Rotundus.com

Russian 'space troops' are not prepared for battle with aliens, says official

Uh oh!

What Christian women really, really want

"When forced to choose their top priority in life, Christian women overwhelmingly pick family over faith, according to a survey from Barna Research. Five times more women chose 'being a mother or parent' than chose 'being a follower of Christ,' as their most important role in life."

The New Old-School Birth Control

How effective can natural family planning be if done in a well-informed way? "The study’s researchers found this to be 98.2 percent effective—comparable with the pill, and a far cry from the 82 percent effectiveness rate of the withdrawal method."

Birch For Breakfast? Meet Maple Syrup's Long-Lost Cousins

"Americans have a longstanding love affair with maple syrup ... However, it isn't the only tree syrup that's available to drizzle on your short stack or sweeten your latte."

Another Judge Suffers from Ironic-Cellphone-Disruption Syndrome

"Judge Hugh B. Clarke Jr. ... fined himself $50 after his cellphone went off at a sentencing hearing."

Ex-Israeli Soldier Denounced on US Campus for Not Raping Palestinian Women

Can't say that I've stumbled across this particular line of reasoning before. "in one case, a professor asked me if I knew how many Palestinians have been raped by IDF forces. I answered that as far as I knew, none. She triumphantly responded that I was right, because, she said, 'You IDF soldiers don’t rape Palestinians because Israelis are so racist and disgusted by them that you won’t touch them.'"

Millionaire Men Prefer To Date Women With Less Money

"the vast majority of millionaire men, 79.6 percent, seek out non-millionaire women, while 84.5 percent of the female millionaires would prefer to date another millionaire."

Why it's probably safer if your pilot is asleep than awake

"A survey of 500 commercial pilots has found that one in six has woken up on the flight deck to find their co-pilot snoozing." Yet, at the same time, "No aircraft in the history of aviation has crashed because a pilot has gone to sleep at the controls ... It's never happened. On the other hand, crashes that have resulted from fatigue? There are many, many, many of those."

Lately I've been seeing headlines like RCMP’s Major Crimes Unit takes over university assaults case after third violent attack at UBC. At the moment it seems that one guy has attacked three women in three weeks. Given the headlines it's been making you'd think this would be a crisis.

Compare how many sex crimes you'd expect to see were the claim that 1-in-4 female undergrads are sexually assaulted during their time at university meet reality. UBC in Vancouver had 26,682 female students in 2012/2013. Assume an average of 5 years to complete a degree and 1 in 4 being assaulted during that time. Under these assumptions you'd expect to see 1334 women sexually assaulted each year for the FIRST time or roughly 3.7 per day. That doesn't even consider yet the possibility that some women get sexually assaulted multiple times. Even if you assume 90% of assaults go unreported, you'd expect to see 2-3 reported sexual assaults in a typical week. UBC, by contrast, seems to have only had 3 reports in 3 weeks.

If you were in charge of allocating police resources what should you do? If you believe that 1-in-4 women are sexually assaulted during their time at university, you should divert police resources away from UBC at the moment as it would seem to be experiencing a period of relative safety. If you don't buy that claim (and if you believe the US campus crime data that by law must be reported by universities you shouldn't) you might do what the police actually seem to be doing - increase police resources in an attempt to address this.

Bad data and bad analysis make for bad policy. Thankfully here the police seem to be addressing reality rather than the rhetoric of many a feminist.

I came across the following quote in a New York Times article a day or two ago:

At my local Starbucks, I asked the young barista who took my order (grande 1 percent latte) how hot the store brews its coffee. “We brew it at 200 degrees,” she said. (That is also the standard recommended by the Specialty Coffee Association of America.)

But the serving temperature is lower than McDonald’s was back then. “We let it sit for a half-hour,” she continued, “so it is about 170 or 180 when we serve it.”

I wonder how common this is in practice to brew and serve at these different temperatures. My home brewing has of late been using an Aeropress and the Aeropress FAQ had the following to say about stale temperature:

5. The instructions for the AeroPress recommend using 175° F (80°C) water. That doesn’t seem hot enough. Why don’t you recommend a temperature closer to boiling?

In developing the AeroPress we spent more time on taste-testing various brewing temperatures than on any other tests. Our tasters ranged from casual coffee drinkers, to coffee aficionados, to professional coffee tasters and consultants. Every single taster preferred brew made at 165° F to 175° F. They said the hotter brews were ok, but the 165° F to 175° F (74° C to 80° C) brews tasted best.

Books often recommend a brewing temperature of 195° F to 200° F (91° C to 93° C). This is good for conventional brewing methods that pass hot water through a bed of coffee. In this method, the water rapidly cools so the lower part of the bed is operating at a lower temperature. However in the AeroPress all of the coffee particles contact the same water temperature during the stirring phase.

I recent picked up a temperature-controlled kettle so it seems that I'll have some experimenting to do. I've also been looking into the option to source my coffee beans direct from a local micro-roaster. As time wears on it seems I'm becoming more and more a coffee snob.