Manual Espresso

This morning, I ordered a short latte from a local Uptown Espresso. I was shocked that after the barista took my order, she did everything by hand. I watched as she ground the beans, dosed them into the portafilter and tamped them down. She attached the portafilter to the machine and timed my shots by hand. And how was the coffee? It was delicious.

I really appreciate when things are done by hand. Almost every other coffee chain I know has fully automated machines. You push a button and the machine grinds the beans, doses and tamps the grounds in the same precise way each time, and pulls shots that come out more or less exactly the same each time. The automatic method is obviously popular for lots of reasons. It enables chains like Starbucks to achieve s sense of consistency across all their stores. Whether you're walking into a Starbucks on the upper east side of Manhattan or in downtown Seattle on Pike St., you know that the beverage you order will taste exactly like the ones you've had at other Starbucks establishments. It also renders a major factor of barista training unnecessary. Pulling good, consistent espresso shots is an art, and it's a lot easier to train new employees how to push a button than it is to teach them how to time shots. This also allows them to spend more of the employee training process on other things like customer service or individual recipes (i.e. how many pumps of what goes in this or that drink). It also enables them to service more customers with a smaller staff. I've read somewhere that a single Starbucks store can serve hundreds of customers in a single hour. That wouldn't be possible without automatic espresso machines.

But still there's something that really draws me to the manual approach. On most mornings I pull my own espresso shots. I prefer my own espresso to the ones I could get at my local Peet's or Tully's or Starbucks. Do manual shots always taste better than automatic ones? Not at all. There's plenty of things that can be done wrong. I'm always trying new kinds of beans too, which means I constantly need to adjust the fineness of the grind, the pressure I apply to the tamper, and the duration of the shot. Sometimes, when getting used to new beans, the result of all my hard work doesn't even taste like coffee. But when you get it right, it makes everything worth it.

Some enthusiasts claim that the best manual shots are consistently better than their automatic counterparts. I don't know if that's necessarily true. A lot of time is spent fine-tuning the automatic machines to produce the most consistently high-quality espresso possible. Of course, there's a little bit of a tradeoff between consistency and quality, but in general, they can make decently good coffee. But then again, it's not necessarily the quality of the brew that draws me to the manual process. Like all manual processes, it's the personal aspect it introduces. You can curtail your espresso to be exactly the way you want it? Do you want a lighter brew or a heavier brew? Do you prefer it to have a hint of bitterness or would you rather shoot to extract all the aromatic flavors of the beans without the bitterness that comes toward the end of the extraction? You won't find any buttons on an automatic machine that'll let you make any of those choices. If you don't want to make those choices, it's fine. You can keep your Starbucks. But there's something about my coffee every morning that says it was made specially for me, just the way I like it. That's why manual espresso will never go out of style. Not because it's better than the automatic kind, but because it's more personal.

Thrasymachus's Claim

At the heart of Plato's Republic lies a question that is never really answered. This question, originally put forth by Greek Philosophers thousands of years ago (and likely even earlier by others) has still not been satisfactorily answered even to this day. The question comes in many forms, but at its root, it is simply this:

Why be moral?

Socrates puts forth the question in a little bit different of a way:

What is the benefit of being Just? Why choose a virtuous lifestyle over a non-virtuous one?

To which Thrasymachus (no doubt a politician) replies:

There is no benefit of being Just. The only  benefits that appear to come from being Just really come from appearing to be Just.

According to Thrasymachus, Justice means compromising ones own personal gain for that of the State, choosing someone else's gain over your own gain. He does admit that there are cases where it seems  like there is a benefit to being virtuous. For example, Others may not be interested in doing business with someone with a bad reputation. Virtuous appearances can make it easier to get other people to trust you, which is of utmost personal advantage. However, Thrasymachus argues, the benefit doesn't come from actually being virtuous but only from appearing to be so. Thrasymachus and Socrates agree that being virtuous and appearing to be virtuous are two separate things. In order to separate the benefits and drawbacks of each one, they propose this thought experiment:

Imagine two men. One of these men is purely non-virtuous and yet appears to be purely virtuous. He is held in high esteem by all people. He is daily praised by the general public for his virtue. He gets the seat of honor at all the fancy banquets. Everyone wants to be his friend and do business with him. But in reality, his actions are purely self-interested. He deceives everyone. He stabs his friends and business partners in the back to the full extent that he can get away with. He is very good (almost supernaturally) at covering his tracks and putting on appearances. Anything he wants, he steals from others, and yet he is loved by all.

