More images from the pamphlet, "Coffee: The Story of a Good Neighbor Product."
A few about coffee exporting, roasting, and preparation, first. Click the images to enlarge...
Plus, I can't resists this pretty page which introduces the activities for school students...
Here are some more images from "Coffee: The Story of a Good Neighbor Product."
These ones are particularly informative and pretty. Click on an image to enlarge.
I've been meaning to share these images with you for a while. My old roommate found a slender notebook in a used book store in San Francisco, entitled "Coffee: The Story of a Good Neighbor Product."
It was published in 1957 by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau in New York City. I'm taking the liberty of reproducing large portions of it here. This was a promotional product; I can't imagine anyone objecting to me disseminating it further, albeit 42 years after the fact.
I like the style of the drawings, and the writing style too. The coffee information is almost all still entirely accurate. Here are a few images to pore over... I'll post more in the near future.
Click on an image to enlarge it.
When the brain gets a set of visual data, it immediately starts processing it a certain way, according to some automatic processes that are more hardwired than we tend to realize.
For instance, in the picture below, there is a clear image of a man's face. But you may have a hard time finding it. Keep looking.
Do you give up? Because it's a very clear picture of a man's face.
Don't keep reading unless you want a clue.
Okay, here's your clue.
It's near the bottom edge of the rectangle, about one third over from the left side.
See it? Now that you see it, you will never have any trouble seeing it again. Your visual cortex was just processing "beans" until you saw the face, even though you knew there was a face to look for. Your "face"-recognizing neurons weren't actually working. Now that you've seen the face, your face-neurons are kicked in gear with this particular stimulus and there's nothing difficult at all about seeing the face.
Check out some more really cool face illusions from Scientific American.
This weekend I'm setting off on a series of adventures in continued pursuit of perfect coffee.
Whenever I get stuck on a plane or runway or airport, and I notice myself getting crabby (and when there's no good coffee to be had to lighten my mood), I remind myself that it used to be a lot harder to get wherever I'm going. Tomorrow I fly cross country to the great West Coast. If I get delayed at Newark airport (likely), I can just remember that such a journey used to take several months and there was a high likelihood of dying of hypothermia or starvation on the way [must.... resist... joke about... package of peanuts].
On the plane I'll be reading a Patrick O'Brien novel, the seventh in his Aubrey/Maturin series (I also brought the eighth in case I read number seven too fast). These are swashbuckling adventure books about the British navy in the Napoleonic Era. Lots of nautical terms and naval battles and old-timey talk. There was a movie a while back based on these books starring Russell Crowe, called "Master and Commander."
Humorously, the main protagonists, the bluff, courageous, affable Captain Jack Aubrey and his surly, worldly, lovelorn friend, the doctor/naturalist/spy Stephen Maturin, are both addicted to ... you guessed it, coffee!
Barely ten pages go by in any of these novels that someone isn't craving coffee, complaining about the weakness of coffee, or otherwise preparing, thinking about, or drinking coffee. Speaking of counting your blessings, author O'Brien portrays some pretty dreadful, salt-water infused, horribly weak dreck served cold. Sometimes, though, when everything is according to their perfect orders, the captain and the doctor get their preferred brew. Green beans are stored on ship, roasted up in a pan and ground and brewed right to order. Captain Aubrey is just like me: he's in the best of all possible moods when served a cup of perfect, hot, welcoming coffee.
Interesting note for coffee experts: in one novel, The Mauritius Command, the heroes spend weeks sailing about Mauritius and Ile de la Reunión. Reunion Island is of course also known as Bourbon Island, original home of the famous Bourbon varietal I am always raving about. When Aubrey and Maturin manage to get some sacks of coffee from the island in between naval battles, O'Brien shows them particularly enjoying the special rich, sweet taste of the coffee from that place. When I read that little detail, I became sold on the historical accuracy of the rest of the stuff in the books (naval battles, nautical and medical terms), about which I know nothing.
Flash forward 200 years and traveling around the world has gotten a little easier. But nothing has changed about the pleasure one derives from great coffee.
When I post to you on Monday it will be from another far-off exotic destination, that little logging outpost burg known as Seattle, Washington.
From this post by alicorn on the fantastic Less Wrong
Most propositional knowledge (knowledge of facts) is pretty easy to come by (at least in principle). There is only one capital of Venezuela, and if you wish to learn the capital of Venezuela, Wikipedia will cooperatively inform you that it is Caracas. For propositional knowledge that Wikipedia knoweth not, there is the scientific method. Procedural knowledge - the knowledge of how to do something - is a different animal entirely. This is true not only with regard to the question of whether Wikipedia will be helpful, but also in the brain architecture at work: anterograde amnesiacs can often pick up new procedural skills while remaining unable to learn new propositional information
.
One complication in learning new procedures is that there are usually dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to do something. Little details - the sorts of things that sink into the subconscious with practice but are crucial to know for a beginner - are frequently omitted in casual descriptions. Often, it can be very difficult to break into a new procedurally-oriented field of knowledge because so much background information is required. While there may be acknowledged masters of the procedure, it is rarely the case that their methods are ideal for every situation and potential user, because the success of a procedure depends on a vast array of circumstantial factors.
I propose below a general strategy for acquiring new procedural knowledge. First, saturate by getting a diverse set of instructions from different sources. Then, distill by identifying what all or most of them have in common. Finally, improvise within the remaining search space to find something that works reliably for you and your circumstances.
You can't turn every casual coffee drinker into a World Barista Champion in three hours. And even a barista champion will lack knowledge about, say, the breakdown of organic acids over time. When I teach, my goal is to saturate people with general coffee knowledge, and then quickly narrow in on their specific circumstances.
A purely procedural class will give someone a very flimsy, robotic knowledge of one way to make coffee. A purely theoretical class will be interesting, but leave people at sea when they want to make a good cup. Start with theory, move on to procedures. And all times be fueling the session with cups of great coffee!
Her sleep must have been very light at the moment because she opened her eyes and gazed up at him questioningly.
"What are you looking at?" she asked.
He knew that instead of waking her he should lull her back to sleep, so he tried to come up with an answer that would plant the image of a new dream in her mind.
"I'm looking at the stars."
"Don't say you are looking at the stars. That's a lie. You're looking down."
"That's because we are in an airplane. The stars are below us."
"Oh, in an airplane," said Tereza, squeezing his hand even tighter and falling asleep again. And Tomas knew that Tereza was looking out the round window of an airplane flying high above the stars.
