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What’s something that’s more complicated than most people realize?
Yes, I realize the answer is “everything.”
I intend the question to be less about simply naming answers and more about surfacing their associated complexity.
Walk us through something you know well so that we can appreciate how not simple it actually is!
Waiting tables. At least in the USA, where service expectations and guest etiquette are overly complicated.
Most people who have never worked in a restaurant think it is very simple. Monkey take order. Monkey tell kitchen. Monkey bring food. Like it's the same as ordering from the counter, only you get to sit down and someone does the walking and talking for you.
In reality, it is a delicate balance of timing, multitasking, problem solving, anticipating needs, and most importantly, reading and reacting to subtle social cues from the guests and non-subtle cues from the kitchen staff.
Most restaurants take steps to set their servers up for success before the guests have sat down. Tables are arranged in sections, stations are stocked and positioned in places to maximize efficiency, sections are filled in rotation, and tables are sat in intervals to prevent the kitchen from getting overwhelmed. The kitchen can make great food, have everything prepared, be staffed with great cooks, and run like a well-oiled machine, but at the end of the day, the decision making and coordination between the servers and support staff will determine whether or not the people leave happy and/or come back again.
It's hard to explain, so here's an example of a standard scenario from a two minute stretch in a six hour shift. You're the server and your section covers the 200s.
At 201, you have a group of three middle-aged ladies who ordered their food and drinks at the same time. You just brought them their cocktails, and the lady in seat two was really torn on whether she wanted a skinny margarita or a regular margarita. After much back and forth, she decided on a skinny margarita, but your years of service tells you that you better go check on her to make sure it isn't too sour. They like you and tonight is a rare night out with friends, so they want to flirt and joke around with you when you visit the table.
At 202, you have an early-30s couple that have been engaged in conversation for the past ~15 minutes. You've already swung by twice and they seem like they're on a third or fourth date. The guy seems a little irritable with servers so you don't want to push it, but you notice that their menus are to the side. Better get their order soon.
At 203, you have a family of four and the host gave you a heads up that they were pushy and "in a hurry," but when you greeted them the mom was really nice but also very chatty. Dad not so much. They're definitely going to want to put their food in soon. Also, the boy at seat 2 is 14 so he just crushed his sprite and the dad is drinking at the same pace with his g&t. Gonna have to stay on top of the refills.
204 is another group of four. You rang in their order 13 minutes ago so naturally someone at the table just said, "Jesus, we've been waiting 20 minutes already." Thankfully, your food runner is about to bring them their meal. Meanwhile, 205 just finished their meal and asked for the check, which you just dropped off. Your busser is clearing the last of their plates right now.
So in the next two minutes, you need to:
Unfortunately, 202 did want to order food. 203 had a shitload of questions and modifications. After you brought back the margarita, 201 took one sip and asked for a paloma instead. 205 paid in fucking hundred dollar bills and needs 73 bucks in change, which is locked up in the office. And you have no idea what's going on at 204 and can't find your busser. Meanwhile, the guests are thinking, "how hard is it to get my food/drink/change..."
And while all that is going on, you need to maintain your composure, you need to match the energy of the tables you're serving, and you need to anticipate what they might need and when based off these brief interactions with them. Oh, and none of the guests can raise their hand or call for you if they need something because all of this is ridiculous and stupid.
It's like performing a dance and each restaurant plays a different song with different beats. You can be a great waiter at one restaurant then start a new job somewhere else and fall flat on your face. Anyway, don't forget to tip :)
I feel stressed out just reading this.
As a neurospicy, introverted, Hong Konger, most meals, I just want to be left alone, eat my food in silence (one hand on spoon one hand on phone), pay at the front and leave. I'll grab my own menu on the way in, flag you down when I'm ready to order, and help myself to napkins cutlery hot water whatever myself. Please do not come ask me how the food is or if I need a minute or if I want to see dessert menu. Tokyo subway station ramen is peak dining: buy ticket, hand over ticket, sit down eat leave. Tiny Italian Bistro with no menu just nod for "carne?" was also fantastic.
I worked in restaurants for five years then took a teaching job in Beijing. Being able to just sit back and raise my hand when I wanted something was a radicalizing experience haha. Part of me wanted to go back to my old managing job just to test that style of service. When America comes to its senses and makes me emporer, that policy will be part of my first 100 days.
It was stressful at times, but the stress didn't follow me like the stress from other jobs. Serving stress is kind of like the fear you get from a rollercoaster or haunted house - it's there in the moment, but once you're done, it goes away. The stress from my (US) teaching job on the other hand...oof, that shit stuck with me like the fear from being stalked by a homicidal maniac.
I worked part time as a teen at a fancy dessert cafe so I have a very chill version of your rush nights, and you're right, the stress is different. It's purposeful, anticipated, intermittent, and normal. Like rollercoast, or P.A.I.N of birth labour.
American service is in a death spiral is it not? People are stressed from their other areas of their lives and fine dining is one of the last bastions of the temporarily embarrassed millionaire dream. So they expect insanity, and then tips are what, 30% now?? Horrible feedback look. Gimme back my 10% if I can't have 0%.
Just this evening, I ate at a place where each table had a little tumbler cylinder, about the size of stein. One end was colored green and labelled "Service Please (I'm ready to order)". Flip it over and the other end was colored red and labelled "I'm good." I thought that was pretty clever solution. (This was in Seattle, so possibly a product of the "Seattle Freeze.")
Reminds me of what I've seen in Brazilian Steakhouses. Green = "bring me more meat", red = "I need a break."
Or in a Korean restaurant, a sort of (silent) door bell at each table, you ring for service otherwise they give you privacy. But I like the analogue nature and simplicity of the tumbler solution
Great breakdown. I solo'd PT at a hotel bar and restaurant on the odd weeknights and Sundays during university. 3 floors of tables, kitchen in basement, wine and beer customer-base and pub/Denny's-style food on a 2 page menu.
One Sunday, I get the call that an entire plane full of angry flyers have been given dinner and drink vouchers and they're all piling in near the end of my shift.
It's an insane scramble, I'm run off my feet and people are furious because who can keep up with drink orders, delivery and food for that many people.
No thanks from the ownership, just the expectation that I put in my time because hotels were great places to serve. The upside is that I end up getting tennis elbow from a variety of life factors, in saying to the Workers Compensation Board (injury at work reporting in Canada) that work partially contributed, the employee decides not to modify duties and instead fire me.
Since I've kept all correspondence, I then take them to human rights court and proceed to beat the hell out of them, walking away with a great settlement.
TLDR: Serving is hard and you'll often get abused by your customer-base and your employer - this especially the case in the mid 00's
Holy shit. Solo, 3 floors, and an uber rush of angry travelers WITH VOUCHERS? That might be the worst scenario I've ever heard. It's like a Bar Rescue stress test on steroids. Good god almighty. I'm glad everything worked out in the end.
Yeah, it was pretty wild. Thanks for the empathy - I still haven't gotten over it.
I used to read Waiter Rant and a couple of other waiter blogs in the 2000's. The window into the pressures, the complexities, the drama, all made me realize that 4 times in 5, if something doesn't go right, it's likely not your waiter's fault. So unless I watch the waiter literally spit in my food or insult me to my face, I tip over 20%. I also try to be the nicest, most patient, most understanding customer they've ever met.
It's not only waiters. Be kind and patient with all the front line workers you meet. If something makes you mad, it probably wasn't their fault. Blame the corporations that put them there to take the brunt on your anger and insulate themselves from the cost of their choices. Realize that you and the front line worker should see yourself as allies.
Now I am curious what sort of historic beef you have with Tyler. Is he just slow under pressure or did he mess up stuff before? ;)
Tyler is an amalgamation of every lousy bartender you've ever had to work with.
Tyler's problems are more about attitude than skill. Tyler is moody and drags his feet when you ask for things that are inconvenient for him. Tyler likes to finish his pointless conversation with the barback before acknowledging you. You're pretty sure Tyler intentionally forgets the garnish, but you can't prove it. Tyler hates when you wait at the bar for your drinks, even though you have literally nothing else to do. Forget about asking Tyler to do something while he is busy.
Sometimes you realize that you are being Tyler, which feels bad because Tyler is the worst.
Firstly I couldn't finish reading this because of hospo PTSD hahaha
Secondly I was about to make a comment about how this made me think of how bourdain would describe the job...then in saw your name and now I'm wondering are you not so secretly Anthony bourdain.
Live music.
This can mean a lot of things, so let's narrow it down (my point will still comes across). Let's talk small-scale live music, like a band at a bar, or a small vocal ensemble. I'm far from an expert, but I've spent maybe 3-ish years doing this, so I think I can say I've advanced beyond beginner level. There is so much that can be said about live sound, so I will
trystruggle to be brief.So your typical small band might have drums, a bass guitar, one or two guitars, one or more vocalists, and possibly a keyboard (or two). Each of them has to, ultimately, be connected to speakers -- somehow -- to be a part of the modern live sound experience.
You could connect any one of them directly to a loudspeaker, but that's almost never done except in the ultra simplest of cases (like one person talking into one mic), because all the sound sources need to be mixed together to produce the overall sonic experience. So, the sources need to be routed to a mixing device. There are several different cable types that facilitate this, and you need to know which one works for the given case. The basics are: TS, TRS, and XLR. You could judge based on whether the cable connector fits the jack/socket, but TS and TRS will physically go into the same socket type, but behave differently, and serve slightly different purposes. What goes through a given cable (the signal) can vary in a number of ways: balanced vs. unbalanced; stereo vs mono; line level vs mic level; which direction. Speakers are also connected to things, and the connectors of those cables also look similar to the cables for mics and musical instruments, so you need to use the right type for the job, or, in some cases, you can literally cause heat, damage, and possibly fire. You can also cause problems by overloading things by connecting stuff on one end that is too "strong" for the other end to handle.
