Making the most from every coffee bean and doing so tastefully
Posted by mark in food science on June 19, 2025
Yesterday Andrew MacPherson from our UK affiliate PrismTC presented a great talk on deploying design of experiments (DOE) via Stat-Ease® 360 software for Developing Optimal Espressos. He worked out a clever way to tailor the grinding and brewing conditions to his taste for specific coffee beans based on where they are grown. Brilliant!
Our team at Stat-Ease did something similar, focusing on light, medium and dark roasts with blends of all three bean types; then grinding them to a range particle sizes in varying amounts. Read all about this mixture-process DOE in the September 2016 Stat-Teaser article on Brewing the Perfect Pot of Office Coffee.
Of course, taste is of paramount importance for coffee. However, with the cost of beans skyrocketing over the past 6 months (and likely to increase more as tariffs imposed by the US government on April 5th take effect), it is also good to use less coffee when brewing. First off, going from espresso to a regular coffee machine will be a step forward by allowing a reduction in the ratio of coffee to water. Even better, if you are willing to forego automation, make your coffee via the pour over method—invented in 1908 by Melitta Bentz.
Recently a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania created an optimal pour-over process using a goose-neck kettle that achieved an avalanche in the ground coffee, which resulted in the maximum flavor extracted from the minimum amount of beans.* See photos, graphs and figures illustrating their findings at this ResearchGate post. For a translation from physics and fluid dynamics terms, see this April 8th USA Today article by Elizabeth Weise: Scientists release instructions for how to make a perfect cup of coffee.
It would be great to try reproducing these earth shaking (more accurately—coffee shaking) results via a DOE on flow rate, pour height, and amount of coffee. Mainly I would like an excuse to buy a goose-neck kettle like this Coffee Gator.
It hits a lot of hot buttons for feature freaks like me—a surgical-grade stainless steel body, “cool-touch ergonomic handle, brewing ‘golden-zone’ thermometer [I like that a lot!], precision pour spout and triple-layer induction-friendly base” (the hyperbolic bits quoted from their sales site on Amazon).
Hmmm…induction-friendly…so to take advantage of the base I need to upgrade our stove. More gadgetry—hooray! No worries convincing my wife, the expense will be made up by the savings in coffee (ha ha).
Maori manu dive bombers making a big splash
Posted by mark in sports, Uncategorized on June 3, 2025
My daughter Emily and her husband Ryan (pictured) will soon be enjoying a massive upgrade to their above-ground pool.
I am hoping to see him jump off the roof of the house and perform a Maori manu (meaning “bird”) dive like these World Champ bombers in Auckland, New Zealand.
A team of fluid dynamic and biomechanics experts at Georgia Tech ingeniously deployed a quarter-pound, 7-inch high ‘manubot’ to work out how these daredevil divers create splashes exceeding a height of 30 feet. See Mastering the Manu—how humans create large splashes (published May 19 by Interface Focus) for their findings. Figure 1a tells the story: By contorting their body into a V shape, the Manu masters create an air cavity that creates a ‘Worthington’ jet-splash—named after the discover who delivered this discourse on the physics phenomenon in 1894.
“It’s very difficult to master, it can be quite dangerous, and it requires millisecond control.”
– Pankaj Rohilla, co-author of Mastering the Manu
On second thought, I will back off on my son-in-law going dive bombing—best this be done by Maoris or manubots.
Going bananas!
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math, pop, Uncategorized on April 24, 2025
Monkeys are a lot of fun except when they get on the loose, as I experienced once while eating at an outdoor restaurant at a Costa Rican resort (as seen pictured). Unfortunately, another tourist started feeding them, despite numerous warnings posted throughout the patio. This last fall 43 monkeys escaped a South Carolina breeding compound—the last 4 of which ran free for two months. Not good.
On a lighter note, consider the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which states that a monkey hitting keys independently and at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. Mathematicians from the University of Technology Sydney did some calculations on this that say no to Shakespeare but provide small consolation by allowing for a 5% chance that a monkey can type “bananas” in its own lifetime. See the stats and math in their December 2024 publication of A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem.
“It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works.”
— Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta
So no monkeying around will be allowed by mathematicians and/or statisticians.
PS: On the topic of bananas, I plan to blow my entire $2 State of Minnesota 2024 property tax refund (just got word on this windfall from my CPA), to purchase this banana-flavored Laffy Taffy. It’s not easy to find something good like this for $2 or less!
Artificial intelligence (AI) enters the “age of inference”
Oxford Languages defines “inference” as “a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning.” Achieving accurate inferences with a minimum amount of work is of utmost importance in my field of design and analysis of experiments for industrial R&D. So, Amin Vahdat, Google’s Vice President and General Manager of ML, Systems, and Cloud AI, got my full attention by promoting their latest developments in AI as the beginning of the “age of inference” in his April 9th blog on Ironwood —their 7th-generation TPU (tensor processing unit). The blog announces that by “combining the best of Google DeepMind and Google Research with Google Cloud” will “further accelerate scientific breakthroughs, with a mission to become the most capable platform for global research and scientific discovery.”