The second man, on the other hand, is purely virtuous and yet appears to everyone to be purely non-virtuous. He spends his days looking out for the general welfare of all people. He doesn't have much in the way of worldly possessions, because he gives much away to others in need. And yet he is despised by all people. He lacks what the first man has: the ability to appear to be virtuous. As such, all his good deeds go unnoticed. Even worse, he is suspected of dishonesty, treachery, and the worst of things. No one trusts him. No one will do business with him. Even his family has abandoned him. He is thrown in jail, beaten, and forced to live out the rest of his days in a dank dungeon, where even in the depths of his despair, he continues to do good for anyone he can with whatever little means he has left.

How many of us would honestly rather be the second man?

In this light, Thrasymachus argues that since the non-virtuous man is obviously much better off than the virtuous man,  all personal gain clearly comes through appearing to be virtuous and not from actually being virtuous. He admits that sometimes it is not possible to appear to be virtuous without doing virtuous things, so in this case, sometimes virtuous deeds are a necessary evil that one must perform, thus giving up some personal advantage in return for a good reputation that will continue to pay dividends.

This is the disturbing problem which Socrates sets out to solve at the beginning of Republic. He wants to show that there is reason to pursue virtue (not just the appearance of virtue). Although disturbed by the possibility that Thrasymachus might be right, he clings to the hope that the virtuous man still has something priceless that the non-virtuous man still lacks, something still more valuable and worth pursuing than all the riches of the non-virtuous man. He never quite reaches a satisfactory answer.

There have been a ton of answers to the question of morality over the years. Maybe doing good makes you feel good and that makes virtue worth it. Maybe God knows the good things you've done and rewards you for them. Maybe you will be rewarded in the next life for the good things you've done in this one. Maybe you'll be tortured for all eternity for the things that you've done. Maybe we were designed to do good things and this is how we reach our true potential. Or  maybe Thrasymachus is right and we should all be more concerned with how we appear than with what we do.

The problem with the question of morality is that it wants a non-moral answer. It asks for a rationally self-interested reason to participate in morality. No wonder it lends itself well to the type of answer that Thrasymachus gives. In a lot of ways, Thrasymachus is right. You don't get anything for being virtuous. But at the same time, the benefits of being rationally self-interested are vastly overstated by the above thought experiment. Ultimately, any way you look at it, living entirely to please yourself is a limited and fruitless existence. For me, anyone begging the question of morality is starting off on the wrong foot. It is just not the right question to ask if you want to end up somewhere compelling. The real question is "how do I live a life worth living?" or "How do I live a life that is part of something bigger than myself?". This is the kind of language to which discussion of morality is actually accessible, to which compelling answers can actually be given. Regardless of whether discussing morality in a religious or secular perspective, if you don't start out with the right questions, you'll easily be distracted by the perspective of rational self interest that often dominates modern thought.

To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions.

Colombian Super Spy

This was just a little weekend project, but I ended up liking the finished product a lot, so I decided to share it. It's only 1:32 minutes long, so I think I'll try to develop it into a longer song at some point. You may have noticed that most of the songs I write tend to be on the short side. I have a hard time developing my ideas into longer songs without just adding filler and fluff. I do everything I wanted to do in the first minute and a half and then I don't really know what to do. I don't want to repeat what I already did, because that just feels like filler, but I don't want to go on and do more stuff, because then there's just too many ideas crammed into one song and it feels out of place. For me, that's one of the toughest parts of music composition: figuring out what to do after the first few minutes.

From Berries to Brews

Sometimes human creativity really baffles me. I've been getting into home espresso brewing recently, and one thing that I find incredibly shocking is the shear number of processes that coffee goes through between getting picked as a berry and getting brewed into a delicious drink. Generally speaking, in order to make coffee out of coffee berries, you must:

1)pick the berries
2)separate the beans from the pulp
3)dry the beans
4)roast the beans
5)grind the beans
6)pour hot water over the ground beans to extract the flavor of the grounds into the brew.

