Fuck io9 a lot, but this is funny:

It bears repeating that the judges Hodgson surveyed were no ordinary taste-testers. These were judges at California State Fair wine competition -- the oldest and most prestigious in North America. If you think you can consistently rate the "quality" of wine, it means two things:

1: No. You can't.

2. Wine-tasting is bullshit.

[...]

A 2006 study, published by the American Association of Wine Economists, found that most people can't distinguish between paté and dog food.

My personal wine Venn Diagram consists of a large outer circle labelled "something my companions thought was a good idea" enclosing smaller almost-equally-sized circles labelled "something that gives me a headache before a buzz" and "something that would be better with bubbles and OJ in it".

Also, liver-flavored butter? Who eats that on purpose?

I am a committed Tabasco Sauce fiend. It is neither too hot, nor too mild, nor too vinegary -- I put it on pretty much everything. I'd use it for contact lens solution if I could. My life was radically transformed by my discovery of tiny, individual Tabasco sachets that aviation security X-rays don't identify as liquids, which means I can carry Tabasco with me at all times without worrying about getting stopped at airports for not having a stupid baggie with my liquids in it.

I found this video describing the production of Tabasco absolutely riveting. The fermentation process, the salted barrels, and let us not forget le petit baton rouge.

How Its Made - Hot Sauce (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Comments

Comments

If This Then That is one of our favorite automation services because it can do almost anything you tell it to. One of the things you can do is set up an automated system to alert you about deals you want, and it's remarkably easy to do.

We've already walked you through the process of setting up IFTTT, and it's as simple as just clicking on a few boxes to create a recipe and make it do whatever you want. With that in mind, here are a few of our favorite recipes for always scoring the best deal.

Get Notified of Results for Your Craigslist and eBay Searches

When you're hunting for something on Craigslist or eBay it feels like you have to spend your entire day refreshing the site in order to find what you're looking for. Thankfully, IFTTT can make this cumbersome task a lot easier. This Craiglist search recipe that sends you an email when an item meets your search parameter, meaning you never have to scour Craigslist again. Alternately, this eBay recipe text messages you when something you want pops up on eBay. You'll never have to waste time digging through all those results again.

Grab All Kinds of Great Free Stuff

All types of sites put stuff up for free all the time. If you want to keep track of these, you just need to pick a recipe that works for you. Our favorites include recipes that send you an email when a free book is added to the Kindle top 100, an email for free MP3s from Amazon (or iTunes), or when apps go free on Appshopper. You can also get an email with the iTunes App Store's "Deal of the Week" so you never miss out on a cheap app. Basically, with a little set up, you'll never run out of free content.

Score Anything From Woot for Cheap

Woot is one of your favorite deal sites, and the nice thing about it is that it integrates nicely into IFTTT. So, you can set a recipe to email you when iTunes gift cards are on sale, get the deal of the day via text message, or even get notified when a Dyson product is on sale. You can pop in and modify the search terms on any of these recipes to meet whatever criteria you want. Of course, if you're looking for something really specific like a new SSD, this recipe will hunt across all kinds of deal sites to send you the best deal.

Get a Deal on Exactly What You Want from Amazon

Setting up a notification to get Gold Box deals from Amazon is easy, but your inbox will be inundated with junk you don't want. A better way to do it is to set up a keyword in the Amazon Gold Box feed so you're only notified when items you care about show up. For example, you can modify this recipe that sends out deals on iPad stuff to match any keywords of your choosing. That way, you filter through the junk and get just the deals you're interested in.

Get Deal Posts from All Your Favorite Web Sites and Blogs

A lot of sites (including ours) have a deals tag they use when they write a blog post about an app that goes on sale. These are usually curated, and filled with some of the better apps out there. If you're hunting for any cheap software, this is the easiest way to keep up to date with the sales. Ours will get you everything we post as a Dealhacker. You can also grab deals from Gizmodo, MacStories, and the Verge. You can make this for pretty much any blog you want by just changing the URL in the "This" part of any of these recipes.

the-absolute-funniest-posts:

My lovely followers, please follow this blog immediately!

we-are-star-stuff:

Who says North is up?

Upside Down maps (also known as South-Up or Reversed maps) offer a completely different perspective of the world we live in.