An April 9 report by VentureBeat offers up an impressive array of statistics on Ironwood with much hyberbolic, high-tech jargon such as “when scaled to 9,216 chips per pod, Ironwood delivers 42.5 exaflops of computing power — dwarfing El Capitan‘s 1.7 exaflops, currently the world’s fastest supercomputer.”
I don’t grasp the units of measure, but it sure sounds great! Perhaps AI will fill in for the ongoing cuts in USA’s funding for institutional research and ripple effects on industrial R&D. I hope so!
However, despite the rapid development of AI, it may be a long while before it gets embraced by researchers. For example, Aidan Toner-Rodgers, an MIT economist, published a paper on Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery and Product Innovation last November that reported 82% of R&D scientists (over 1000 surveyed) being dissatisfied with AI due to it decreasing their creativity and skill utilization.
On a positive note, Toner-Rodgers asserts that the output of “top” researchers nearly doubles due to how they “leverage their domain knowledge to prioritize AI suggestions.” That is the best of both worlds—human intelligence (HI) combined with artificial intelligence (AI).
PS: An April Nature News article summarizes results from a survey of 4,000 researchers that addressed broader questions about AI, not the “what’s in it for me” focus of the Toner-Rodgers’ poll. For example, scientists viewed the glass slightly more than half full for AI whereas nearly all the general public feel it creates more risk than benefit. Interesting!
Bulbous bats hit the sweet spot for bashing baseballs
Posted by mark in sports, Uncategorized on April 4, 2025
According to the lore of Major League Baseball (MLB), in 1919 Babe Ruth hit the longest homer run ever recorded—purportedly 575 feet, but probably closer to 540 feet. See the bat he used, which sold in 2003 for over $56 thousand, at this auction site. Notice the clean lines.
In the early days of baseball, batters preferred bats made from hickory and oak due to their durability. But when Babe Ruth played, ash became the preferred choice for its lighter weight, allowing for increased bat speed and power. In 1998, the MLB approved maple, which despite its heaviness and propensity to shatter catastrophically, is now used by nearly all players, in part due to ash becoming very scarce due to invasive insects.*
Now attention to bats has shifted to their shape. The New York Yankees set the baseball world on fire by using “torpedo bats” in game 2 of their 2025 season to hit 9 home runs—a notable exception being Aaron Judge (AJ) who hit 3 of the home runs with a conventional Chandler model AJ99 (aka the “gavel”, ha ha).
Developed by an MIT PhD physicist—Aaron Leanhardt, torpedo bats push their barrel closer to the player’s hands, thus providing a better chance of hitting the ball on the sweet spot. They look like an elongated bowling pin, not elegant like the bats I saw being turned out at the Louisville Slugger factory a few years ago.
So far as I’m concerned the ‘jury remains out’ on torpedo bats, especially given the counteracting results by the Judge (see my pun there?). I will be watching for statistical evidence based on a representative and sufficiently sized sample.
Stay tuned!
PS: By the way, baseball bats, specifically their shapes, cannot be patented because they fall within the rules of the game, making them ineligible for protection. That opens up the market for bat-makers to feed the frenzy for torpedo bats, for example Louisville Slugger’s Pro Prime Pink model TPD1. Wow!
Don’t be a rube—build a snub cube
I am a fan of geometry, but beyond a tetrahedron for mapping out three components in a mixture design of experiment, things get too hyper (pun intended) for me as a practical matter. However, I greatly admire the genius chemists who assembled 12 helical macrocycles into a 2,712-atom polyhedral shape called a snub* cube. These “supramolecules,” the first to made in a stereoselective way—vital to human biology, could lead to crucial advances in pharmaceuticals.
If you are exceedingly interested in geometry, handy with scissors, and desire a very cool ‘sky lantern,’ follow the directions in the video for making a snub cube.
*As you may suspect, “snub” refers to a shape with the corners pushed inwards, similar to one’s ego after suffering from a rejection—some of the air gets taken out of you. ; )
A simple statistic reveals amazing wisdom from crowds
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on February 18, 2025
My good friend Rich Burnham, knowing my interest in off-beat science and stats, drew my attention to this video by YouTuber Michael Stevens (aka “Vsauce”) on an experiment that failed to confirm a phenomenon called the “wisdom of the crowds.”
