Very cool time lapse photography taken from the International Space Station:
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
The View from the International Space Station
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Category Archives: Interesting
In Praise of a Great Cup of Joe
Anyone who knows me knows I love a good cup of coffee. Love is an understatement, but appropriate adjectives would likely be unsafe for young/workplace readers so let's just stick with unadulterated love. That's why I totally get this letter, written by the the third Secretary of the Smithsonian:
Dear Mary,
I hope this will interest you.
Affectionately,
Your Uncle Samuel
The best coffee in Carlsbad is at the Posthof, and is as good as I know of anywhere. I have been looking into the kitchen this morning and seeing it prepared. The statement that figs or anything of the kind are employed is legendary. There is absolutely nothing but coffee, and it owes its superior excellence to the freshness and the pains taken in its making.
1. The coffee in the berry.
There are four kinds of coffee bean employed: the Menado, Ceylon, Java and Preanger. I do not know the English equivalents for the first and last. They are of very different sizes indeed, and this difference in size of the berry must make it difficult to burn them equally.
2. Roasting.
The roasting is done in a rotary wire mesh over a slow fire. The coffee is renewed three times daily. Each time 10 to 20 pounds of coffee is roasted, a girl turning the handle, and the process occupying in each case nearly an hour. In spite of this care, when the beans come out some of them are very dark and these are picked out.
3. Grinding.
The coffee is then ground to a very uniform fineness, something between the head of a small pin and a coarse sand. It is in no ways ground into a snuff-like powder, but is always clearly perceptible as particles between the fingers. The color of the ground coffee is a light chestnut.
4. Mixing with water.
Somewhat over one-quarter of a pound of the ground coffee is measured in a tin and this is emptied into a tin pail holding, I suppose, four to six gallons. Into this is poured, actually boiling soft water, enough to make 10 portions of the coffee. This softness is considered so important, that if the water be at all hard, a little soda is first added to soften it. The coffee and water are then well stirred with a spoon, and the lid put on and allowed to remain two minutes, when it is poured onto a thick straining cloth placed in a tin vessel with large holes at the bottom through which it drains into a white stone pitcher, which is itself set in boiling water. From this pitcher it is poured into the little ones in which it is served on the table.
5. Serving.
The amount of coffee and water just described will, as I have said, make 10 portions, each of which will be, with the addition of the milk, two of the little cups here, or hardly one good breakfast cup as we have it at home. It is served ordinarily with milk which has been boiled, and which has a little whipped cream on top.
The one criticism I can make is that the coffee with the above proportion of water, is served too diluted for a café au lait. It would be better made half as strong again and diluted with a larger proportion of hot milk.
Now those who know me also no I can't stand anything in my coffee – cream or sugar is a degradation if you ask me – but I totally get how into the coffee he is. A lousy cup of coffee is more likely to ruin the start of my day than some jackalope cutting me off in traffic, and a great cup of coffee is almost a guarantee for a great day.
Obviously They Didn’t Test Moravian Women
A (perhaps flawed) study identified a correlation between heavy coffee consumption and lower rates of depression…and/or churchgoing. I'm guessing Moravians, thee of the Lovefeast, weren't included in the study.
Forget Being Outsourced, We’re Being Siliconsourced
An interesting take on disappearing jobs:
…digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie.
But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines.
Found via Cone.
Sentiment Analysis of the Bible
I was taught to never talk about politics, religion or sex in polite company, but since neither you or I is polite I'm going to talk a little religion here. Some smart people applied sentiment analysis to the Bible and created a very interesting graphic. I also like their little descriptor:
Things start off well with creation, turn negative with Job and the patriarchs, improve again with Moses, dip with the period of the judges, recover with David, and have a mixed record (especially negative when Samaria is around) during the monarchy. The exilic period isn’t as negative as you might expect, nor the return period as positive. In the New Testament, things start off fine with Jesus, then quickly turn negative as opposition to his message grows. The story of the early church, especially in the epistles, is largely positive.
Here's their description of sentiment analysis:
Sentiment analysis involves algorithmically determining if a piece of text is positive (“I like cheese”) or negative (“I hate cheese”). Think of it as Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes backed by quantitative data.
I'm beginning to understand why Bible study sometimes creeped me out.
Hyperdecanting
For you winos out there (I prefer wino to wine connosieur since being called wino makes me feel less snooty) here's an interesting way to decant wine:
Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender. I just pour the wine in, frappé away at the highest power setting for 30 to 60 seconds, and then allow the froth to subside (which happens quickly) before serving. I call it “hyperdecanting.”
Generation X Speaks Up
I've always been fascinated by the generation thing, probably because all I've ever heard about was how the generation I just missed, the Baby Boomers, had such an outsized influence on the world and how their evil progeny, the Echo Boomers, are likely to have an even greater impact. My generation seems to be the forgotten Olive Loaf in the generational sandwich.
I can remember going to a middle school that had empty lockers because all the Boomers were gone and they left over capacity in their wake. I can also remember sitting in a class in college and having a professor point out that my generation, the yet-to-be-identified Generation X, probably wouldn't have Social Security waiting for us because the Boomers would live longer, and in greater numbers, than the program's designers had intended and that he couldn't imagine the political will of anyone to make the changes necessary to keep Social Security viable for later generations. Generation X has literally been joking about not having Social Security since before we even really understood what it was, and sadly we have no reason to think it's really a joke.
I was wondering when someone would write, say or do something that would capture Generation X's spirit and if the 1,280+ comments on a blog post titled Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It are any indication I think I might have found it:
Generation X is a journeyman. It didn’t invent hip hop, or punk rock, or even electronica (it’s pretty sure those dudes in Kraftwerk are boomers) but it perfected all of them, and made them its own. It didn’t invent the Web, but it largely built the damn thing. Generation X gave you Google and Twitter and blogging; Run DMC and Radiohead and Nirvana and Notorious B.I.G. Not that it gets any credit.
But that’s okay. Generation X is used to being ignored, stuffed between two much larger, much more vocal, demographics. But whatever! Generation X is self-sufficient. It was a latchkey child. Its parents were too busy fulfilling their own personal ambitions to notice any of its trophies—which were admittedly few and far between because they were only awarded for victories, not participation…
Generation X is tired.
It’s a parent now, and there’s always so damn much to do. Generation X wishes it had better health insurance and a deeper savings account. It wonders where its 30s went. It wonders if it still has time to catch up…
Whatever. It’s cool.
The post appears to have been written in response to a New Yorker article about the travails of Echo Boom generation, and I think it really does reflect how a lot of folks my age feel.
Whatever.
Will I Ever Outgrow the Wonder?
I've been an enthusiastic online traveler for about 15 years, maybe a little longer, and I've always wondered when the wonder of it would wear off. As long as I keep stumbling across things like this blog post about triangular letters used by Soviet soldiers to send news back home from the front in World War II I doubt it ever will. An excerpt:
Folding had one more advantage: that the content of the letter was easy to check. Therefore, it was forbidden to seal them in any way. The censors working at the front did not primarily search for letters reviling the system – according to the analysis of the surviving front letters, almost none of them includes any political reference or Stalin’s name –, but whether they include any indication from which military movements and plans could be deduced. These were erased with black ink, but the mail was still transmitted.
The Great Boatlift
Found this over at Ed Cone's blog. A 9/11 story that I'd not seen before.
Genius or Nuts?
I can't decide if this is genius or nutiness.
Befuddled 