There are lots and lots of different microphones in the world: different price points, different types (dynamic vs condensor vs ribbon), different polar patterns (the angles it picks up or rejects sound), different frequency response, different ideal purposes (vocal vs instrument; which kind of instrument). In a band situation, microphones need to be selected, positioned, and used right to get the best overall sound. The thing is, every live mic on stage will be in the vicinity of other sound sources -- but each mic is intended only to pick up one sound source. So, things have to be done to optimize the pickup of the intended sound source, but reject or avoid every other sound source. "Ah I just see one singer, so that means just one mic, so, there should be no sound pollution, right?" Well, no, because the drums are also miced, unless they're electronic drums, which usually not the case. "Okay, so just two mics, then, right?" No, because in most professional events, more than one mic is used. Way more than one. A basic drum kit (Wikipedia) will have (at least) a kick, a snare, a couple toms, a couple cymbals, and a hi-hat. In a professional concert, it'll be way more pieces. If budget allows (which, in professional situations, will almost always be the case), every individual piece of the drum kit will have its own mic. This is for mixing purposes, but more on that later. On top of all these drum mics, there may be mics on the amplifiers of the guitars, and the bass.
Mixing devices (known as mixing consoles, boards, or desks) usually have a myriad of inputs, and a legion of controls. On old analog desks (only seen on old boards, which tend to be used in low-budget situations), those controls would be in the form of knobs, sliders, and buttons. On modern digital desks, it's a electronic/computer interface of some kind, usually a hybrid of the classic controls with screens. You've got to know where and how to connect the cables from your various sound sources, and also how to connect your sound producers (loudspeakers, "monitors" (no, not the viewing kind), and auxiliary outputs, such as for broadcast or streaming).
Once you've plugged everything in in the right places, with the right cables, you now need to operate the mixing console, and do the live sound mixing. Except in the most amateur cases, this is not a "set and forget" thing. To have good sound throughout an event, someone(s) has to be actively operating the console pretty much at all times. Good sound doesn't just magically happen after you've plugged things in and turn things on. First is proper setup and preparation, and second is doing changes and tweaks from moment to moment as the live event takes place, and different things happen on stage. For a small-to-mid-sized concert, bringing equipment in and doing setup can take a few hours. Sometimes the venue has it in-house already, which can save some time, but, in either case, there is still sound check. That's where the various acts (main act, plus front acts, plus any speakers like emcees, comedians) come on stage in turn, and do a portion of whatever they'll do (make music, speak), and the audio crew makes sure what should be set up has been set up, and to "dial in" various settings and parameters, so that the acts don't just make sound, but make good sound. Depending on how many acts there are, that can take a few hours, also.
Mixing is more than just turning volume up and down for each channel (input). There are all kinds of effects that can be applied to a signal or group of signals. There's equalization (EQ) which adjusts relative loudness of frequencies (bass, mids, highs, etc.); frequency filters (like high pass, low pass); compression (controls spikes in volume, among other things); gating (cut out low-volume sound, like background noise); reverb; delay (echo) -- and that's just the basics, scratching the surface of audio signal processing. The one doing the mixing also needs to react and adjust to (compensate for?) whatever each of the performers are doing on stage, like poor mic technique, bursts of volume from sound changes (guitar pedal boards, keyboard patch changes), or pushing up a channel for a solo and pulling it down again after, or even just adjusting for differences from song to song. Mixing also involves balancing the sources relative to each other in the frequency space, like making the rhythm guitar not "invade" the space where the keys or the bass are, or making the bass guitar and the kick drum really work well together (and not against each other). Volumes (heh) have been written about the topic of mixing, and I won't dive into details. The point is: mixing can literally make or break a great show (as a performer, it's happened to me both ways!). A good sound engineer plays a crucial role in what, as a concert-goer, you hear as a good concert.
There's also the topic of monitoring, which is giving the performers some sound to hear, also. In times past, or if budget is low, that means speakers on the stage, pointing at the musicians instead of the audience. The point of these is to help the musicians perform better, for example, by helping them play in time and in tune. Past a certain budget level, monitoring means in-ear monitors instead of speakers -- kind of like ear buds (and attendant connections and equipment), but purpose-built for live music performance. Larger shows will have a separate sound engineer to control monitors, because the mix that comes out of those speakers is very different than what goes out of the main loudspeakers (because it's for a different purpose). Usually, each musician will want or need a different monitor mix, and the front-of-house (main) sound engineer has enough to deal with. Oh, and if the monitors are speakers, they contribute to the "this mic should only pick up this sound source" problem, multiplied by however many mics.
All of the above is mostly analog, but modern audio (except, again, in low-budget cases) has largely moved to digital, where the classic cables from sound sources are connected to an analog-digital interface nearby (e.g. on stage with the performers), and then digital cabling (Ethernet or fiber) runs from there to the mixing console, and whatever else needs it. Once you enter the digital world, you need to start considering all the usual fun IT networking things like IP addresses, DHCP, TCP vs UDP, protocols, etc.
I haven't even talked about the other big part of live performances, which is lighting and other visuals, like screens, fog, haze, lasers, and pyrotechnics. In larger events, there may even be mechanical things like moving platforms, acrobatic rigs, stuff like that. Not to mention stage manager, stage crew, all other semi- or non-technical personnel...
Even a modest, small-scale concert with an audience of about 1200 would have a technical team of probably some 10 to 20 people, at least a third of which are actively doing something as the live event happens. I didn't mean to write this much, and it isn't very organized, but, just know that a live event involves way more than just the performers you see on the stage.
One thing that I love about playing jazz is that in small bars you can easily do without most of those things.
I have a tiny improvised non-drum drum kit with a single condenser mic, pianist uses an electric piano which plugs directly into the mixing board, saxophone is loud as shit on its own but gets a mic because he sometimes switches to a flute, one mic for the accordion, two mics for vocals and done.
Zero need for any special mixing effects, though we sometimes cut a specific frequency to prevent feedback. No need for a sound guy, we carry a 16 channel digital mixing board and do the sound ourselves.
Since we're not very loud we can get away with just two tiny stage monitors, one for the singer and one for me and the pianist, but if the stage is small, we can play with just one for the three of us. The mix is then plugged into 2 active speakers and that's it. And the sound is great.
Microphones are difficult, but literally only because our singer wants to use vintage-looking mics since we play a lot of old music. Otherwise no issue.
Playing on larger stages is exactly the same except all the mixing is done by a sound guy and 2 monitors are mandatory.
We actually do not want in-ear monitors at all because with acoustic bands it feels worse when you don't hear your colleagues and the audience directly. I used to use them, but often only in one ear and it's just not comfortable, normal monitors are better.
Also worth noting that guitarsts regardless of genre often prefer standard monitoring instead of in-ear because they're used to playing with and using the feedback, not just from the guitar amp/speaker itself but from the monitors too. It depends on the band, sometimes big stadium show are done the opposite way, where the guitar amps and speakers are placed and mic'd entirelly off-stage in some back hallway so that there's zero interference on stage, but often times the interference is wanted and necessary.
Do you have any recordings online? I'm interested in hearing jazz that uses an accordion.
I'll send you a DM, I don't want to neccessarily doxx myself completely openly here. But the gist is that we mostly play old music and are heavily influenced by 40s and 50s lounge, which sometimes uses accordions and kind of softer accordion-like keyboard sounds, and while normally you'd have the issue of piano and accordion occupying a similar tonal and timbral space, our pianist has a split keyboard and plays the bass with his left hand and actual piano with his right, which leaves some harmonic space for the accordion.
That sounds amazing. If you're open to sending a link to more people, I'd love to hear what you're doing,
To expand for the readers, think about how all of it applies to theatrical productions. I only ever worked as a sound tech for a few high school plays and musicals in 1998sh with analog gear from the 70s or 80s and almost everything said applies. There is a reason that, especially in the past, a gigantic soundboard often occupies some really great seats.
Behind every mic'd person on a theater stage, there is a knob to help balance their volume. Making sure to flip it off when they leave stage and turn it back on just before they're due to come back. Sometimes througout a song and dance number to minimize chances of accidental noises when performers are not singing If there is an orchestra, add in those mics as well. That meant knowing the flow of the production almost as well as the performers themselves. It might have just been because we were the most amateur, but we took shifts on the board swapping out after a couple of scenes to rest our brains.
Every time you've ever heard feedback at a theater after seating but before show means a handful of sound techs are scrambling as fast as they can to fix some problem that just came up right now.
There is some alternate reality me who just spent 25 years slinging cable instead of SQL queries.
Are you me? Lol I was doing sound in HS tech theater about five years after you, and after that rather than SQL I've been slinging python bash and C++.
My HS girlfriend did the lighting for those productions and she did wind up making a career of that. Glad I went with computers - working in live productions is really competitive, high stress, has shitty hours and endless travel.
I'm wondering about the in-ear monitors and how they differ from the ear buds we're all familiar with. Presumably they're not Bluetooth because of latency? Are there any that are in a reasonable price range for hobbyists?
You can use basically any wired IEMs for monitoring, that includes ones sold for hifi listening, but most professionals use custom molded ones - instead of a silicone or foam tip they use epoxy resin molded to the shape of your outer ear - because those isolate well and they fit well. Just making the molds costs about 200 € around here, and they are usually used with pretty expensive IEMs.
However. There are two basic types of IEMs in the normal retail world. The first uses dynamic drivers, which is the normal type of drivers used in large earphones or loudspeakers, just very tiny. Those usually have relatively wide ducts that lead sound from the IEM to your ear canal, use bigger tips and relatively shallow insertion. Those in my opinion tend to fall out more easily and be less comfortable.
The second uses "balanced armature" drivers, a special kind used only in IEMs and hearing aids, and those can have narrow ducts with smaller tips that get inserted quite deep into your ear. These are also used in professional in-ear monitors, but in the recent years excellent hifi models using this technology became available for as low as 40 USD or less afaik. When you use a properly sized tip, whether silicone or foam, and lead the cable around your ear, it's quite hard to accidentally rip them out and they can fit and isolate similarly to custom molded ones. You could absolutely use those for on-stage in-ear monitoring.
The wireless part is done using special low-latency wireless kits that you generally wear on your belt on stage, not bluetooth.
I'm actually not sure. A quick websearch tells me a few things: Bluetooth IEMs may suffer from the usual Bluetooth latency (like 150ms, I think), which is not acceptable for musical performance. I've tried to play a musical instrument with plain Bluetooth, and the delay was very noticeable, and somewhat disorienting. To reduce latency, you'd go wired for a stationary performer like a keyboardist, which would give near-zero latency; or a non-Bluetooth wireless solution for a mobile performer like a lead singer, which may be a bit more latency, but still acceptable.
I'm not sure about pricing, so your websearch would be as good as mine, but I can share with you that when I briefly looked for possible IEM replacements for the monitor speakers I usually use, it was like 2 or 3 times as expensive for a decent IEM product. For the low-budget org I was working with, it was essentially out of the question when the through-the-air monitors were more or less doing their job still.
