Cats supposedly fail the mirror test, but I think they're just disinterested. There are a lot of videos of cats being shown live video of themselves and their owners, with the owner's face modified to look like a cat. In many of these the startled cat immediately turns around to look at their owner, seemingly indicating an awareness that the video they were being shown contained themselves and that the weird cat-like human creature seen in the video was behind them.
Very late comment, but I find this truly amazing. Yes, some cats are too dumb to fully grasp what's happening, but they do give the human a look of concern. Their reactions could be manipulated, but I find interesting how dogs look forth and back, while most cats remain fixated in the real human. Not very rigorous, but very cool anyway.
I've always thought a good mirror test shouldn't be just a mark, but something that looks like a venomous insect, to stimulate the subject to look for it.
I don't think these devices save time at all. In the time it takes me to navigate the through the touch-screen UIs of these fancy toys I can microwave a cup of instant coffee and start drinking it before the fancy machine starts brewing anything. The results are indistinguishable.
I can. I love all sorts of preparations, and really enjoy the broad range of flavor profiles out there. I only drink instant coffee when I'm staying at somebody's house. I don't insult their hospitality and drink it.
For many people, the cost (both labor and monetary) of "good" coffee doesn't come with a corresponding increase in their enjoyment. You won't change their mind.
Nope. Nor can I tell the difference in a blind taste test between white and red wine. Probably most wine snobs can't either, and probably most coffee snobs couldn't really tell the difference in a blind test.
If it were true in my case for instant coffee, I would be ALL over that.
Instant coffee is not even in the same category as brewed coffee. I am by no means a coffee snob. I do grind beans right before I brew, but they are the lowest priced beans I can find that taste good to me (which is reasonably cheap).
I'd love to just microwave a cup, but that stuff tastes nasty.
What are the two closest flavors that you can differentiate? Because those are some massive gaps in flavor to not taste any differently. Can you tell different brands of soda apart? Styles of beer? Does all liquor taste the same?
I haven't tasted cola in years; back when I drank it I believed I could tell the difference but today I doubt I ever could. I can tell a pilsner apart from a stout. All whiskey tastes like whiskey, but whiskey doesn't taste like gin.
I don't believe I have an impaired sense of taste. I'm just highly skeptical of the objectivity of my sense of taste. Marketting and branding probably has more influence than anything else when comparing two drinks in the same category (wine-to-wine, coffee-to-coffee, etc.)
You're referring to the Brochet experiment? That wasn't a blind test: the white wine was dyed red with a flavourless dye, so there was an element of deception involved.
Biased sample. There are many confounding factors why if you cannot tell the difference, it is likely your family can’t either.
I do like the idea of testing my wine drinking friends, who are definitely not snobs. I would bet money they would mostly pick the difference between a normal: Oaked Chardonnay, Reisling, Savignon Blanc, and Cabernet Savignon. I suspect the red wine drinkers could tell some of the red wine varietals too (I would struggle there).
I would take that bet. I'm prepared to believe there are wines that if the only question is 'white or red' I might not know, especially if an ambiguous temperature. (Most people are accustomed to drinking white 'too' cold, and red 'too' warm - so obviously in such a test you have to remove that cue, but then what do you choose and still get a good fair test?) but there are also wines that I could tell you which of two grapes it is with nothing but my teeth. (I wouldn't say I'm a snob, but I'm sure you'd disagree.. meh, whatever.)
Coffee.. geeze, much more so. If the only thing available is a jug of brewed coffeewater that you pump out nice and bubbly, as at hotel breakfast bars or conference centres, I have to really 'need' it, and then I pack it with sugar to take the taste away. (I don't ordinarily drink coffee with sugar at all.) Instant, I just can't drink. I could definitely tell you the difference between instant 'coffee' and real, it's not a case of having a preference and better 'notes' like 'essence of snobby bullshit' - one I would be able to drink, and the other I would want to spit out before it even hit my lips.
> Probably most wine snobs can't either, and probably most coffee snobs couldn't really tell the difference in a blind test.
I think you are concluding too much for the data points you have (of your personal experience).
I have a similar palate (lack thereof) like yours, but even my family members can tell when I've (say) used "too much" garlic in a recipe--when I can't even tell that the garlic is even there in the final product. (I only use it because the recipe says to.) Using a (e.g.) different marinade for chicken does not change my perception of it much when I chow down, but it does for others eating it.
I once heard the explanation that the 'flavour' of a food is made of the taste (tongue), aroma (smell), and even texture of a food. Adam Ragusa made a video on the smell part recently:
I suspect that I (and you given your descriptions) may have some kind of lowered sense of smell when comes to intaking foods and beverages, and so do not perceive the "tastes" as much as some other people. For example I cannot tell the difference in a lager, stout, etc, types of beer (they're all 'yeast water' to me), but I know people who love beer so much that if you put down a random one in from of them they could ID the style and often the maker and make.
The flavours that do not exist in your experience may in fact do so for folks who have senses that are more sensitive than yours. Epicurious has a series of videos where experts do a blind taste test on "Cheap vs Expensive" products:
There certainly are folks that pre-judge things by simply knowing which is which beforehand, but to say that 'there are no differences' is swinging the pendulum the other way too much as well IMHO.
Find a few coffee gear testing reviews where they use the same beans, using the same grinder, and yet different brewers cause slightly different results as perceive by the testers.
America's Test Kitchen is a good source, as they often have a dozen-plus folks do blind tests to find the most-liked ("best") product.