The thing that's really interesting about this is that without any of these 6 steps you don't end up with coffee in the end. It makes me really wonder how humans ever discovered coffee. Did someone just look at a coffea plant one day and say, "I wonder what it would taste like if I took some of those relatively bland-tasting berries, extract and dry their seeds and roast them and gridn them up and brew them in hot water..."?

The vexing issue here is that the complicated process of coffee making does not lend itself well to discovery by parts. In many other areas of science and engineering, new discoveries are made on the shoulders of older, well-established, and useful discoveries. Think of the modern automobile. Cars weren't invented overnight. Someone discovered the wheel long before anyone was thinking about combustion engines. So there were intermediary steps. First, carts with wheels. Then horse-drawn carriages, then motorcars, then cars with automatic transmissions, power stearing wheels, alarm systems, air bags, and all the other modern luxuries. The point is, at any point between the initial invention of the basic cart and the development of the modern automobile, each step was its own finished product, with its own intrinsic utility.

This is not the same with coffee production. Getting halfway there doesn't get you a finished product at all. Say one person discoveres how to de-pulp and dry coffee beans. That's not a finished product! It's not something that others can say, "wow, that's good, but I wonder if we can make it better." With things like the coffee process, it's all or nothing. Either you end up with coffee or you end up with something totally useless, like dry beans. This makes the entires process much less probable to be discovered, because it's all or nothing. There's no half way.

It makes me wonder what other potential delicious bevarages are you to be discovered. There are countless varieties of beans and seends to try similar processes on! After all, who would have expected that something as delicious as coffee would come from something as unsuspected as a bland-tasting cherry-looking berry? It's entirely likely that there are more such discoveries to be made.

That's the thing about the human creative spark. It enables us to think of the most uncanny ideas that end up being totally rewarding!

New Years and God's Grace

I know it’s late, and I have an 8:00 am flight tomorrow morning, but I had a fun New Year’s thought that I wanted to share. I love New Years. There’s something great about fresh starts, new beginnings, clean slates. Thinking about all the possibilities for the new year, I find myself reflecting on some of the really great things I’ve heard said during this holiday Season, particularly things that have to do with God’s grace. I’d like to share two:

This morning, at church, my Pastor made this analogy about God’s grace being like shaking an etch-a-sketch. Over time, we write lots of stuff on our etch-a-sketch. But God comes and shakes your etch-a-sketch, so you can start over with a fresh slate.

A lot of people have trouble with the concept of God’s Grace. They argue that if God forgives all your sins, why bother changing? Why bother trying to living a good life if you know God will just forgive you for everything you did wrong anyway? But if you go down that road, you really miss the whole purpose of Grace. Grace isn’t just washing your past away. It also provides the opportunity for new, better beginnings, and God is constantly inviting us to start over with Him.

Regardless of whether you think a New Year really provides a clean slate, we can always find peace in God’s eternal grace, which always provides us an opportunity for real, meaningful change.

Islander Economics: Part I

Economics totally baffles me. And when I say economics, I mean more generally the way in which produced goods and services get distributed. Most people get way too bogged down with currency, exchange rates, stocks, options, futures and all that other derivative hogwash and forget that economics is really about deciding who gets what. There’s this huge pie called “all of the products and services that are being created”, and economics is all about figuring out how to divide that pie amongst all of planet Earth’s 7 billion inhabitants. We use money as a sort of intermediary to designate how much goods and services each individual has contributed to the pie. So in a perfect economy (in the capitalist version anyway), the percentage of the total goods and services that any given individual is allowed to consume should be as close as possible to the percentage of the total goods and services that said individual helped to create. (quick personal question: does your own daily work create at least one 7-billionth of the world’s wealth? Also how do you figure that out? More on that later.) So let’s start with the basics.