I believe the IEMs differ in a couple ways: one is, as you thought, they wouldn't be Bluetooth; and, two, they can be customized to fit very snugly and exactly in the ear of the user, which is important for the sake of blocking out external sound, and for comfort, and probably also helping them stay in the ear.
That all said, I think another configuration is for there to be a wireless pack, and then the performer can plug in wired earphones or headphones of their choice.
Anyway, I haven't used IEMs myself, I just have heard and read about them. The industry is moving to IEMs because they greatly reduce conflicting sounds on stage, which makes things easier for the sound engineers, which generally translates to better-sounding concerts.
I have some KZ IEMs that I got for about $35 a few years ago and they sound great!
Washing clothes.
It's such an everyday task, a literal chore that people do every day for a variety of reasons. We want to like our smell. We want to get that stain out. We want to do a little thing for ourselves today, to make future us proud. We want to do what we can to support someone we love. We really want to wear that shirt again.
A lot goes into this task that is meant to be done in the background. Millions of washers and millions of dryers are purchased every year (and they're generally designed to last around ten years). Each of these is a delicate balance between a number of factors:
It's REALLY HARD to find the proper balance between all of these things. Everyone has an experience with this, and everyone has an opinion on it. You have to do a lot of work to try to get something objective, but that's probably another post.
A few fun facts from my time in development:
Answer:
It's how much water remains in the load, or the Residual Moisture Content (RMC). A washing machine will use somewhere between 200 Watts and 500 Watts of electricity, usually. A clothes dryer in the US, on the other hand, will use _at least_ 5200 Watts! So, the Department of Energy rightfully put a heavy weight on how much work the paired Dryer will have to do. (Don't be afraid to line dry things, folks! it's great!)Answer:
it's around 800 times the acceleration due to gravity! So much engineering work has to be done to find the proper balance of mass to make this much force safe for literally kids to interact with.I could literally talk about this for hours. I love how it's a topic that everyone has experience with, and I always learn something new, despite working in the field for almost a decade. A part of me really misses it, but I don't miss corporate decision making.
I wished we lived in a world where everyone with this kind of specialized knowledge had a podcast and I had unlimited time to absorb it all.
I've been meaning to listen to this podcast (and the hundreds of others I've got saved in Pocket Casts, so I feel you on wanting the time to just listen to podcasts all the time), but you might be interested in Ologies with Alie Ward
Ologies is great!!
We have a basement that, if not for the dehumidifier, would transform into a fungal kingdom. The dehumidifier runs very close to the washing machine and dryer, so we hang just about all our clothes and let the dehumidifier do the work of drying the clothes as a matter of course. I didn't give it a second thought until a friend was discussing their own basement situation and I pointed out that the dehumidifier would also dry their clothes for them, obviating the need to use the dryer. So, if you have a dehumidifier, just hang-dry your clothes with that. Also, it's way cheaper than a dryer.
N.B. - We still use the dryer for articles like socks etc., but most of the actual mass of the wet clothing ends up on drying racks or hangers.
Ha, this is us, too! I recently started buying nicer clothing with the intent of wearing it for as long as possible, and almost all of it is meant to be hung to dry. It takes up a LOT of space! We have multiple, multi-rack hangers haha
This is actually my primary use case for a dehumidifier. I rent an apartment where I have no way to otherwise dry my clothes so what I tend to do is put my dehumidifier in always-on mode and point a room fan on a drying rack. Even a full drying rack ends up being mostly dry in 2-3 hours.
I mean, I also like keeping my room at 40% humidity almost all of the year except summer, but it doesn't take it much effort to do that - it tends to be off most of the time.
I used to hang dry my clothes next to a dehumidifier. They certainly get dry but always came out as stiff as a board! Are there any tricks to softening them or is that just something you learn to live with?
If you have a dryer, throw the clothes in to tumble for a few minutes. It'll beat them soft. Though it also does cause clothes to wear out sooner. Or line dry outside. The wind will toss them around a bit as they dry, leaving them less stiff.
I believe that I have learned to live with it so effectively that the possibility of a world with clothes softer than the completely stiff ones that dry out in our basement has now become completely foreign to me. If you find a way, perhaps you can tell me and then we will have soft clothes in our home as well.
What are you thoughts on the best washer/dryer I've ever owned
IMO they really nailed it out of the park except for making cleaning the filter housing and coils accessible. Given its ventless nature and where the filter sits, any leaks between the filter and coils make a mess real quick.
I love combo units!!
They're actually really common in Europe, as well - the smaller general living spaces and the sensitivity to energy efficiency drove them into market dominance decades before they ever came over to North America!
(Side note, I'm not terribly sure about South America - I know that most appliance companies try their hardest to get clothes dryers into common usage in the South American markets, but the rate of adoption is really low - air drying is just way too effective)
A number of years ago, combo units would still tend to be a bit smaller, and would also tend to dry a little less thoroughly - maybe ending clothing at between 5% and 10% remaining moisture, instead of the usual 2%-4% common in the US. I bet they've really improved that in the time that I've been out of the industry!
I hope they catch on! I personally would definitely take the increased cycle time over not having to swap laundry from one machine to the other. On the other hand, I'm a pretty basic laundry user. It can be tricky if people often use air drying for a part of a wash.
I'm South American and in my country more and more people are getting dryers, but adoption is definitely slow and most people still hang dry. I would say that about 10 to 15 years ago nobody even considered getting one. I want to get one and my mother is worried about it destroying my clothes.
In terms of normal wear, the tumbling will accelerate wear a little, but not much.
However, I’ve had a poorly-designed dryer in an apartment once, and it had a little hook on the inside of the drum that my clothes would catch on every now and then, and make a hole.
It was definitely a bit infuriating.
Thanks so much for the info! I've learned so much on this thread.
That's so funny, I was just thinking about how I'd like to know more about the clothes washing process and the machines we use. I watched Your dishwasher is better than you think (tips, tricks, and how they work) yesterday and learned a bunch about dishwashers so it got me thinking about washing machines.
Thanks for your post!!
If you are in North America and you want a washing machine that will last decades, buy a Speed Queen. Their front loaders are just as good as their legendary top loaders too, so people who prefer that style shouldn't feel left out. Quality comes at a large upfront cost with Speed Queen. Not as much as Miele though, which is the European choice for high quality appliances.
Yeah, a Speed Queen is definitely a particular style!
In general though, I find brands way less reliable as a marker of quality than specific model lines.
I tend to view appliance brands in the same way as I view car manufacturers. I think the specific model and the engineering team behind that model are usually better indicators. In my experience, brands themselves can be all over the place in terms of quality.
I've never actually used a Speed Queen, but I've seen them being tested.
Funny that you posted this - I've spent the last couple hours attempting to fix (and mostly just cleaning) our dryer. I'm 99% sure the heat fuse tripped, and it was like $5 for a 3 pack on Amazon.
I thought it would be on the back of the unit, or accessible from the back, but that doesn't appear to be the case. From looking at a diagram, I should be able to get to it from the front.
But then the endless cycle kicks in - I don't have the proper size socket long enough to get under it. Which simply means a trip to the hardware store, where I'll buy the thing I need, some others that might be useful, and definitely not the thing I will need for the next project.
There are usually a couple of levels of protection around overheating. One fuse will reset itself, and another will trip permanently, if the self-resetting fuse fails to stop an overheating issue.
If you're right that that second fuse has failed, it's worth trying to figure out what's causing the overheating issue in the first place. Typically, this is due to some sort of blockage in the ducting system that the dryer is connected to.
This is usually:
I've seen what should be a 30-minute job extend into the 250-minute range due to a kink in that metal tubing (It was a nightmare of an R&D problem until a team traveled to the test site).
The other possibility is that your heating element opened. This is possible over time, basically your element slowly reacts with the atmosphere, and eventually the oxide layer on the outside can just cause the whole thing to open. But again, this is more likely if temperatures are elevated in the first place, pointing to a restriction of some sort.
Most home appliance manufacturers suggest cleaning the vents every 18 months or so, but I have yet to encounter a regular person that knows that.
It's definitely related to lint buildup. The washer and dryer came with the house, and the entire few years we've been here, the dryer has shown the "check lint screen" light when begin selecting the type of dryer cycle. We assumed this was just a reminder of sorts to clean the lint screen every time, but from watching a video, I don't believe it's supposed to light up at all.
Roughly two loads ago, before it stopped working, it seemed to output way more heat than it normally does/should. The lights on the controls still display and operate properly, so I'm sure it tripped this overheat fuse. (And for this model, I confirmed it was a one-time fuse that can't be reset.)
The ducting output from the dryer was actually pretty clean. It was re-routed (before we bought the house) to go out the side of the house instead of up an exhaust on the roof, so it was easy to check.
But the inside of the dryer, after taking the back panel off, had a pretty good layer of lint. I assume when I take off the front part I'll see even more. Hopefully after a thorough cleaning and replacing that fuse, things will work fine again.
Please do be careful with this - one of the most common ways for dryer fires to cause issues is if lint from the base of the unit gets sucked through the heating element, catches fire, then quickly makes it's way through the unit, lighting lint stuck in the vent.
Also, while you have the dryer apart, I'd check for the resistance of the element. It should be somewhere in the 1 - 100 ohm range if you have a multimeter handy. Anything in the megaohm range means you'll have to replace the element.
Just wanted to let you know, not only did I not die, but that was the fix!!! Glad I was able to repair the dryer with $6 in parts and $30 in tools (that I will certainly use elsewhere) vs a $300 repair call or some other higher amount to replace.
I appreciate it. There was a very thick layer of lint in the base already, so hopefully things are safer now that I've cleaned it up. Just got back from the hardware store and will be taking the front off shortly, hopefully giving me easy access to the fuse.
I'm not sure if I can access the heating element well enough to use a multimeter - it was already difficult enough to lay on the ground with the vacuum hose, and the element (at least from the back) is like a whole arms length deep. I'll see if it's exposed from the front.
Okay, here's a shot at round two!
For this round, I want to dive a little deeper into the complexities of appliance sales and marketing! I spent my time in product engineering and sensing, but part of that engineering goes into understanding how sales happen.