Technically speaking, even referring to the earth with words like “up” or “down” or comparing places with words “above” or “below” is flawed, considering that the earth is a spherical body (it’s actually slightly “fatter” at the equator) and flying through 3 dimensional space with no reference of up or down. However, the issue of “up” and “down” does become an issue when viewing the surface of the earth projected onto a flat piece of paper (a map). And the effect of the orientation of a map is more significant than you might realize.

As all maps require orientation for reference, the issue of how to layout the map orientation is as old as maps themselves. As map orientation is completely arbitrary, it is not surprising that they differed throughout time periods and regions.

The convention of North-up is usually attributed to the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (90-168 AD). Justifications for his north-up approach vary. In the middle ages, East was often placed at top. This is the origin of the term “The Orient” to refer to East Asia. During the age of exploration, European cartographers again followed the north-up convention…perhaps because the North Star was their fixed reference point for navigation, or because they wanted (subconsciously or otherwise) to ensure Europe’s claim at the top of the world.

In modern times, reversed maps are made as a learning device or to illustrate Northern Hemisphere bias. Different from simply turning a north-up map upside down, a reversed map has the text oriented to be read with south up.

The famous “Blue Marble” photograph of the Earth taken from on board Apollo 17 was originally oriented with the south pole at the top, with the island of Madagascar visible just left of center, and the continent of Africa at its right. However, the image was turned upside-down to fit the traditional view.

While the orientation of a map might seem harmless, it can have a significant effect on one’s perception of the world, and the relative importance of the different place in it.

In speech, we often refer to places being “above” or “below” others. Think of how you would say you’re about to travel to the state or country to your north or south (to go “down” to Kentucky from Indiana, or “up” to Canada from the US). Without even mentioning geography, ask any grade school student whether Mexico is “above” or “below” the United States. We’re all familiar with the “land down under”. As we often correlate importance to relative height (think how a citizens of a country will fly their flag higher than all other flags), the north-up convention reinforces the idea that northern bodies are more important than their southern neighbors. Suddenly, traveling “down” to the South might have an inference much deeper than geographic location.

After looking at the map more closely, you may realize that the South-Up orientation may change your perception of the relative status of different places. For example, South America suddenly looks to have more prominence, and Africa and the Middle East completely dwarf Europe. Likewise, tucking Northern Europe, Canada, and Russia away at the bottom of the map, subconsciously takes away their status.

To summarize, unconditionally accepting the north-up map convention without at least appreciating the effect stands at odds with viewing all people and places within the world equally. x x

How can six people be organized into four committees so that each committee has three members, each person belongs to two committees, and no two committees have more than one person in common?

It’s possible to work this out laboriously, but it yields immediately to a geometric insight:

If each line represents a committee and each intersection is a person, then the problem is solved.

You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach.

Perfect.

““For the last three decades many Americans have puzzled over a system that gives an R to a movie in which a women is carved up by a chainsaw and an NC-17 to one that shows a woman sexually pleasured. From such ratings one might conclude that sexual violence against women is OK for American teenagers to see, but that they must be 18 to see consensual sex. What message does this send to the kids the MPAA presumably means to protect?””

-

Carrie Rickey

(via fireworkselectricbright)

“You have to question a cinematic culture which preaches artistic expression, and yet would support a decision that is clearly a product of a patriarchy-dominant society, which tries to control how women are depicted on screen. The MPAA is okay supporting scenes that portray women in scenarios of sexual torture and violence for entertainment purposes, but they are trying to force us to look away from a scene that shows a woman in a sexual scenario which is both complicit and complex. It’s misogynistic in nature to try and control a woman’s sexual presentation of self. I consider this an issue that is bigger than this film.”

-Ryan Gosling on the controversy around the rating of his film ‘Blue Valentine’

(via misandry-mermaid)

The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors.

Georgia Tech will work with AT&T and Udacity, the 15-month-old Silicon Valley-based company, to offer a new online master’s degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current degree. The deal, announced Tuesday, is portrayed as a revolutionary attempt by a respected university, an education technology startup and a major corporate employer to drive down costs and expand higher education capacity.

Georgia Tech expects to hire only eight or so new instructors even as it takes its master’s program from 300 students to as many as 10,000 within three years, said Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech.

…The deal started to come together eight months ago in a meeting between Galil and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun.