The simplest possible version of economics happens in an economy with one person in it. This doesn’t happen so much anymore, but it is theoretically possible. Think of an urchin, living out in the forest, creating his own shelter, providing for himself. He has a list of needs he must take care of: food, shelter, warmth, etc., so he spends his days engaging in various tasks to provide these things for himself. He’ll hunt, forage, build, and do whatever else it takes to provide the goods and services he needs. This kind of economy is very simple. There is only one single consumer, so there is no question of how to divide the goods. Everything the urchin has gathered together belongs to him (as far as John Locke is concerned anyways. More on that later possibly). So as long as the urchin is industrious enough to provide for all of his own needs, we can say that this is a healthy economy. All of the inhabitants of the economy are actively contributing to the solution, and all of their needs are being met.

Let’s take a slightly more complicated example, a small fishing community on a remote and undeveloped fictional island of Lolo. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that everyone on Lolo Island spends the majority of their time fishing. Food is the primary concern. Everything else is taken care of. Their huts are well built and the weather is moderate, so their shelter is mostly taken care of. The island is remote enough that the threat of invasion has never been considered, and the community is closely knit enough so that disputes are resolved as a group. The islanders have not discovered anything valuable to scavenge on the island yet, so foraging is not a primary activity. There is plenty of space on the island, so there is no concept of owning or purchasing land. (This is a thought experiment, of course, so I’m trying to remove any unnecessary complexity.) So the community’s primary goal every day is to make sure everyone is well fed. During the day, every able-bodied islander fishes in the shallow waters with spears. At noon and at dusk, the islanders divide the fish amongst themselves and eat them raw. They don’t prepare the fish or cook them over a fire. Lolo Island hasn’t even discovered fire yet. I told you I was keeping things simple! I’m doing this because each new factor adds an extra complexity to the economic problem. Even just adding a second occupation complicates things drastically. We’ll see this as we move on. For now, though, the Lolo economy is incredibly simple. Some economists may say that Lolo doesn’t even have an economy. But the islanders on Lolo do have one single economic problem to solve. Who gets the fish!?

This entry has been really fun for me to write. Economics, the distribution of goods and services, and the ever-expanding poverty gap have been serious points of interest for me over the years. I would have liked to fit all of my ideas about these topics into one single, neat, concise blog entry, and when I started writing, I actually thought I would be able to do it. But these things are pretty complicated, and I want to make sure I take the time to develop my ideas to the level that they deserve. In the coming entries, we can delve farther into what I perceive to be the fundamental problems of modern economics by following the development of our newly created fictional Island Lola. Here are some thought-provoking questions to tide you over:

-What’s the best way to determine how many fish each islander gets? (i.e. What’s better for the islanders? Capitalism or Socialism? Hint: both of them kinda suck.)
-What happens when the community develops multiple disciplines (i.e. how many fish does a roof thatcher get to eat?)
-What happens when the community begins trading with other islands? (i.e. how many fish is a canoe worth?)
-What’s worth more? A car engine or a driveshaft? (i.e. how far can you get with just one or the other?)
-Why do poor people exist? (i.e. is it their fault or someone else’s? Or a little bit of both?)

revisiting old projects

I opened up my guitar the other day since the electronics had stopped working. This is what I saw:



That circled white wire was supposed to be soldered to the other circled piece, thus actually sending an audio signal through the output jack. My first thought was, "How in the world did that happen?". My second thought was, "Well that explains everything." I wish I could blame someone else's bad soldering skills, but it was actually I who wired this all together in the first place.

It's always interesting opening the covers on a project you did years and years ago. It looks so familiar and yet so foreign at the same time. It's the general feeling that feels the most familiar: the smell of routed-out Alder wood preserved under the pickguard, the excessive quantities of electrical tape everywhere, the general layout of the electronics, all this seemed so familiar to me, as if it was only yesterday that I was putting this thing together for the first time. But when I got down to the nitty gritty details, some of the details I couldn't remember at all. For example, why did I solder a spring onto the back of that control pot? I have no idea! I can't imagine what that would do to help, but it must have completely made sense to me at the time why that needed be done.

This is usually the same way it feels to go back and read code that I wrote years and years ago. It feels so familiar, but I just can't phathom what could possibly have been going on in my head at the time.