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  • About 75 €/month at most, but that would require drinking only specialty coffee. Normally I also have a bag of cheap supermarket coffee, which I use for experiments and training. Really good specially coffee costs about 80…100 €/kg, while good light roasted fresh supermarket coffee costs about 14 €/kg, so that can easily bring that monthly expense down.

    Since I drink a little bit of both, I think the overall cost is somewhere around 30…40 €/month.

    AP filers are really cheap, so they contribute only cents to the monthly sum. Can you really taste the difference between two filter types? If so, can Chemex really justify the higher cost?

  • “Ambient temperature“ is even vaguer. We should start referring to different things as ambient temperature when talking about hot and/or cold things.

  • It’s called research. You search for something, can’t find it, so you try again; hence the prefix.

  • Either way, NASA is already exploiting it. I guess, next they’ll find a way to glitch through the very fabric of the universe to teleport to a distant galaxy without moving at all or even using any energy.

  • Yeah, I guess that’s the only reason they haven’t done that already. Although, I’m pretty sure that eventually some ultra cheap airline company will optimize the hell out of everything like boarding efficiency, take-off weight and everything to make the tickets as cheap as possible.

  • What the airline company really care about is weight. To address that, they could charge you by the kilogram. If you’re heavy or bring lots of stuff with along, you would need to pay extra. This would encourage people to bring as little as possible or send their stuff to the destination through some shipping company.

  • That keyboard thing was pretty clever. I would not have thought of that.

  • In addition to what everyone else has already mentioned, I would like to point out that tasting is a skill you can develop. It’s possible to taste the difference between two methods or recipes, but if you haven’t developed that skill, it’s very hard to tell if a particular change or consistency even matters. Without this skill, you won’t really appreciate the time and effort you put into making coffee in a particular way.

  • I drink about two cups a day (400 ml in total), and I definitely get a headache if I drop my caffeine intake too suddenly. If I was adapted to drinking much less, then I might be able to go an entire day without noticing anything, but at the current level, it’s just not going to happen. Did James mention how much coffee do the participants normally drink every day? If they are all in the 1 cup club, these results are only exploring one extreme of the scale.

  • And you would need to include exteme cases to make the effects visible. Having two cups a day might not be enough, and 4 might just approach the limit. People who drink like 10 cups a day should stand out in a study like this.

  • That was a great video! James takes these things rather seriously when compared to other coffee people. For example, there are lots of people who say you should rinse the aeropress filter or stop pushing once you hear the hiss, but James said those things don’t matter, so why bother with extra steps like that. The same idea applies here. There are lots of strange but appealing ideas floating around, but many of them are not worth your time.

  • Last time I had a sore throat, I drank a lot of hibiscus (sort of like tea, but not even close). Obviously, I still had to fuel my caffeine addiction so I did have my usual coffee too, but most of the time I had a warm cup of hibiscus with me. Whatever you end up drinking, make sure it isn’t too hot, because that’s going to make everything worse. Hibiscus appeared to work just fine for me.

  • Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • If the apologee knows that the apologizer wasn’t sincere, then it’s pretty much worthless. However, the insincerity of the apologizer isn’t always known by the apologee, and that’s when the apology still does have the intended psychological effect on the apologee. However, an insincere apologizer doesn’t get any of the benefits giving an apology usually comes with. However, the apologizer can still view that as an effective a social manipulation method, if they’re a psychopath.

  • If you find out that your current ram is obsolete, you probably have lots of other ancient stuff in your computer too. By the time your ram is too slow or there isn’t enough of it, your CPU is going to be abysmally slow by modern standards. Even if your mobo is still fine at that point, it won’t support any of the upgrades you have in mind, so you’ll end up changing everything anyway.

  • Can confirm. If you wish to listen to something while in the train/subway or in some other noisy environments, such as a bus stop right next to a busy road, ANC really helps a lot. Obviously, it’s no replacement for proper hearing protection, but instead of cranking up the volume through the roof, you can listen to things at a very reasonable volume despite the noisy environment.

  • Man, that is just such a cool little easter egg. Totally love it!

  • Nah, just throw all the unknowns into a the error term at the end of the equation and call it a day. All models are wrong, but some are close enough.

  • The idea of modern medicine is to sell chemical compounds that actually have an effect. It’s a philosophical and ethical thing. All products have a unique psychological effect that gets intertwined with their biochemical effect. If you can’t study them individually, it’s impossible to tell if the biochemical effect even exists at all. If your medicine relies heavily, or even entirely, on the psychological side, it’s no different than homeopathy. The idea of modern medicine is to be better than the old stuff that preceded it.

    I prefer to think of this as an equation like this: Pm+Bm=Pp+Bp

    Pm=psychological effect, medicine

    Bm=biochemical effect, medicine

    Pp=psychological effect, placebo = surprisingly big

    Bp=biochemical effect, placebo = 0

    If these sides are equivalent, the medicine is just as effective as placebo. If the medicine side is bigger, you’ll want to know how much of it comes from the P and B terms. In order to figure that out, you would need to know some values. Normally, you can just assume that Pm=Pp, but if you can’t assume that, it you’re left with two unknowns in that equation. In this case, you really can’t assume them to be equal, which means that your data won’t allow you to figure out how much of the total effect comes from psychological and biochemical effects. It could be 50/50, 10/90, who knows. That sort of uncertainty is a serious problem, because of the philosophical and ethical side of developing medicine.

  • Statistical tests are very picky. They have been designed by mathematicians in a mathematical ideal vacuum void of all reality. The method works in those ideal conditions, but when you take that method and apply it in messy reality where everything is flawed, you may run into some trouble. In simple cases, it’s easy to abide by the assumptions of the statistical test, but as your experiment gets more and more complicated, there are more and more potholes for you to dodge. Best case scenario is, your messy data is just barely clean enough that you can be reasonably sure the statistical test still works well enough and you can sort of trust the result up to a certain point.

    However, when you know for a fact that some of the underlying assumptions of the statistical test are clearly being violated, all bets are off. Sure, you get a result, but who in their right mind would ever trust that result?

    If the test says that the medicine is works, there’s clearly financial incentive to believe it and start selling those pills. If it says that the medicine is no better than placebo, there’s similar incentive to reject the test result and demand more experiments. Most of that debate goes out the window if you can be reasonably sure that the data is good enough and the result of your statistical test is reliable enough.

  • Yeah, that’s the thing with placebo. It’s surprisingly effective, and separating the psychological effect from actual chemistry can be very tricky. If most participants can correctly identify if they’re bing fed the real drug or a placebo, it makes it impossible to figure out how much each effect contributes to the end result. Ideally, you would only use effective medicine that does not need the placebo effect to actually work.

    Imagine, if all medicine had lots of placebo effect in them. How would you treat patients who are in a coma or otherwise unconscious?