Five things I never remember
- Get my work done tonight, even if I’m tired. I will not get up early to do it. Ever.
- Never send e-mail after taking Ambien.
- Always check if it’s game day before driving to Berklee.
- Never snack right from the box.
- I cannot get to Coolidge Corner in 20 minutes.
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Hill of beans
I love chocolate-covered coffee beans. The other day, I bought a 10-oz pack from Starbucks and ate about half of it in one sitting. Then I felt very, very, very awake. I got to wondering just how many of those buzz-nuggets are equivalent to a shot of espresso.
The math alone was pretty revealing. I have a one-shot iced latte every morning, and I have to put about two handfuls of beans in my espresso maker about once a week. So if two handfuls = seven shots, one shot is not a whole lot of beans. Certainly not, say, the 20 to 30 I tend to eat at once. Gulp.
A quick google confirms it: One shot of espresso, or one cup of coffee, equals five or six chocolate-covered coffee beans. Be careful out there, folks.
I may have to switch to chocolate-covered cocoa nibs. That’s right: Some wonderful cocoa maker actually said to themselves, “I love eating the sweetest, richest part of the cocoa bean, but if only there was some way to make it more chocolatey.”
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I don't wonder -- I google.
If I’m curious about something, it’s usually only a matter of hours before I google for the conventional wisdom on it. I’m pretty thorough, and I’ve got a knack for finding the right search keywords, so there’s not much I can’t find. Why not, I said to myself, collect all that mundane knowledge in one handy, publicly searchable place? So here it is.
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Dicing an onion
So simple it’s crazy. To dice an onion quickly, cut it in half. Then slice each half vertically from the stem to the root, but – and here’s the trick – don’t slice all the way to the root! Leave the root intact, and it holds the onion together while you slice it. Make the horizontal slices, and the layers of the onion form the third dimension of the dice. The last slice cuts the root off.
Obvious.. in retrospect…
Obvious.. in retrospect…PS – despite the well-worn phrase “slices and dices”, no home food processors actually dice things; they slice or shred. If you want a machine that dices, you’d need to spend $2000 on a commercial model.
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Birthday Paradox
I’m a pretty skeptical guy; I don’t believe in homeopathy, astrology, or premonitions, and I read James Randi on a regular basis (though his vitriol impedes his ability to convince the faithful). And while I’ve heard of the birthday paradox before, I never quite extended the analogy the way Thomas Gilovich does in How We Know What Isn’t So.
Here’s the paradox: In a group of 23 people, there’s a 50% chance that two will share the same birthday. And if the group has 60 or more, the chances grow to 99%.
That’s it. (It’s not really a paradox; just a counter-intuitive fact.) How can that be? If there are 23 people, and the odds of any given birthday are 1/365…
Ah, but we didn’t ask the probability of Bob and Alice sharing a birthday; that would indeed be low. But because we’re asking about any two people, you’re looking at the sum of the probabilities of each pair sharing a birthday – and with 23 people, there are 253 possible pairs.
Now shift gears. Carol has an odd dream about Donna, her old college roommate. That day, Donna calls her! What are the odds of such a coincidence?
Well, the odds of Carol dreaming about Donna (of all the people she could have dreamed of), and of Donna then choosing to look up Carol (of all her other old college friends) on that day (of all other days to start reminiscing) are quite low. But, as with the birthday paradox, that’s not actually the question you’re asking!
What you’re asking is: What are the odds that something would happen to Carol today that would seem uncoincidental enough to convince you of her ability to dream predictively? That opens up a lot of possibilities. She might have dreamed of a plane crash, or of a crime being committed, or of meeting someone new, and something somewhere in her life or the newspaper might have happened which matches one of her dreams. And the dream and event might not have happened on the same day; if Carol dreamed of a plane crash Monday, and a jet crashed on Thursday, you’d probably still be spooked.
In fact, since the story’s being told to you, we might ask the probability that anyone you know might have encountered a coincidence in the past few days. Pretty high, eh?
Real-life example from the book: Luis Alvarez, a physicist, read a newspaper article that began a series of musings, which eventually led him to think of an old college friend. When he got to the obituary section, he discovered that this old friend had died. Strange coincidence!
Alvarez set out to calculate the rough probability of such a thing happening. Factoring in the number of people the average person knows, how often people think of their old acquaintances, etc., and calculated that “the probability of thinking of an acquaintance roughly five minutes before learning of that person’s death is roughly 3 × 10 ^ -5.” That means that in the United States alone, it happens ten times a day. Rare, but certainly not unexplainable.
Neat stuff.
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