A scientist has put common kitchen myths to the test, finding many wanting. Like these:
Apparently there are at least these 20 reasons that smart people fail. If you want to look into why dumb people are overconfident (or the Dunning-Kruger effect),
1. Lack of motivation.
2. Lack of impulse control.
3. Lack of perserverance and perseveration.
4. Using the wrong abilities.
5. Inability to translate thought into action.
6. Lack of product orientation.
7. Inability to complete tasks.
8. Failure to initiate.
9. Fear of failure.
10. Procrastination.
11. Misattribution of blame.
12. Excessive self-pity.
13. Excessive dependency.
14. Wallowing in personal difficulties.
15. Distractibility and lack of concentration.
16. Spreading oneself too think or too thick.
17. Inability to delay gratification.
18. Inability to see the forest for the trees.
19. Lack of balance between critical, analytical thinking and creative, synthetic thinking.
20. Too little or too much self-confidence.
I wonder how many of these factors must be present before intelligence must be questioned.
I have, unless you notice any major dramas dear reader, finished playing with my design.
It should look a little something like this:
If it doesn’t, could you let me know (and tell me what browser you’re using too…) Could you also let me know if you really hate it? Or like it. That would be great.
I was all set to roast the beans at the end of step two (which followed step one).
And doing so would probably have proved disastrous. The husks were still on. That would have thrown out all my roasting calculations and I probably would have set the beans on fire in my roaster. This DPI article was useful. Although it suggested storing the dry beans in a sack for two weeks before continuing with the hulling process (which may have saved me significant time).
Removing the husks proved to be the most time consuming process to date – and the most mechanised. Even with the help of modern technology (a food processor) the process require sorting through every bean by hand and often removing either flakes of husk or the whole husk – depending on how effectively the food processor had worked on the individual bean.
I started shelling the beans by hand – as though they were peanuts.
Before turning to the food processor. The plastic blades (recommended by the DPI) took too long – and the beans probably did more damage to the blades than the blades did to the beans. So I switched to the metal ones. This process was very loud. I started at about 11.30pm, and then decided our neighbours might not appreciate the machine gun like sound.
I enlisted some help, and even with these three dedicated shellers the process took about two hours.
These beans (approx 430gm worth) are now roast ready, but they’ll lose another 20% of their weight in the roast – so I’m going to end up with around 350gm of roasted coffee for my troubles.
It turns out world cup success does not depend on the ability of the players a team fields – but rather the presence of a particular parasite within their home country. This parasite, Toxoplasma Gondii (which sounds like the name of a footballer), may influence the natural dopamine levels of those infected. This diagram (from wikipedia) shows its life cycle, though it omits the bit where it helps win a World Cup for its host.
From Slate:
If we set aside the qualifying rounds (in which teams can play to a draw) and focus on matches with a clear winner, the results are very compelling. In the knockout round of this year’s tournament, eight out of eight winners so far have been the teams whose countries had higher rates of Toxo infection. If we go back to the 2006 World Cup, seven out of eight knockout-round winners could be predicted by higher Toxo rates. The one exception to the rule was Brazil’s defeat of Ghana, a match between two nations that each have very high rates. (Aside from having the winningest team in World Cup history, Brazil has quite a few cases of Toxo: Two out of three Brazilians are infected.)
It gets better. Rank the top 25 FIFA team countries by Toxo rate and you get, in order from the top: Brazil (67 percent), Argentina (52 percent), France (45 percent), Spain (44 percent), and Germany (43 percent). Collectively, these are the teams responsible for eight of the last 10 World Cup overall winners. Spain, the only one of the group never to have won a cup, is no subpar outlier—the Spaniards have the most World Cup victories of any perpetual runner-up. “
Coincidence? Perhaps. But I wish I’d read this before tipping a World Cup winner.
I’ve been on some pretty awesome camps in my life. Mid Year Camps and National Training Events were the highlights of my time at university. They were life changing events. But I’d probably swap half of one of those experiences for a trip to Camp Bacon. Activities include bacon bingo, bacon trivia, sharing bacon recipes, and all you can eat bacon.