“Sebastian suggested to do a master’s degree for $1,000 and I immediately told him it’s not possible,” Galil said.

Eventually, the program came together for about $6,600 per degree. In a blog post, Thrun compared the day of the announcement to the day he proposed to his wife.

There is more here.  Hi future.

edroso: Great read RT @maradydd: In which @moxie does the Right Thing in a big way. Well done, sir. http://t.co/p1jnVWi1es

kellysue:

Photographs: Tom Hussey

This is remarkably well done, I really like it.

This is exactly how Grandma DeConnick described aging to me. 

fuckyeahfeminists:

Costco CEO Craig Jelinek supports raising the minimum wage.

Costco announced record profits today, averaging $10,000 in profit per employee compared to $7,400 at Walmart. 
The secret to Costco’s success is paying employees well, providing benefits, and giving them an opportunity to unionize.

So large corporations’ excuses that treating & paying workers well would damage profits are all a crock of shit.

Comments

Wood is one of the most versatile materials known. You can coax it into uncountable forms. However It exhibits extremely complex behavior, as if it were still living. This tome dives deep into woodology, and returns with great insight into what wood wants. It is essential understanding for anyone wishing to master working with wood.

-- KK

Understanding Wood
Bruce Hoadley
2000, 280 pages
$27

Available from Amazon

Sample Excerpts:

A knot is the basal portion of a branch whose structure becomes surrounded by the enlarging stem. Since branches begin with lateral buds, knots can always be traced back to the pith of the main stem.

*

*

Various shapes of red pine have been dried and superimposed on their original positions on an adjacent log section. The great tangential than radical shrinkage causes squares to become diamond-shaped, cylinders to become oval. Quarter-sawn boards seldom warp, but flat sawn boards cup away from the pith.

*

A wafer cut from a kiln-dried plank of white ash shows no symptoms of stress (left). Another section from the same plank, after resawing (center) reveals the casehardened condition (tension in core, compression in shell). Kiln operators cut fork-shaped sections that reveal casehardening when prongs curve inward (right).

*

Most of the boards in the drying shed at left are restrained by the weight of the others. At right is a similar, simpler setup, where the wood is protected by a sheet of corrugated plastic. In both cases, the boards are stacked in the sequence they came off the saw.

*

Red oak end grain cut with a ripsaw (right), which mangles the cell structure, and with a crosscut saw (left), which severs the fibers cleanly.

The latest 60-second Speedrun through a science fiction movie takes us through the action-packed mayhem of Aliens, from Jonesy to Ripley's power loader. Those Xenomorphs are still vicious in this format, so watch out.

Read more...

edroso: Thanks @JillianSed & @pattonoswalt -- Mike Brodie's teen trainhoppers photos are fantastic. http://t.co/EqtCdS6r6F

Read about this project and listen to Mark's interview with Dennis Eichhorn here.

The creator of the GIF, Steve Wilhite, caused a firestorm today by weighing in on the correct pronunciation of his creation:

He is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format. “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

This is not the first time Wilhite has handed down this decree. It's never been the end of the story before, and needless to say, it was not the end of the story this time either. But I bring this up not to declare my own allegiance, but to ask a different question. I need some honest input from old timers here.

As near as I can remember, controversy over the pronunciation of GIF has existed practically from the day of its birth. Nevertheless, my recollection is that 20 years ago, most people pronounced it JIF. The hard-G contingent was a distinct minority. But that seems to have changed over time. Today, my sense is just the opposite: most people pronounce it with a hard G, and the Jiffies are now a small rump fighting a rearguard action.

Everyone has such strong opinions about what the pronunciation should be that it's hard to solicit opinions on the purely empirical question of how it has been pronounced. But I'm going to ask anyway. Please don't bother answering unless you were born before 1970. For those of you who were, and especially for those of you who worked in the tech industry in the 80s and 90s, what's your recollection? Has the favored pronunciation changed, or has the hard G always been the more popular choice?

SuperTooth hopes to take Bluetooth stereo headphones to the masses this June with its Freedom headphones. These $149 cans don’t feel cheap, however. In fact, you get a lot of features found in higher-end headphones for less, including NFC for easy pairing and integrated mic for making calls and built-in touch controls.

Here at CTIA 2013 we stopped by the Supertooth booth to try the Freedom’s for ourselves, and we like what we saw–and heard.