(I don't really know how in-depth I can go into how washers and dryers sense the status of the load without having NDA / self-doxing issues, but I might be able to try if there's enough interest)
For any appliance, the sale happens three times.
1. Manufacturer to Retailer
The first thing to note is that none of the major appliance manufacturers do direct-to-consumer sales. This is probably because the market started back in the early 1900's, when national distribution was even more complex than it is today. It persists for a number of reasons, but a lot of them boil down to these things are big and heavy, and it takes capital investment to store them and move them where they need to go efficiently.
So, appliance manufacturers' customers aren't actually the end users. The primary customers are the retail outlets.
That's one of the major reasons for the sometimes-overwhelming number of cycles and buttons on most appliances - it's way easier to sell something if you can show iterative improvement from one year to the next. It's easier to tell a retailer
or
or
or some combination of these three and more.
That's a gross oversimplification, but it's a decent first-order model.
2. Retailer to Consumer
When the retailer sells to the consumer, the consumer has a really limited set of experiences to make their decision around. Like I said in the post above, there are a ton of pressures on the consumer, and that makes an informed choice really difficult in most cases. (Side note, this is pretty similar to how I envision the -absolutely broken- US healthcare system, but I don't know what I'm talking about there).
If the retailer is getting a good deal, they may increase employee training around specific models.
The manufacturer will often try to focus product cost on "touchpoints" - literal things that people can touch an feel on the showroom floor. These floor models are very rarely powered, so a lot of digital displays just fall flat at this time. Knobs and buttons and hinges and handles are key points for influencing a customer's perception of quality. So, manufacturers put a lot of time into getting those points right.
3. Consumer to Consumer
Finally, when the consumer actually has the appliance in the home, they get to evaluate it. a HUGE driving factor on whether or not a person buys from a specific appliance brand is whether or not they owned the same brand in the past, and whether or not they have a good time with it.
Judging consumer sentiment online is really really hard, because appliances are meant to be in the background in most cases. People (that aren't me) just don't talk about appliances to one another, unless the appliance is a real pain. It's like talking about the weather, in that a bad appliance can make for great small talk!
If a consumer has a great time with an appliance, then they're really likely to go with the same brand. It can override a pretty significant price margin.
But, the time scales here are wonky. As I said above, manufacturers usually aim for a ten-year life target. In that time, there have probably been at least five major iterations of those appliance designs, and there are a large number of good and bad decisions wrapped up in those five iterations.
If a decision ten years ago was a bad one, it takes ten years to get that feedback into the appliance design. It can go a little faster than that if the decision is really bad, but then there are much larger problems anyway.
So thank you for listening to my mini info session / rant about the weird world of appliance sales! I think I have a bit more energy for this, if there's interest.
Topic ideas:
I would love to hear more about the energy usage bits (also any tidbits about load size or cycle choice, i.e. how much do those selections actually matter when I’m throwing in laundry).
Okay, please do. Specifically washer/dryers or other things? Talk away, or you mean literally talk and not write?
I usually do enjoy talking about it more than writing - it's easier for me to see what topics pique interest, and it's easier for me to lead people through fulfilling their own curiosities!
I think the interest in this will get me to do a follow-up post with more appliance knowledge, so I'll try to write another section tomorrow!
I look forward to reading it!
Thank you so much for this! It's been such a long time since I read a post that taught me something new in a manner I genuinely enjoyed.
You're welcome!! Thank you for having an interest! :D
That was a very interesting post; thank you for writing it :)
I’ve been idly dreaming about the possibility of an open hardware washing machine for a while, now. They’re fantastic devices for saving people — often women — from spending huge amounts of effort manually cleaning clothes, as well as being more water efficient. But access to them (and the maintenance/repair knowledge necessary) is spread unequally around the globe, and I’m not sure there’s much profit to be made trying to sell durable, reliable, easily repaired and cheap washing machines to the global south.
So it’s cool to hear about someone who does this for a living! Kinda gives me hope that these things are made by regular human beings, if that makes sense 😅
It absolutely does make sense!
I've had the idea of starting up an open-source appliance company rolling around in the back of my head for a long time now, but I keep hitting roadblocks. These things end up controlling a lot of energy, and it's really hard to make something safe that is also effective without heavy-duty metal stamping.
I'm aware of one company that's actively trying to work in the space of lower-tech appliances for the global south - https://www.thewashingmachineproject.org/ They seem pretty legit, and I hope they do well!
If you have a blog or something I'd be super stoked to go read it! I'm going to be getting into a lot of manufacturing tech -- metal forming included -- and it'd be really useful to read more about the experiences of someone in the industry.
Background is that I've always been interested in how commercial products are manufactured, and what with the resurgence (of dubious intent :/) of activity in the space, it seems like a good time to jump in with both feet, so to speak. I suppose that's to say, I'm also interested in open source, heavy duty metal stamping machines 😅
I'm going to start shopping for new appliances now, just to screw with the appliance marketing folks.
If I prioritize extreme repairability, how do I avoid the situation where the manufacturer stops making critical replacement parts over the next 2-3 decades?
Unfortunately, I have no better answer for you on that one. good luck, appliance shopper!
Building things that are "safe".
Like @halfloaf, I could talk about this for hours, but to pick off just two things:
There's no such thing as "perfect safety". The real question is: "what level of risk is acceptable?" Then you can ask, "acceptable to whom? Individuals? Society? Which society?" Then you can ask things like, "Are the people who bear the risk the ones accepting it, or is someone deciding for them? If the latter, what responsibilities does that person have? What incentives do they operate under?"
Risk homeostasis is the idea that people have an instinct for the level of risk they are willing to accept, and they will adapt their behavior accordingly. The classic example of this is antilock brakes. They substantially reduce stopping distance, so when they were first introduced, you got an insurance discount for having a safer car. But pretty soon, the data showed that accident rates were the same for cars with and without ABS, because people who could stop faster would follow closer, negating the risk reduction from having ABS.
The dumbest thing automakers do IMO, even worse than touchscreens, is allow for incredibly short ACC follow distances. On my car, the middle is the bare minimum safe stopping distance.
Safe stopping distance is so greatly ignored that I'm mildly concerned more than a few engineers didn't even factor it in.
You know those tiny green markers on the side of the highway? Many of them are in 1/10 a mile increments. In other words, they are spaced approximately 528 feet.
At 65 mph, the average passenger vehicle has a safe stopping distance of approximately 340ft under ideal conditions and a perfectly attentive driver.
That number goes up every extra mph, every extra lb, and every milisecond that the driver doesn't slam on the brakes immediately upon notice. Rain doubles it.
Always,always be at least one of those marker distances between you and the next vehicle at highway speeds. If people keep wedging in closer, you're going to fast.
Drive 4 mph under the speed limit until the road is clear then stay at the speed limit. It'll be like there are no other cars on the road.
I hear where you're coming from, and there's no reason to play Devil's Advocate here, but I'm going to anyway...
If the safe stopping distance is 340 feet, that doesn't realistically mean you need 340 feet of separation from a vehicle in front of you. The vehicle in front of you is going to need the same 340 feet to come to a complete stop. Obviously, I'm simplifying aggressively, but my point is the stopping distance of a car is not really the same thing as the safe follow distance.
But again, there's no reason to follow closely at all, so, nobody will ever be making the "wrong call" by following your line of reasoning.
The vehicle in front could collide with something and stop in considerably fewer than 340ft, so you might need all 340 of yours.
That's an excellent point.
I get what your getting at, but I'll counter anyhow.
As @trim mentioned, that devil advocate is why we end up getting multi-car pileups even with automatic emergency braking. The scenario you describe only works if everybody has that safe following distance.
But "safe stopping distance" is calculated under lab-like conditions. One 0.5 second text glance increases that distance by ~50ft. A tiny bit of rain increases that to well past my "1/10th mile" rule of thumb, even in otherwise ideal conditions.
Give Human Benchmark a go. Average is on the order of 250ms, which is what they base that standard on. Are you always above average, every time?
And finally, at least for now, there is the most basic: You ever test your stopping distance on an empty highway? It is not a pleasant experience. Not collision unpleasant by any means. But still unfun.
I agree with you completely. Perhaps I should have made this more explicit, but I was really only "arguing" (and calling it that is a stretch) about the mechanics, not the practicality.
But ultimately, yes, the vehicle in front absolutely could come to a stop in rounds-to-0 seconds, as @trim said. Not safely, of course, but the mechanics of the situation don't care about safety. And the fact that it can happen completely dissolves whatever bits of an argument I had.
I'd like to contrast this:
With this:
If vision past the car immediately to your front is clear, you can rule out many of the reasons the car in front might stop faster than is safe. Safeguarding against every long-tail risks is a sysiphean task and usually ineffective use of resources.
Of course this needs careful consideration of just how big that tail risk is: in poorer visibility, denser traffic and poorer braking conditions, more distance is needed. And unless you're on a green-flagged racetrack, being able to stop before your effective horizon is advisable.
Generally speaking what we are told here (Netherlands) is to keep two seconds distance from the next vehicle. Meaning that if the vehicle in front of you passes a marker you need to pass it two seconds (or longer) later.
This has the added benefit of working at different speeds where the stopping distance is different.
Anyway, anyone who gets their driving licence is taught this. Almost universally I see people not applying it.
To be fair, I probably only noticed because my car does this for me and displays the distance in seconds between me and the vehicle in front of me.
Big TV campaign in the UK I always remember stated
“Only a fool breaks the two second rule”
The rhyme itself takes 2 seconds to say.
https://youtu.be/kw52bewTfVA
I just bought a car with ACC, and I realized that I can adjust the follow distance - one to four "ticks" that seem to roughly correspond to one to four seconds of following distance. I generally run it at three seconds - I find four is too far for it to reliably track the vehicle in front of me.
A little bit of safety trivia related to platooning autonomous vehicles (e.g. follow the leader) - very close following distances are lower risk because the relative speed difference during a collision is low. Longer follow distances are okay because there's time to detect the lead vehicle stopping and stop. But there's an unhappy middle where you can't stop in time and you will end up with too great a speed differential. This makes forming and informing the platoons (moving through that unhappy medium) quite complex from a safety point of view.
I believe this assumption implies the stoppage is due to brakes being applied, but I don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption to make. If myself and the car in front of me are both matching speed and close together, and the front car collides with a moose (this is my attempt at picking an “immovable object” but I’ll admit my experience is with Australian animals so I don’t know if it applies the same way) then it doesn’t matter that I’m matching speed, I’m still causing a dead-stop collision to be much much worse by slamming into the back at the same speed.