The camp is run by a guy with serious bacon credentials – the author of the Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon.
The Washington Post covered the first event…
One family travelled 21 hours to be there. That’s dedication. The group shared bacon recipes, bacon making tips, and bacon poetry:
The Pig, if I am not mistaken,
Supplies us sausage, ham, and Bacon.
Let others say his heart is big,
I think it stupid of the Pig.
M.S Corley, a freelance cover designer, redrew the covers of all the Harry Potter novels as Penguin Classics. They’re pretty cool.
Have you seen Nike’s “Write the Future” advert during the World Cup? It was brilliant. A viral masterpiece. It was everything Adidas’ involvement with the World Cup was not (they made the Jabulani ball) – popular, successful, brand-building. And then this curse struck. Every player in the ad campaign has been bundled out, somewhat unceremoniously. Even Roger Federer, who made a cameo in the ad, was knocked out of Wimbledon prematurely.
“Because Write the Future was so well-executed, and because it became so popular so quickly, it effectively functioned as an inspiring prelude to the kickoff. And when that decisive moment came for Rooney (or Ronaldo, Ribéry, Cannavaro, et al) and they crumpled exactly as they had done in Nike’s vision, the entire meaning of the ad shifted away from “just do it” and toward a prognostication of doom.”
From Slate.
Maybe this is what got Tiger Woods.
Rule One for running competitions online in the 4 Chan era must surely be “though shalt not run competitions that allow unsolicited responses…”
Teen “sensation” Justin Bieber ran a web competition for fans to choose his next tour destination. 4Chan got wind of it. Justin Bieber, if he honours the competition, is now going to North Korea.
The BBC reported the story with unwarranted seriousness.
“Given the fact that almost all citizens of North Korea are denied internet access and there are restrictive controls over all media, it is unlikely that any of the votes have actually come from within the country.”
Really?
Via BoingBoing.
GeekDad has launched a great bacon odyssey aiming to try as many bacon flavoured products and bacon recipes as they can lay their hands on. It’s been a heady ride filled with porky goodness. This burger looks sensational.
The series is worth watching.
Foxtel’s Football commentator Simon Hill, in a piece assessing Luis Suarez’s goal line handball, suggests that the “communist” mechanism by which we assess and participate in sport is at the root of our misunderstanding of the game, and our failure to embrace it. Seems a little heavy handed really… I reckon our failure to embrace the game is linked to our failure to master it.
Many in Australia loathe football’s unpredictable nature – it plays havoc with their established order. In their sports – more communist by nature – only the strongest win by imposing their power on the weak. Sportsmen like Suarez wouldn’t get near their team – he is too small, too renegade, too individual.
In their communist world, draft picks and salary caps ensure everyone remains equal. Even bottom place on the ladder is rewarded by the party comrades, and of course, there is no promotion or relegation….everything must stay the same.
To them, toughness is a mantra. An indoctrination akin to political brainwashing, where the ability to give (or take) a punch is the sole measure of manliness. Not individual thought, nor creativity – just sheer brute force. It’s how communist regimes work.
To continue where we left off…
I soaked the beans in water for about 48 hours – changing the water a few times, discarding about 30 floating (second rate or dead) beans.
Getting them dry presented a bit of a problem. I tried putting them outside on a couple of trays in the sun – but only the top dried.
They were still a little slimy, and the guide I read said they should be coarse. So I put them back in cold water and rinsed them a few more times before bundling them up in paper towel.
Like a coffee bean sausage.
This happened last night – so the sun wasn’t out. I improvised using a heat lamp we have for our turtles.
Which worked. I have dry coffee beans.
Dry coffee beans which weigh almost half what they weighed soaking wet…
I’m anticipating about 400gm of roasted coffee from 2kg of fruit and about 5 hours of work. Ouch.
Jack Streat builds guns. Awesome guns. Made out of Lego. They fire lego bullets. This is what happens when boys don’t stop playing with their toys. There are videos of his guns in working order on YouTube.
This Freezer is so cold for so long it keeps dinosaurs frozen.
It’s currently a bit messy. Working on it. This post is actually mainly to clear the cache so I can check out my changes.
That is all.