I’m working on a shattered teapot and am finding the scaffolding part very difficult. Any tips on holding pieces in place that you’d be willing to share?
Sure thing. For shatters the main thing is just accept that it'll take a while and plan on doing it one or two pieces at a time, ideally starting with the biggest and working down in size. I've seen videos where someone is fitting a whole shatter together in one go and holding it with rubber bands but this almost never works right in my experience.
A pair of good articulating arm clamps is my starting point for almost everything. I like to put the "main" piece directly under the shard that is being joined. You want the pieces as tight as you can get of course but you don't need a ton of pressure on there. The flour in the medium will draw it together some as it dries. If you get a good bond but it cures with gaps or holes in the join, you can fill in later with lacquer mixed with a fine clay. Tonoko or jinoko are the key words if you don't have it on hand.
Usually there's at least one join where you need to set multiple pieces at the same time. Sometimes I'll use a single string tied across the outermost shard to keep pressure on, usually across the rim of a bowl or cup. More than one string is too much to keep track of for me though. And the lacquer fumes are extremely detrimental to rubber and elastic, they will harden and break with a few hours of exposure so I don't use them at all.
A more traditional move is to bury the main body of the repair in a dish of sand, with the part to be joined exposed. Then arm clamps or whatever to hold the pieces together. Just make sure any joins that touch sand are fully cured. The cleaner you work the less sanding you'll have later. But there will always be some so do what's necessary to get it together then clean afterwards. I've even used masking tape to hold some many-pieced shatters together. It's a mess but it works, provided the piece doesn't have any texture or decorative elements that could be damaged by the sanding.
Good luck! It's the most tricky and frustrating part, and where most of the failures happen. You should probably expect some failures and setbacks, it's just part of it.
What are the variables that a roaster can tweak? Temperature, time, and lots of others I assume? Which variable can produce vegetal flavors? I’d never thought much about roasting but now I’m curious!
5 mins or under and it’s scorched, 10 mins or over and it’s baked. I want in the middle.
Too dark and oily and it’s not great. Too light and I miss the bitterness and it tastes weak. I need to stir it a lot or the roast is uneven. I spray water on it at the end to arrest the roasting.
This is something that I still consider to be black magic to me, so this is my best attempt at describing a number of the variables.
Temperature is controlled in two ways: direct heat input (e.g. gas flame heating the outside of the rotating drum) and air flow (moving air through the roasting drum to the exhaust). It's not 1 measurement though: there is bean temperature (measured by a probe stuck into the pile of beans) and air temperature.
As far as time goes, when keeping the end temperature equal, spending more time in the roasting process means that the difference between interior and exterior of the bean are closer in temperature. When you plot air and bean temperature against time, you can derive additional information: how much energy is in your roasting drum and the rate at which the bean temperature is changing.
I'm going to preface this by saying that this is an ongoing field of research. We're still learning about what is happening in a coffee bean at various stages of the roasting process. For example, we're not quite certain exactly what is happening at "first crack" (the first time you can start to hear the beans popping), or why some coffee beans simply don't have as audible of a first crack.
We can attribute the first "rules" established for consistent coffee roasting to Scott Rao, who published some of his observations in a book in the early 2010s. Some of those rules were: (1) ensure that the rate of change of the bean temperature ("rate of rise") is constantly decreasing, and (2) prepare to adjust your roast as you begin first crack to prevent the "crash and flick" (a sharp decrease followed by a sharp increase in the rate of rise). The current thinking is that the release of moisture during first crack causes the temperature to crash, and the removal of that moisture causes the temperature to uncontrollably rise back up again. Not handling this properly often results in undesirable hollow and bready flavors; this is frequently referred to as "baked coffee".
As far as vegetal goes, that is often because of roasters cutting their roasts too short (and perhaps roasting too quickly). In this case, the bean does not get hot enough for sufficient flavor development, so it more or less retains a lot of the undesirable flavors of essentially "raw" coffee.
Note that these are "rules" instead of rules because there are a plethora of edge cases out there.
This is why roasting is really really difficult. And why even some of the best roasters out there end up leaning a lot on blends and their milk drink business.
