleagues as his anonymity had slowly evaporated. (His comments tended to be a little scathing.) You may have noticed I never mention my name, the company for which I work, or the names of the schools which I attended. Since the majority of my posts are meant to be lighthearted and since I do not expect to be criticizing other people’s research very often, I may be being overly cautious, but for right now, that’s the way I’m going to roll.

Over time, astute readers will probably begin to figure out where I went to school. That’s fine. Although there were a few professors with whom I was at odds during my Ph.D. project, I doubt that any of them will ever read this blog. Work, however, is a different story. I’ve been very careful not to reference my workplace, the projects I’m involved in (even if publicly known), or my co-workers (well except for the guy who destroyed my CRC). I’m not saying that my company would be upset if they knew I was blogging, but I’m not saying they wouldn’t be upset either. I just don’t know. I’ve heard enough stories about co-workers who were released because they were looking at the wrong internet sites during work, or who accidentally emailed a risqué joke to the wrong person. I know they track the websites we visit. I know the IT department receives a message every time our firewall blocks me from visiting a restricted site. The company is very concerned with its reputation and I would not be at all surprised to find that our company hires other firms to search the internet for employee based content. Paranoid? Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong either.