Yeah, that is in the context of platooning 18 wheelers, so not very many things dead stop them.
But to get any tangible effect tailgating a tractor trailer, you've got to be 100 ft or less.
That is about 1 second of human reaction time. Without factoring any stopping ability of the car.
At that level of ACC distance, you'd be having emergency stop almost any time the system can't accurately detect the distance of an object. Like a touch of rain. Because otherwise it would be impossible to avoid a collision even if truck stopping at half speed.
Also, will the car react in time if the truck kicks up a rock off the ground? How well does ACC detect objects falling from above, like a poorly secured load? Or a sheet of ice?
I was not talking about ACC on cars, I was referring to research on platooning autonomous semis. The idea was that they'd platoon up on the highway to save fuel, and the lead vehicle would be communicating status to the rest so they can speed up and slow down in coordination.
Regarding ACC, a normal safe following distance is what you want almost always.
One of my pet peeves is the general confusion between probability and risk. The new classic example is the Tyler Cowan interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, discussing his appetite for "risk":
Caroline Ellison's courtroom testimony after the FTX crash further confirmed that this was fundamental to Bankman-Fried's understanding of risk:
If Bankman-Fried had anything like a conventional safety engineer's understanding of risk, he might have understood that the probabilities are irrelevant in the face of a negative consequence of infinite magnitude, the destruction of the world. Too many people and businesses make the mistake of confusing the probability of a good outcome with the actual risk that an improperly weighed negative consequence will have enormous impacts (e.g. forever chemicals, economic collapses, etc.)
Historically, the U.S. and Europe have sustained high regulatory costs for safety of drugs, products, finances, environmental protection, and so on. I pray that we don't find out the true costs of failing to remediate the risks after rolling back that framework of rules.
I agree with what you wrote, but I think what is missing is not a safety engineer's knowledge but a safety engineers ethics.
These CEOs know that the system is designed to reward and protect the wealthy. They know there's a safety net for them in the rest of the grifting CEOs who have a vested interest in protecting the person who rolled snake eyes because they know they're all gambling.
At the same time, they are shifting risk (externalizing risk) to the people who don't have a safety net - drugs that don't work, or have terrible side effects, opiods, trashing the environment.
The only ethical system in the halls of power is: take what you can grab and pull the ladder up after you.
The Bankman-Fried case is instructive here - among the consequences he underappreciated was that he could be held personally accountable for losing other people's money. There have occasionally been consequences that blew back on even the most privileged - jail time, bankruptcy (there are historical theories that the New Deal legislation went through because so many of the businessmen who contributed to the crash lost everything themselves), revolutions, wars, general catastrophes that spare no one.
It's not the same as having an internal sense of professional ethics - the knowledge that you're responsible for other people. But even a more informed self-interest would be helpful.
What is surprising to me is that they recovered enough funds to make most of the losses related to the FTX fraud whole (one estimate I read was 119% of what was originally invested). I think this is pretty rare in the sense that it seems some kind of justice was done, but I'll be surprised it if he serves out the 25 year sentence.
One thing that I'm pondering is that this is straight up theft, and so I think he was "allowed" to be punished because it's safe (and desirable) to punish pure taking, but not the other kinds of harm that In alludes to.
I agree with you that it seems like he didn't realize he could be caught and held responsible. But it seems like there is some balance between the upside and the downside (I say this by virtue of them being able to make those he stole from whole).
OTOH, if you look at something like the Koch family and the opioid epidemic, there's no way to hold them responsible in the same way. There's not enough punishment you could mete out or money that you could take to balance the harm down to individuals to families, or to society. So the upside is much greater than any possible downside.
That said, the only downsides sufficient to the task I can think of (things like prolonged torture) seem unpalatable as well. So I think the answer is to have oversight and limits on how big companies and personal wealth can get.
Part of the purpose of regulation is to mitigate the risks one person or company can take which are so large that they can't be recompensed. Like, if one Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India cuts a few corners and accidentally slaughters thousands of people.
On the other hand, the Kochs and Sacklers of the world very intentionally bent the laws and regulations to suit themselves, knowingly doing harm. [I'd argue that Bankman-Fried was in the process of doing this, too.] If I was running the revolution, they'd be first up against the wall.
An interesting question imo is the "level" of risk homeostasis. Is that long-term constant in time? The ABS example you give only entails a short-term stability, but it's entirely plausible that in the long term the level of acceptable risk decreases. Also, is the intuitive acceptance level calculated in terms of monetary cost or danger to life and limb? What if the rewards are money as opposed to time? How do we trade off monetary gain vs health risks? Or time gain vs monetary risk?
One example of all these factors at work is workplace safety in developed vs developing countries. We all know videos featuring "safety sandals" in Indian factories, right? Assuming the employees aren't slaves, those conditions are somehow "part of the Overton window of safety": someone else might decide on the level of PPE, but the employees still accept the deal. Which I suppose says more about their economic alternatives than their inherent risk tolerance. But the acceptable money to spend to statistically save a life is undoubtedly a different one.
When we talk about the level of risk acceptance, it's very nebulous in the sense that there's no real way to measure it. If there were "units of safety", not only would my job be a ton easier, but I would have probably finished grad school about 5 years sooner.
It's a lot like the concept of utility in economics. It's a good model, even if it doesn't match what people do in their decision making at the individual level. We can talk about levels of risk as if they're quantifiable as a model for reasoning about it, but when it comes to what people actually do, nobody is sitting there and thinking about the economic cost of following too close. Instead, there's a feeling of "this feels dangerous" or "this feel safe".
It's tied to our direct experience (after you have an accident you definitely don't follow as close), but also how we're socialized to think about things. In some parts of the world, sleeping with a fan on is considered deadly, but where I grew up in the south you would never not have a fan on. The question of whether to have a fan in your bedroom figures prominently in your thinking even though almost no one has directly experienced fan related death or injuries.
But to answer your question, or at least to comment on it, it definitely changes over time, and it's different in different places.
One way to think about it is relative to the other risks you face. If you have a pretty safe life and live in a pretty safe society, then those risks around workplace safety or driving safety start to look like the biggest risks that you face. If you live in a place where your whole existence is precarious, or your life is not valued at all by society, then it's not surprising that workplace safety would be at the bottom of the list.
It's really interesting to talk to military folks about risk, especially risks around autonomy and things like that, because when bullets are being shot at you, your risk tolerance is already pretty high so you can tolerate quite a lot of risk when it comes to something like software safety.
Electricity.
People probably know it is made in (various) power plants but many may not realize that only what is needed (consumed) is being made at he same time. People may not realize that by trying to draw more (than designd capacity), they are actually slowing down the generators in the power plants (reducing frequency).
And we can even ignore mainspower and go o just using adapters.
Many people don't realize that ie. 5V/3A adapter will not push 3A into your device if the device doesn't need/want it. The 3A in this case is the maximum rating that this speciric adapter is able to deliver. This basically means that if your device needs 1A at 5V, any adapter that outputs 5V and at least 1A is sufficient (even the one that doesn 2A, 3A any amps over just 1A). The voltage is the one that is important here because connecting adapter with higher voltage will likely kill your device.
Also - people may know the saying voltage doesn't kill you, it's the current. It is true in its nature, but people should realize that even if for example car battery (lead-acid, 12V) is capable of doing 500-1000A, it will do exactly nothing if you touch both terminals with your hands. There must be sufficient voltage for the current to flow through your body. So while the current actually kills you, you have to have the voltage at the beginning for the current to even flow. Don't take this as an advice! Always keep respect and be careful when dealing with electricity.
This Practical Engineering video on how to 'dark start' the power grid is a fascinating glimpse into just some of the hidden complexities of large scale power generation and distribution.
There was the power outage in Texas I believe.a.few years back and I remember seeing a video on how it all happened (basically cutting off parts of the distribution net until the demand was low enough). Maybe 8bit Guy did the video, but I'm not sure right now.
The 'Big Freeze' of 2021 - yeah, they cut providing power to certain markets and started rolling reintroduction of power... But left some people functionally off while others barely had an interruption... All while charging exorbitant rates for that electricity.
That's how it works. If there is too much demand, ypu have to cut off part of the circuit otherwise the whole circuit will not be powered at all (soon enough). I can imagine them leaving power for hospitals and other critical infrastructures while cuttong off homes or entire cities.
And while it doesn't seem fair to cut off some and leave others connected, it is simply the way it must have been at that situation. By cutting some off, they actually got to the point when they could povidepower to them sooner than if the whole network collapsed (which is what Practical Engineering talks about in the video).
I realize it sucked for too many people but there was no other way (apart from dragging the whole country down with them).
Charging exorbitant money for power in such situation is straight up bad. You souldn't provude bad service and want higher money for it, really. I don't remember what was the cause of it, but let's say that Texas could use connection to the rest of USA for this one reason (if I'm right, they are on their own?).
Not sure about the US, but I was just looking through how it works in our little country and no, that's not possible, generally you have to disconnect from the network at a higher level that doesn't allow you to just keep running electricity to critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure needs to have its own backups, in hospitals specifically it's mandated by law and specifies what needs to be powered by it - lights in operating rooms, oxygen concentrators, life critical devices etc.
That's why during the short but large blackout we recently had (context: Czechia just had one of the largest blackouts in history due to a fallen very high voltage power line) people kept calling the fire brigade due to smoke coming out of buildings - it was the smoke from automatically starting diesel power generators on the roofs of hospitals and commercial buildings.
I meant like leaving the part with the hospital in a big city connected while disconnecting the rest.
I think there is no place in the world where there would be different connection to just critical infrastructure and to residential and commercial areas - why would anybody spend more mone to have two "wires" running in parallel for long distances to just keep hospital running.
In California, rotating outages are by "block" and we're in the same block as a fire station, so ours would be skipped. I don't know how big a block is.
Some rural areas get their power cut off when there is high wildfire danger.
I imagine it's like that. Thanks for the info.
I saw an analysis of the Texas outage that showed that at one point, they were about 15 minutes from going unstable and losing the whole grid. Wild.
I saw thiskind of video too. They explained how the frequency was going down and how it would basically bring the grid down if it reached certain threshold. This is why they had to cut off people - to bring the frequency back up.