I'm given instant sufficiently infrequently that it always comes as a shock -- I'll decline if I know it's going to be instant coffee, so I am indeed in the state of taking a mouthful of something that I expect to be regular coffee and discovering to my distaste that it's actually instant.
And I'm definitely not a coffee snob. But I can tell you that bog standard Tesco "house blend" coffee tastes nicer in a Philips Solimo machine than in an Aeropress, and nicer in the Aeropress than in a cafetière. And Amazon branded Solimo sachets aren't quite as nice as the ground coffee in the machine, but are good enough for every-day use.
IoT terrifies me and I'd never buy one of these internet-connected gizmos but let me play devil's advocate: you could be coming home from work and, as you know you're about 6 or 7 minutes away, you instruct the machine to make a cup of coffee so that it has time to cool, and maybe you also turn the AC on, etc. It's the exact fantasy being sold to people who buy them and it does, in a way, save time.
Although, personally, I'd question anyone buying these, much less taking out their phone while they're driving to tell a "smart" coffee maker to brew a cup.
In the UK we make instant coffee by putting water in an electric kettle, letting it boil, putting the instant coffee in a mug, adding the boiled water, optionally adding milk and sugar. (For ground coffee, we use a cafetiere.) But I've read that Americans don't have kettles.
Surely a kettle (ahem) boils down to a simple resistor (the heating element) that gets good and hot, boiling the water. P=VI, so if you halve the voltage (wrt the UK) you need to sink twice the current. I=V/R, so if you need to double the current (and voltage is fixed) you need to halve the resistance.
Is the problem that they're rare enough that they're all import kettles safe at 110 but designed for higher voltages?
The maximum current you can draw is based on the ratings of the plugs, cabling, fuses, circuit breakers, etc. Regular US appliances use less than 15A. I believe UK is similar at about 13A. The voltage available almost doubles the available power.
Yes, and a kettle is a likely candidate for the cause of a trip, but (in normal operation) the vast majority aren't near that, a little over half.
AmazonBasics kettle (first result for searching kettle) for example is rated 1.5kW.
I'm just sceptical that all American kettles can suck, and mains voltage be the cause. If that were the only reason, and otherwise you'd all love them, you'd have a 'kettle socket' on higher amperage, as for ovens (here too, 32A).
Yeah. American homes do have 240V across a split phase but this is virtually always used only for heavy appliances like electric ovens. Split phase 240V for countertop appliances isn't a thing and NEMA 14 outlets aren't installed in locations that would accommodate such appliances.
If I were made to wear such a device, all it would have to report is the murderous intent I would have for the jackasses that made the device, and those that made me wear it.
I think most bosses are probably not stupid enough to think this is a good idea.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is asking whether firms which eventually would employ this tech have a competitive advantage over those that don't. If the incentive exists it only takes complicity to allow the system to naturally run its course. Most bosses may not be stupid enough, but are they complicit enough?
The P and V operations on semaphores are from Dutch. I find this difficult, "The V kind of looks like a down arrow.. but wait no that's increment. The P could mean plus.. wait no that's decrement..."
As an Emacs newbie (less than one year of usage) I could not disagree more. I disagree with basically everything you just said. If somebody wants notepad++, they should just use that instead of trying to turn Emacs into something it never was.
As an olive branch: Perhaps Emacs could prompt the user on first run what sort of control scheme they want. Emacs standard, Evil mode, or some notepad clone could be modes that ship with Emacs by default (evil already does.)
(I chose evil, because I came from vim. Maybe this is why Emacs was so easy for me to pick up. But by the same token, Vim is arcane compared to Notepad style editors but is quite popular, so I outright reject the hypothesis that Emacs has lower numbers because it's arcane. Rather, I think it has a marketting ''problem'' relative to Vim.)
> But by the same token, Vim is arcane compared to Notepad style editors but is quite popular, so I outright reject the hypothesis that Emacs has lower numbers because it's arcane
vim might be arcane compared to Notepad, but I've been successfully using vim as an editor of choice in ssh pretty much throughout the whole uni without knowing more than :w and :q (at which point it basically was a notepad). I was ever completely lost in Emacs though, with its nested C-x, M-x seemingly without rhyme or reason. I wouldn't "outright" reject that hypothesis without more scrutiny.
Anecdotally, I've been an Emacs (Spacemacs) user for a few years after that, and I never got used to all the commands I would use on a daily - but not hourly - basis, having to always look those up. But, as one of the other top-level posts said, what made me switch in the end were the language servers.
Vim drops noobs straight into normal mode, meaning the moment they start trying to type they get confused. I know that's what happened to me. The arcane nature of Emacs doesn't make itself apparent nearly so fast.
Yeah honestly I think a config “wizard” when you start up to get some basic standard stuff ready to go, like package installs, themes, evil/CUA/traditional keybindings, LSP stuff, some major modes, etc. would go a long way towards making it less intimidating and more productive out of the gate.
Also some kind of popup help for keybindings like you get with the Doom/Spacemacs leader key would I think help a lot.
I certainly don’t think that changing the color scheme or other “chrome” improvements are going to make any meaningful difference, and honestly the discussion in the article sounded kind of condescending, assuming that the only reason people might find emacs difficult to get started with is because it doesn’t have cat videos or a dark color scheme.
I can't say I'm a fan of the GUI (part of this is me not needing most of its many features, which are doubtlessly useful for others), but the Calibre command line tool `ebook-convert` is fantastic and handles conversions pandoc can't. I love Calibre for this.
Compilation of such reactions that was posted on HN a fee days ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jto2peSOLac