The Supertooth Freedom’s are fairly sleek, offering a choice of three colors. We’re partial to the black version with blue on the interior but you can also get the headphones in glossy white or black with gray interior.

The right earcup includes a button towards the bottom for Play/Pause and accepting calls. Double pressing the button, which depresses slightly, skips to the next track. You’ll also find a narrow volume rocker on the inside of the right cup next to the power button. This was a bit more difficult to find by feel, but we got the hang of it quickly.

To try out the NFC pairing feature, we simply placed a Galaxy S4 next to the Freedom’s and the two devices were paired. However, we had to dig into settings to connect the phone to start streaming music. When we played Coldplay’s “Paradise,” the audio sounded rich and full. 

The best part of the Freedom’s is its rated 15 hours of battery life. A company rep told us that SuperTooth was seeing up to 20 hours of endurance in its tests. And if you do run out of juice, the SuperTooth Freedom comes with a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

Overall, the SuperTooth Freedom looks like a good value for those looking to rock out in comfort all day long. Stay tuned for a full review.

• Top 10 Smartphones
• 25 Best Android Apps
• 10 Smartphones with the Longest Battery Life

Follow Mark Spoonauer on Twitter,Google+. Follow LAPTOPMAG on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.

UPDATE: "Vimeo has removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust claiming that this material is infringing: THIS IS WATER - By David Foster Wallace."

Here's a beautifully made video accompaniment to "This is Water," an excerpt from a David Foster Wallace commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, in which Wallace exhorts his listeners to empathize with the people around them, using examples and languages so beautifully chosen that they just about break your heart.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005 (via Lifehacker)

When you've unintentionally angered someone, your first instinct may be to explain that making them mad wasn't your goal, and try to elaborate on what you really meant. If you've noticed that it never really seems to calm them down, here's why: your intentions matter less than the consequences of your actions.

If someone's done something that's inconvenienced you, or made your job harder, or made you late, your intentions are great, but they don't address what the fact that what they did wasn't appropriate. Similarly, on the other side, if you're the offending party, you may think that if the other person only understood what your intentions were, they'd understand and relax. It just doesn't work that way. Instead, focus on the consequences, and acknowledging how the other person feels and has been wronged, says Peter Bregman at Daily Good:

As it turns out, it’s not the thought that counts or even the action that counts. That’s because the other person doesn’t experience your thought or your action. They experience the consequences of your action.

It’s stunningly simple, actually. When you’ve done something that upsets someone — no matter who’s right — always start the conversation by acknowledging how your actions impacted the other person. Save the discussion about your intentions for later. Much later. Maybe never. Because, in the end, your intentions don’t matter much.

What if you don’t think the other person is right — or justified — in feeling the way they do? It doesn’t matter. Because you’re not striving for agreement. You’re going for understanding.

Bregman concedes that this is easier said than done—our own emotional resistance makes us want to put ourselves at the center of the story. We want to believe that if we just explain our side the right way, the other person will get it. We think that if they don't get it, something's wrong with them, and that anything different would be betraying ourselves and how we feel—but at the core, it's really just about empathy.

If you start the conversation by acknowledging the other person, both of you will be ready to move on from the issue sooner, without it blowing up any further. He offers this tip to make it easier:

Here’s a trick to make it easier. While they’re getting angry at you, imagine, instead, that they’re angry at someone else. Then react as you would in that situation. Probably you’d listen and let them know you see how angry they are.

And if you never get to explain your intentions? What I have found in practice — and this surprised me — is that once I’ve expressed my understanding of the consequences, my need to justify my intentions dissipates.

That’s because the reason I’m explaining my intentions in the first place is to repair the relationship. But I’ve already accomplished that by empathizing with their experience. At that point, we’re both usually ready to move on.

And if you do still feel the need? You’ll still have the opportunity, once the other person feels seen, heard, and understood.

If we succeed in doing all this well, we’ll often find that, along with our relationships, something else gets better: our behavior.

Hit the link below to check out some specific examples where Bregman says this approach would be useful, like an unintentionally infuriating email to a coworker or arriving to a dinner date with a spouse later than you planned.

Thanks to reader Mary for sending in the tip!

What To Do When You've Made Someone Angry | Daily Good

Photo by Greg Chiasson.