Undervolting can also break things... especially things with motors, relays, or other moving parts
Didn't think about it that way, but you are right.
What's a zero? Nothing. What's a few zeroes added to the end of a voltage? Lightning.
Yeah, if we look at it this way, there is nothing like an insulator. They are just blockers up to some voltage.
The Internet. Everybody gets frustrated with “The Internet” when they have a slow website. I’m constantly slightly surprised it worked at all.
The masses don’t have any real understanding of the complexities of shipping a packet from one machine to another. They don’t even understand what a packet it, so the hundreds or thousands of devices in between them and their website? Well they might as well not exist.
Each device negotiating with its partner to determine what to do with the bits, what they’re allowed to do, how they are allowed to process them, where they get sent, how they get sent.
Then there’s the intelligence - understanding who knows most about where you are, and how to best ship your data to the place you want it, and at what cost?
And none of that has even covered the times when someone needs to shoot your packet in to space to bounce off a satellite and come back down again somewhere else!
Then you have capacity management to worry about. What do your traffic flows look like? Are they running normally? Can you send that data down that pipe or is it too busy? If it’s too busy, how do we evaluate which other way to send it?
FINALLY, once it reaches the target, often it’s going to need to negotiate a TCP session, open a socket and ensure that it sends the responses back over as similar a network as is practically possible… Assuming the firewalls, load balancers etc don’t get in the way!
Hah, my favourite tech question (that I’ll never deploy in an interview, because it’s deeply unfair to people) is to have the interviewee explain what happens when you press a key on your keyboard in Google Docs. The sheer number of layers involved, and the many different overlapping spheres of abstraction, are fascinating and it really gives you an intuition about what a person has studied in their lives.
If I may, I would also propose adding to your list (1) carrier level routing (often done to reduce costs, but sometimes pulled over dark fibre to reduce latency at great expense) and self healing (often useful when someone “accidentally” cuts an underwater cable, or pushes some bad BGP announcements).
A question I love to ask in interviews is “in as much detail as you can, please explain to me how DNS works. Use the example of visiting the website www.google.com”
It’s great because you can use it for multiple levels by adjusting your expectations but it gives you a good idea of their understanding of how stuff works.
Stellar answers have started with:
Asking that one question and getting an answer by someone who actually knows what they're talking about can instantly tell you what their work history and interests are.
A database engineer would probably tell you that the site is going to query a backend sharded key value store using some sort of fast lookup technique. A wan network engineer would talk about BGP and route take lookups. A SRE or datacenter engineer would talk about reverse proxies and TLS termination. A security engineer would talk about TLS handshakes, key exchanges and PKI. A web developer would talk about DOM rendering and HTTP methods.
Every single one of them, myself included, would skip over a lot of very complex and very vital steps and layers in the process, so you can learn a lot about what they leave out too.
I don't think it's an unfair question at all though, because there really isn't a "right" answer. The most technically correct answer would probably have you in the room with that interviewee for a couple of weeks, but you probably wouldn't want to hire that person since they'd have no social awareness.
Depending on the role and the experience you're looking for, you'd want them to leave out specific things and talk about other things.
And there's so many other connected fields of study to networking, which is one of the things I love about computing.
Developing a baseline of what normal network traffic looks like is a key component of setting up alerts of potential cyberattacks or data leak events. Along with awareness of different traffic patterns that could indicate something fishy is going on.
Cellular connectivity is its own can of worms. Especially when you think about high density spaces - it's amazing that you can still have high speed data connections when you're using your cellphone at the same time as 1000+ other people in a big venue or sports arena. And now the big providers are offering 5G home internet.
Your ISP may be doing a variety of different things to get you internet access, and that can differ from one block to the next.
If you're using a non-cellular phone, such as on your desk at work, you're probably using "Voice over IP" (VoIP), which is basically using a computer network instead of an old-school phone line. These networks have to be prioritized, because clear conference calls are more important than your co-worker that insists on listening to music on Spotify all day.
And consider what's happening inside your devices. Busses like PCIe and USB. And within a chip, you've got stuff like networks-on-chip, routing data between IP blocks, processing pipelines, and yet more busses and crossbars. It's a fractal!
I once had a lecturer try to talk to us about networking. I found it fascinating but my eyes glazed over so fast. I'm amazed by "simple" illustrations like a honeycomb web of cellular signal cells, and as I'm moving around in a car how they know which cell to hand me off to and which ones to pick up and how not to drop my call or give me echo.
Video game feel!
I'm always amazed at the lengths that game developers will go to in order make games feel fun, even at the expense of the game as a strict simulation of sorts. Essentially, games will cheat in a ton of ways and almost always in the players favor. Some of the tricks used:
I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones that I can think of at the moment. It kind of reminds of when I worked at an animation studio, how often we'd break physical light transport in interesting ways. A scene might be wrong in the sense that light doesn't work that way; but it'd be better from an artistic and story-telling perspective. Or typography! Good typography is full of tons of interesting little optical illusions that make it look better than doing things strictly geometrically. I'd better stop there, since now that I think about it, there are quite a few fields where little cheats and fudges are used to make things feel better and align more to what your brain expects. Humans are weird!
Here's a list of 10 of them that Celeste uses with helpful animations to show what's going on, Celeste & Forgiveness. There's some overlap with your list, as well as many additional ones (some of which only makes sense for a game with controls similar to Celeste).
Nice! And darn, I'd put corner correction when making my list and then forgot to add that to my post. I remember being fascinated when I realized that the original NES Zelda would subtly nudge you sideways to align you to its grid as you walked.
This is the only one on the list I would disagree with being best practice. On the surface it makes sense - people have a bad feel for percentages so we'll make it feel like people think it should be.
However I don't think the upside is worth the long-term damage it causes.
First, the adjustment isn't consistent between games, so the meaning of "50% chance" changes game to game, which isn't intuitive.
But more importantly, our brains are easily tricked into believing they are learning something. Part of getting better at games is our brain learning the mechanics, and they are shockingly good at recognising patterns and applying learned knowledge to new scenarios.
In the case of fake percentages, playing a game for many hours will make you worse at estimating percentages in the real world, because your intuition has adjusted itself to what the game designers think "50% chance" should feel like. IMO we do a disservice to players when we mess with stuff that has real-world effects.
I can definitely see your argument for this. That's why I like things like "bags" for random choices - the odds can be exactly as stated overall, but it prevents really long losing streaks. (And winning streaks, to be favor.)
Here I'll quibble slightly. As someone who's published papers on quasirandom sampling and studied this a lot, I'd argue that percentages are just glorified fractions and it's randomness that people have a bad intuitive sense of. Most people don't realize just how darn clumpy true randomness can be. Or consider things like having a 1/1024 chance (i.e., not unheard of) to flip ten coins in a row and have them all come up heads. And therefore with enough random events happening constantly, miracles are all but guaranteed to happen. (Law of truely large numbers)
I'm playing through Zelda Breath of the Wild right now, and there's tons of stuff like this in it. The one that gets me is that I can be clinging to a wall, then go to the menu and change my pants, and they just magically change. Or the fact that I've been eating food for several months of game time and never gone to the bathroom. No wonder Link always has that grim look on his face.
But really, we're here to solve puzzles, not watch Link changes clothes or do anything else bodily-function wise besides sweat when he climbs a cliff.
Speaking of BotW and wall climbing, there's a pretty famous trick they do specific to that - watch carefully and you'll see that a last desperate leap right as you run out of stamina gets a height boost!
And yes, I've definitely thought about the clothes change when switching to my climbing gear mid-climb. Or switching outfits in-battle or "in public." But for me, the big one that always gets me is games with day/night cycles where the characters go weeks without sleeping!
Lol, I hadn't thought of that! I have chronic nightmares and a million hobbies, so never sleeping that seems like the dream to me.
Childcare.
I've been called a glorified babysitter, and it's as far from the truth as you can get. You think managing your kid is rough sometimes? Imagine twenty of them, in a tight space, with a whole day together ahead of you.
Have fun. Oh also - educate them, feed them, keep them healthy and safe, and manage everything that kids go through x20. At the same time.
I love it. The chaos calls to me. It is not for just anyone. That scene in Toy Story 3? Yeah that's about average. It's not easy to run a tight ship with a room full of drunken leprechauns.
Closely related: education, particularly for younger kids. I volunteered a few hours at a local school in my first semester of college, and when they asked me to help with learning letters, I was quickly struck by how messing up with those little kids would screw them over for life. I remember mixing up lowercase q and p because they started blending together to me after staring at them for so long and a kid asking "are you sure it's that side?" gave me doubts. I'm reasonably sure I didn't screw them over forever by giving the wrong answer, but it just really hit me how this was the building blocks.
I was already passionate about education—I went to a school nicknamed "the school of second chances", where every kid had some story about being failed by other schools in some way—but experiencing it from the teacher's side firsthand was still a shock to me. And I wasn't even doing any of the serious legwork like making curriculums, I was just answering questions! I really don't think anyone can understand how hard and important it really is until they actually try it themselves.
This also applies to topics for older students, or when passing on skills/knowledge in general. Being good at something is a different skillset from teaching it. I hear stories of geniuses and experts in their fields being pretty bad teachers at colleges, especially for beginner level classes. The more you know, the more of the basics you take for granted because it's just instinct. And if you fail to help the students understand those basics—well, they're screwed.
ECE is as close to taming magical epic forest animal friends as humans can come, I believe. Or negotiating with a tribe of pixies.
Tell me about a time it all went perfect? Or the reverse if you prefer?
There's never really a time things go perfect, but I do set myself (and the class) up for success each day.
Routine. Kids thrive on routine, establishing positive habits early and instilling a sense of continuity and normalcy. From day one with each new group I demonstrate that we follow a schedule and do our daily routine. If you start this early, and keep it consistent, it really provides a strong foundation to build the rest of your day off of.
Variety. This should be a no brainer but I see so many other teachers fall into the trap of being too routine, and setting up the same activities every day. Kids need some variety within a structured environment so they can explore new concepts in their own way. Having a diverse set of activities scattered throughout the classroom also helps spread kids out into manageable groups instead of one demonic mass.
Classroom Management. This is the make it or break it of teaching. Either you got it or you don't - you can learn it, but you also need good teachers around you to learn from since it isn't taught in school. My main method with managing the classroom is to utilize the routines I mentioned before to stop problems before they start, mostly - regular potty breaks, using physical sand timers to alert kids to transition times, songs and music that signal it's time for this or that. When shit hits the fan and you need two dozen ballistic missiles to halt IMMEDIATELY you need have a method in place already.