And sorry, I gotta call out everyone who suggests this: most of your home-roasted coffee is gonna taste like ass lol. I tried home roasting a bit with a fancy setup and with a Fresh Roast. I sure saved a lot of money per pound of coffee, but I always got a fraction of the quality and the flavors were never consistent. But what I gained was insanity and the realization that home-roasting isn't for me.
Thank you for the detailed answer! It makes sense that the vegetal flavors are the raw flavors from the beans themselves. And that temperature is much more complicated than it appears. I also appreciate the Scott Rao pointer, perhaps that will be interesting future reading.
Of the plane wasn’t full, they’d often not care, or they’d be lax about it. The “fumble in my pockets with people behind me until they just wave you on” kind of thing.
There’s a big cultural divide between urban and rural Americans. It shows up in all sorts of contentious issues, not just this one. For example, urban Americans that would like to limit gun ownership where they live are largely prevented from doing so because of the preferences of rural Americans.
That’s fascinating - my weirdest stranger story wouldn’t make your top 100. Is there something about your home, work, or hobbies that could account for so many strange encounters? Or just luck of the draw?
> For better or worse, the side channels are not an accident. They are extremely intentionally designed. Accessing them often requires performance of being a professional-managerial class member or otherwise knowing some financial industry shibboleths
What is meant by side channels here? Is it writing "a paper letter to the VP of Retail Banking", as mentioned elsewhere in the article? That doesn't seem "intentionally designed", so the author must be referring to something else, but I don't have the imagination to guess it
That's the kind of thing done by people who the bank really doesn't want to offend. The bank decided it wants that to work for them. Therefore the bank created a way of making sure it works.
That it is not documented or advertised is a feature.
The "intentionally designed" part isn't just the mail, it's the process that comes after receiving mail. The VP of Retail Banking does not read their own mail. Who does read that mail? How are various letters delegated to appropriate teams? What letters are discarded or given a canned response? How does the bank make sure that it doesn't ghost people (most of the time)? It basically needs an entire support system, which may or may not rely on parts of the official support system
Not sure if this is what he meant but you can call a bank or visit a branch, get a phone number for a specific department and call them directly and get almost VIP levels of helpful service in my experience.
Something that would entail hours of phone support thru official channels cut down to 15 minutes. Once you discover this there's no going back and it all depends on who you ask, and how you ask.
The paper letter would be one such side channel. jeff@amazon.con would be an even better such example. You will get a response from a "Executive Customer Relations" team, which is likely still a tiered tech support team, but the lowest tier is already capable of actually solving most problems that would get completely stuck in the regular support queue. It doesn't get much more intentionally designed than that.
For banks and other regulated industries, if something is a sufficient clusterfuck of incompetence and getting-the-runaround, filing a complaint at some supervisory authority also works. That generally gets the attention of the "troubleshooting" team mentioned, which is usually all it takes. The supervisory authorities know this, and most complaints likely get resolved this way (getting it in front of someone with some level of competence and authority).
I think the tiering structure is reasonable (some of my requests simply need a Tier 1 person to press a button that they have and I don't), and I've seen cases get escalated appropriately, but when the escalation fails/doesn't happen quickly it's incredibly infuriating.
Other side channels can be (real examples):
- legal department (note: this can be a one-way street and can make the company only talk to you through a lawyer, but if e.g. you have a complaint with a company that would result in a small claims court judge shake their head over the company's behavior, and are willing to take it to small claims court, this can be really effective). To reach them and get their attention, filing a small claims court case can be effective!
- Really bad feedback (0/10 on every category, including the "are you satisfied with the person on the other end", not just the company) on a customer satisfaction survey
- Social media (the common way to escalate "beyond the abilities of normal support channels" issues with tech companies). There are teams specifically for tracking and escalating social media feedback, but that's again a tiered system. Bigger shitstorm = higher tier.
To my ear, the two translations you listed sound very similar to primitivesuave’s “I am time…” translation and dissimilar to Oppenheimer’s “I am death…” translation. Can you explain why you disagree?
I've lived everywhere, including in big metropolis cities. In general, people do not want to leave the community they were born in, unless influences and factors beyond their control force them to. Including of course the people who were born in the cities.
In practice, backcountry hikers in the US do commonly bury toilet paper. There’s definitely a growing contingent arguing they shouldn’t, though. Portable bidets (like the culoclean brand) and pee cloths (like the kula brand) can reduce toilet paper use and make packing it out easier.