Those are the big three.
Usually when things go poorly, it's due to situations out of my control. I've had all manner of emergency events - our bathroom caught fire, a car crashed into my classroom (no injuries! Insanely lucky!), innumerable injured kids with broken bones or gashes requiring stitches, every kind of bodily fluid you can imagine going somewhere it shouldn't... The list goes on.
I will say that kids with behavior challenges are tough, but not as tough as parents. I've seen all types and I feel that as a general trend, I'm seeing fewer parents that actually parent their kids. I could go on a whole tangent there, but this already getting long and I'm not sure how much more y'all want to read.
Probiotics.
Most people now understand that the gut microbiome itself is a very complicated thing affecting many different parts of our life, but this knowledge is somewhat surface level and hasn't really transferred into understanding how everything else regarding the gut microbiome is also complicated.
So doctors still tell you to "buy a probiotic" when you take antibiotics, which according to some studies may not be the best idea and may slow down the recovery of bacterial diversity, but also it's like your employer telling you "you're going to need a vehicle for this job" without specifying if it's a tricycle, an excavator or a helicopter. Pharmacists aren't much better. And actually it's even more complicated, because not only do different probiotic bacteria have different functions, these functions also change depending on the current state of your own microbiome.
Most probiotics available in pharmacies are a mixture of (what used to be called, there's been some renaming of some of them) lactobacillus and possibly bifidobacteria, with occassional streptococcus thermophilus (the one used for yogurts). These likely won't hurt, though those are the ones that may slow down microbiome recovery after antibiotics (though they often do help against nausea or diarrhea when taking ATB, so it may be worth it to use them). They also don't colonize your gut, so most of their effects are temporary.
However some of the probiotic bacteria produce bacteriocins, their own antibiotics that they use to fight other bacteria in your gut, and some even produce actual antibiotics of some of the same types that we get in pills. Those probiotics can actually help, and the changes induced by them may stay in the long-term, if your gut contains pathogenic bacteria sensitive to those bacteriocins. As with antibiotics, some bacteria are sensitive and some aren't. And as with antibiotics, they can become resistant.
You take the probiotics, they make whatever your problem is better, so you keep taking them, and after a month you may get worse again and the probiotics don't work anymore, because you cultivated a colony of bacteria resistant to bacteriocins that you supplied. So it's theoretically a good idea to regularly switch up and rotate the probiotics you take after 2 - 3 weeks, but to do that successfully you'd need to know which probiotic does what, and you usually don't.
However, alternatives to common lactobacillus mixtures do exist. E. coli is for example mostly known as a pathogen, but some types of e. coli are also critical for the gut microbiome function and are some of the first bacteria in the microbiome of babies. And on top of that the probiotics based on those (Mutaflor and Symbioflor 2 are the ones I know), contrary to most other probiotics, actually stay in your gut long after you take them. The Japanese use a popular probiotic called Miyarisan, which contains clostridium butyricum, one of its advantages is that it can lessen the probability of a c. diff. infection. You can also buy bacillus subtilis probiotics, the bacteria that makes Natto, a fermented "superfood" also popular in Japan, and those supposedly also create several different bacteriocins. And there are many other lesser known options.
One that deserves a mention is saccharomyces boulardii, which is technically not a probiotic bacteria, it's a yeast, but has a relativelly broad application against various pathogenic bacteria causing diarrhea and stomach pain, broader than common lactobacillus mixtures, and it's also one of the rare ones that's relatively readily available and cheap.
Also the quality of a lot of probiotics on the market is very low. Studies showed that retail probiotics often do not even contain the bacteria that they claim they do, or that the concentration is much lower than claimed. On top of that studies that examine the effect of probiotics on a specific thing often use dosages 3x - 5x of common recommended dosages or even higher. So if your probiotic is literally doing nothing, don't be afraid to double or triple the dose. If it's still doing absolutely nothing with your digestion or other symptoms within a few days, it's likely the wrong kind for you or it's dead on arrival.
My own experience with treating persistent stomach pain after a bad covid infection using s. boulardii is that the most well known pill in my country (Enterol) contained 5x fewer CFU (standard colony forming units) than most others, was more expensive, and I had to take double the recommended dose of the 5x stronger ones to get an effect.
The best way to get high quality high dose probiotics that I currently know of is buying from manufacturers that sell pure powdered probiotics on Amazon. You pay 30 - 40 USD for a 100g pouch, but 1 gram contains the same dose as 10 pills from your pharmacy, so it's much cheaper as a result, and it's possible to order probiotics that were manufactured just 2 - 3 weeks ago. Surprisingly the fact that you're just using pure powder mixed in a bit of water without any normal or enteric-coated capsules (those should survive stomach acid) doesn't seem to lower their efficiency.
However, choosing which one to use based on symptoms or ideally microbiome sequencing is a whole different can of worms, no time for that, and I don't think people assume is uncomplicated.
How do I....how do I do a subscription box for a rotating sampler of fresh and different probiotics?
If I start a business I'll give you first month free for the idea. I'll call it shitrotate.io
I'm imagining the previous post with Mark Rober's whacky high energy delivery.
I'm way too eastern european to do something like this, though I imagine my inner enthusiasm is on a similar level.
Easily how modern wastewater treatment plants function. People flush their toilets or watch the sink water swirl down the drain, but the process of removing solids, processing them, and disinfecting the water responsibly is incredibly intensive and complex.
I saw this video a few weeks ago... is it accurate enough?
Yeah, that's actually a great synopsis of the process. Both water and wastewater treatment have many many variations. No 2 plants are alike. It's what keeps the industry unique and interesting. There are many ways to do one thing, some better, some worse. I'll probably use that video elsewhere, thanks for sharing!
Computers. Now, of course, computers are really, really complex, but what most people, even programmers, don't realize, is that your standard desktop or laptop computer is actually a network of 10-100 computers*. Of course, the CPU is the largest and most powerful, but hardly the only one. The GPU is also a computer in its own right, communicating over PCI with the CPU. And then there are dozens of microcontrollers, small computers running either no operating system or extremely small operating systems called Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS)s, handling almost every interaction between the CPU and the outside world. Every hard drive, every USB port, the sound card, the screen, the keyboard, Everything is its own computer.
Examples:
hard drives/solid state drives/NVMe drives:
All have a computer in them to communicate with the host computer and execute commands given over SATA/PCIe. In the case of a hard drive, there is bookkeeping to translate an address into a set of commands for the physical magnetic read/write head. In the case of SSDs/NVMes, the controller has to translate addresses given over SATA/PCIe to its internal address space, which is not a 1-1 translation, as they must perform whats called wear leveling, where the SSD ensures that the drive is written to evenly.
Peripherals:
Both your mouse and keyboard contain computers in them. A mouse needs a computer to compare the pictures taken by the mouse sensor from one second to the next, figure out how it has moved, and send that movement over USB. A keyboard needs to figure out which key(s) in the key matrix have been pressed, and send that info over USB. If either are wireless, they also have to handle things like bluetooth pairing and negotiation.
Screens:
A monitor probably has a couple of discreet computers in it, to do tasks like decode HDMI or DisplayPort into raw pixel data, to drive the raw LCD or OLED electronics, and in the case of standalone monitors, to run the user interface and menu system of the monitor.
*Im defining a 'Computer' as a device that is programmable and has a well defined, Turing-Complete Instruction Set. I still count them as computers even if they are only programmed via a one-time-programmable ROM, as long as the same physical part can be programmed to do different things out of the factory.
Disc golf! Many people of the general public think it’s as easy as throwing a frisbee, which are generally low effort and easyish to throw on target. That is not the case with disc golf discs. They all have different flight dynamics which allow them to fly further or shorter, have more or less lift, and then affect how much the disc curves left or right in the start and middle of a flight path as well as if a disc finishes to the left and right. There is also usually a wide range of weights and plastic types to choose from for each disc, so even if there’s a specific model you like to use, you still have to choose the plastic type and weight for your throw.
There are thousands of models of discs between dozens of manufacturers and they all fly a little bit differently. It actually takes a ton of time and trial and error to find out what kind of discs work best for you.
On top of that, there are multiple ways to throw discs. I primarily throw backhand, but many players throw forehand. Even with backhand, your form does not match how you would throw a frisbee in the slightest. It’s also helpful to be able to throw both in case you have a difficult shot or for cases like if you play a hole that’s a dogleg right when you are a right hand back hand player (as RHBH it’s generally easier to throw left than right). On top of that, putters use a different throw entirely and then it’s also helpful to know a few utility throws like if you have to hammer toss a disc (overhead), roll a disc, or otherwise thread the needle on a tough throw.
The great thing about disc golf, though, is unless you want to play at a tournament level, you can just get a few discs that work for you for under $50 and just go have fun on the course. The sport is so much fun to play at all skill levels. While I personally am trying to improve to the point where I could play local tournaments, I just played for fun for a very long time (I still absolutely have fun though). Most people that play are so chill and judgement free and it’s just fun to talk with fellow disc players at the course.
Last week, my son said, "Dad, can you show me how you throw a roller" and I internally groaned, because the checklist of things to think of for one throw is pretty lengthy. On our local hole I always throw a roller on the first hole - low ceiling, perfectly flat, trees to either side, and a backstop behind the basket. It was empty, so we took some practice shots, and he went OB left, OB right, cut rolled almost back to where we were.. Each time he asked what he did wrong, and I tried to help him and explain about angle of the disc, angle of the arm, and where to throw to avoid roots... and then he just sighed and threw his regular backhand.
All that is just to say that even really small parts of sport can be wildly complicated.
I've been playing seriously for about 7 years now and I can still barely throw a roller, ha. I usually just use it if I'm stuck behind a tree and don't have a great angle to do anything else. I keep an innova wolf in my bag basically just for that.
As someone who can't throw a regular frisby under the best of circumstances, I am baffled by the thought people think disc golf is easy. Have these people never thrown a frisby??? And I have friends who play and I've gone with them a couple times just for a fun outing, and there's definitely nothing easy about that game.
How does one get this absolute over confidence so much of the general public apparently has? Fry some brain cells? Just baffling.
Nearly everyone I know my age and older can throw a frisbee the regular way and get it to go in the general direction they aim, including those who don’t generally do anything athletic. I think that’s exactly where the confidence comes from - it’s easy… when you’re in an open field with minimal wind and just tossing it to your buddy. Not so easy when you’re on a disk golf course with obstacles and small targets, or in an ultimate match with an opposing team.
I’m sure there’s a similar overconfidence for regular golf; its not hard to hit at the driving range, most people have gotten through some mini golf in their lives, and televised golf looks… the way it does, so how hard could normal golf possibly be? (Answer: Very)
I don't think it's overconfidence, more so just ignorance. Many people can throw a frisbee well and they just assume a disc golf disc flies like a frisbee, but when most first timers try to rip a disc golf disc the first time, it goes about 30 feet forward and 80 feet to the left into the woods, lol.
Caffeine and hydration! It's not so simple as the often passed around myth that "caffeine is dehydrating". It's way more complicated and many factors are involved: dose, tolerance, time, body weight, and more, but for instance- in general it seems that those that regularly consume caffeine do not experience any diuresis from typical-dose caffeine intake. Those with no tolerance can experience it at more moderate doses, and high doses can induce a short-term diuretic effect that doesn't seem to have an overall effect on fluid-electrolyte balance or renal function over the period of a couple of weeks.
Self-promotion but related!
I wrote a blog post on it after checking out a few studies and reviews and it's complicated
Also, tangential to that- coffee and tea- and all the different flavors, complexities, harvesting, and processing that go into these. There are tons of stories, details, people, cultures, and all sorts of things people could write book-length things about when it comes to all the factors but just to toss out an example:
Also tangential- caffeine levels in different types of coffee and tea are far more complicated than people think. It isn't as simple as "green tea has less" and "black tea has more", or same thing for coffee roast levels, it gets pretty complex.
This is a tangent, but I've had a good outcome for myself by separating my hydration and my caffeination.
A few years ago I finally stopped drinking diet soda. Looking for alternatives, I'm prone to make oxalate kidney stones, so neither coffee or tea is great for me and high quantities. Now I just drink seltzer water and take a caffeine pill in the morning. It's really nice to just drink as much as I want and not worry about having too much caffeine. Overall my caffeine intake has gone down because I rarely take a second caffeine pill, and my water intake has gone way up. Everything works better when you're better hydrated.
I am on my phone, so I can’t write up a long post about it, but my answer is Wine. The kicker is some of you may already think it’s complicated, but I am willing to bet that there is far more complexity than you realize. The reason I got into winemaking is because of my ADHD requiring novelty. Winemaking is one of the only industries where I will be able to keep learning my entire career.
If anyone has any questions about wine, send them here. I love sharing my knowledge.
We live in a wine-making region, I've worked at a winery, and my spouse is currently a winery worker/wine seller. We hang with growers, vintners, tasting room workers, and distributors. Every step from vine to glass is fractally dense with information. I sound like I'm high when I start with "Everything is connected...", but there are so many inputs, from soil chemistry to weather to grape genetics to pruning to a thousand pests, diseases, contaminants, to the deep mysteries of fermentation, barrels and other vessels, minute titration of sugar, acid, oxygen, tannins, blending... And sensory analysis is even more bonkers - there's enormous variation in people's ability to taste and smell, and how much they'll enjoy any given pour. Then there's all the craziness with bottling, storage, labeling, regulations, distribution and marketing.
I love the fact that you can never have or create the same glass of wine twice.
I could not have said it better myself!
I agree completely. Especially about sensory analysis. It is some complex stuff. And it is also really personal. Everyone has different genetic abilities to detect different aromas, and that effects how we experience wine. For example, I found out in my studies that I cannot smell β-ionone. That is the primary aroma in violets. That is a common aroma in floral white wines, and I literally cannot smell it. That’s just the genetics I have. There aren’t many aromas where some of the population can’t detect them at all, but the detection threshold for nearly all aromas is bimodal, meaning roughly half of the population is more sensitive to it than the other half. Wine is definitely complex.
Spouse thinks I'm a supertaster. It's not that I really have more sensitive taste or sense of smell than anyone else. It's that between a biochem background, analytical lab work, and a stint as a pastry cook, I've got a larger mental library of descriptors for what I'm tasting and smelling.
And it's not just detection threshold for aroma and taste - there are chemicals in wine like skatole whose perception the brain processes differently depending on concentration. I've been in blind tastings where I've thought something a bunch of sommeliers loved was absolutely foul because I picked up an off note they didn't - and it was completely a matter of learned experience because it reminded me of something {hazardous and carcinogenic} that I smelled in the lab. [Complete digression - read The Emperor of Scent. It's an absolutely fascinating exploration of olfaction, even if Luca Turin's theory is likely to be false. You can go down a deep rabbit hole on olfaction alone, and we still don't know exactly how it works.]
Maybe this is unrelated but watching a video like, "Why a Hass Avocado Seed Does Not Give Us a Hass Avocado Tree" makes it seem like grafting and having a consistent flavor profile would be really hard to scale--if only from a quantity of material perspective.
Is there ever not enough cuttings to meet demand?
That is absolutely related! The short answer is that it is surprisingly easy to scale grafted plants. I can’t speak to other plants, but there is never an issue producing enough cuttings (never is a strong word. There is often inadequate supply of specific varietals, but a winery that wants a specific varietal and orders with enough advanced notice, they can plant any varietal they want without issue).
There are vineyards that we call nurseries. They grow thousands of grape vines simply to graft together for customers. Typically they don’t even harvest the fruit created by these vines. They just collect the shoots that grow each year.
For grapes, basically all wine in the world is made with one species, Vitis vinifera. However basically all commercial grape vines are grafted onto a different species of rootstock. Grafting is kinda a miracle of plant biology. As long as you connect the vascular system of two different plants together, they will merge together into one plant. There isn’t really a limit to how many times you can do this. You can create an apple tree where each branch produces a different species of apple. For grape vines, we graft Vitis vinifera onto the roots of a different species of grape, typically one from North America. This is to combat a pest called phylloxera, which eats the roots of Vitis vinifera. North American varietals are more resistant to phylloxera.
One grape vine will typically produce for 20 to 50 years, so we don’t have to replant vineyards every year. In fact, grape vines don’t produce quality fruit until around their third growing season. And for a single grape vine, we only need a single node of Vitis vinifera. If you look at a grape vine, the leaves come out of the stem at regular intervals. Each of these intervals is a node. When grafting, the nursery takes a single node of Vitis vinifera for the top of the plant. This is typically around an inch of plant. A single shoot can create 10 to 15 grafted vines, and a single plant can produce probably around 100-300 grafted vines each year. So they can be very prolific.
For the root section of the vine, we typically need around 1-2 feet of shoot length. It is important to say that grape vines are a weed. They are extremely hardy, and can grow well in extremely adverse conditions. I just finished an experiment where my test vines lost all of their leaves due to lack of water, and still managed to send out new shoots and keep growing after we watered them again. And that is for Vitis vinifera. The species we use for roots are even more hardy. At nurseries, they literally cut these vines to the ground, and they still grow tens or hundreds of new shoots every year.
To sum it all up, making enough stock to graft new vines isn’t very difficult. It’s not trivial, but it is a pretty well solved problem. Growers don’t need to plant new vines very often. And the quantity of plant needed to graft and start a new growth is pretty small. So a single plant can make lots of new plants. The difficult part to scale is really just physically attaching the two parts you want to graft together. Even still, grafted grape vines cost around $2 to $5 when buying at the scale that vineyards purchase at.
Ahh that definitely makes it seem more reasonable. You've filled some gaps in my brain. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
This is a tremendously bold statement! I love it :)
If you don't mind my asking, what wine region do you work in, and what's your favorite local varietal to work with?
I grew up in Sonoma County, California, and I have worked in wine hospitality there for a few years. I just completed a degree in Bordeaux, France, and I have some internship experience there. But my actual practical experience is very limited so far. I am working this fall in Sonoma Carneros, and I am pretty excited to get some actual production experience.
As such, I don’t really have a favorite varietal for winemaking, just because of lack of exposure. As a consumer, my single most favorite varietal is petite Syrah, with Cabernet Sauvignon as a close second. For the most part, I don’t care for white and rosé wines. I also firmly believe that blends of multiple varietals are almost always far better than single varietal wines. New world wine regions tend to be focused on single varietal, so I tend more towards old world wines. I also really like Italian wines in particular.
Horses.
Some of you might remember I wrote a reasonably long post about it a while ago, so I won't repeat myself if you want to read that rambling.
But I'm constantly blown away by the depth and breadth of the horse world. When it comes to sport and welfare it's blogging how much stuff there is and how much you can do really.
This year we're getting an arena and I want to get our horses fitness better for next year so I can do some jumping. And learning that has been a while rabbit hole I could also talk about for hours never mind everything else.
Every single thing. As I've gotten older I've had a lot of very diverse experiences in different jobs and different hobbies and different activities, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that if you don't do that thing, your conception of it will always be vastly oversimplified, and you'll never grasp just how much effort and thought have gone into it. The chances of you, as an outsider, coming in and proposing a new idea that hasn't been considered before and which is actually good is so ridiculously small that it may as well be impossible.
It turns out that pretty much all types of people are equally smart more or less, and people tend to put a lot of thought into the things they do to make a living or are passionate about.
I've developed less and less patience for the types of people that think they can jump into an industry and "disrupt" it without any experience. This type of attitude is really common among the tech bro demographic, but thankfully it seems to be less popular than it's peak circa roughly 2010ish.
The sheer audacity and hubris of it always really annoyed me. The idea that some kid can manufacture car parts, or grow corn, or design a transportation system better than people who have dedicated their entire lives to doing those things, solely because that kid knows how to write JavaScript is just too much for me to deal with.
I always imagine what it must be like to be hired by a 26 year old that lucked out, and made a ton of money from a start up. You're a transportation planner, and he's telling you that your job is now to design some stupid hyperloop based transportation system. He won't listen to your decades of experience in the field telling you why it's not feasible, and he insists that it is, but that people like you just haven't thought outside the box enough. The implication is of course, that you, and everyone else you worked with in your career are stupid, and he's smart because he made an app and got a bunch of money for it.
I don't know how often this imagined rage fantasy has actually played out in real life, but it's tough to see the stupid ideas, the delusional keynote pitches, and the sycophantic interviews that these guys give and imagine anything else.