Normally, as demonstrated by Sir Francis Galton in 1906 from data collected at a country fair on 787 guesses at the weight of an ox,* groups of people exhibit a high level of collective intelligence via a simple median (the “middlemost estimate”)—being off by only 9 pounds for the 1,198 pound ox. This amazes me—blowing away my mindset that the wisdom of a crowd degrades to the ‘lowest common denominator,’ that is, the people with the least knowledge.
Experts agree with Vsauce’s hypothesis that the complete failure of his crowd to correctly guess the number of jelly beans in his jar stemmed from the estimates being shared, rather than gathered with no cross-talk.
“The wisdom of crowds requires that people’s estimates be independent. Studies have found that when people can observe the estimates of others, the accuracy of the crowd typically goes down. People’s errors become correlated or dependent, and are less likely to cancel each other out. We follow our peers, to the detriment of the performance of the group.”
– Psychology professor Tania Lombrozo, No Man Is An Island: The Wisdom Of Deliberating Crowds, posted 3/12/18 by WGCU, a National Public Radio-member station on Florida’s Gulf Coast
I made the same mistake in a 2019 contest for my Anderson clan. While vacationing together at a lakeside resort, I gathered individuals’ estimates on the number of aluminum-can pull-tabs I’d collected for donation to the Ronald McDonald House in Minneapolis. See the picture below of my wife Karen (holding Bertie) working with our oldest grandchild Archer do the count. I asked the participants to write down their guesses on a clipboard by the jar, which created more fun via the gaming aspects of going just above or below a competitor, but violated the statistical requirement for independence.
An interesting workaround that allows collaboration for tapping the “wisdom of the crowds” is to first break the group into a number of teams and then average out their consensus estimates. See the research, based on results from a group of 5,180 people asked to estimate the height of the Eiffel Tower or the like, at this 2018 Letter by Nature Human Behavior on Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds.
To keep things simple, the next time my bottle of pull-tabs fills up for another contest to guess the total, I will go with the simpler approach for crowd wisdom by banning cross talk and then seeing if the median estimate wins. If it doesn’t work, I will blame it on our family group being too small (though it does exceed 20—all in one cabin!).
An homage to an engineer extraordinaire—my dad
Posted by mark in engineering on February 3, 2025
James J. (Jim) Anderson, my dad (seen pictured in 1990 with former President Gerald Ford), passed away peacefully on Wednesday, January 29, at the age of 95 after being hit hard by influenza A (be careful out there—it’s spiking now across the USA). Both of us being engineers, him inspired by his dad—an engineer also, and me by him, we enjoyed many great talks in his later years about technical matters along the lines of this StatsMadeEasy blog. This is my homage to Jim’s engineering accomplishments, mostly based on what I gathered from his stories (which I will greatly miss) and my memories, thus off a bit on some of the particulars, but fairly accurate, hopefully. It’s quite a story!
Jim was a stellar masters civil engineer who specialized in wastewater treatment before the realization of the damage being wreaked on our rivers by unconstrained dumping. His first job after achieving his bachelor’s degree in sanitary engineering in 1952—a newly created specialty at University of Minnesota—was a demonstration project for The American Meat Institute aimed at cleaning up waste streams from the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota (where I was born in 1953). He then moved us (by then my sister Nancy also) to the Twin Cities for a job at Toltz, King, Duvall, Anderson, and Associates (now known as TKDA), being assigned as City Engineer for West Saint Paul.
Jim then took an engineering job at the aptly named Pigs Eye Wastewater Treatment Plant in Saint Paul. While there he became skeptical of sketchy studies dating back to the 1930s that led to heavy use of flocculants at a substantial ongoing cost. This seemed to produce little effect, but Jim knew it would take a definitive experiment to overcome the ‘common knowledge’ of its efficacy. Someone suggested that a fellow at University of Wisconsin by the name of George Box might provide some help on the design of experiments (DOE). Sure enough, the DOE designed by Box did the trick—no more wasteful use of chemicals after that.
In 1968, Jim completed his master’s thesis, which involved regression modeling—a tool undergoing rapid development at that time. He had to defend the methodology against a professor who doubted anything produced by a computer could ever be relied upon.
About then, Jim was at the right place at the right time by submitting a proposal to the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration (created in 1965 by the Clean Water Act) for ways to deal with secondary sewage—the surge of dirty water pouring through single-pipe systems in Saint Paul and many other cities after heavy rains. To his surprise, a grant came through in an amount that seemed overwhelmingly large at the time—$1,741,000.* Even more surprisingly his engineering manager went for it. Predictive modeling of rainfall based on regression was the key to Jim’s solution for dealing with overflow. Knowledge was power. Being able to anticipate the surges, weirs (small mechanical barriers inside the sewage pipe) and inflatable dams trapped the water long enough to then be released in a volume that would not overwhelm the wastewater treatment plant.
Other cities jumped on his solutions, starting with Cleveland, infamous for their 1969 Cuyahoga River fire. Jim then started a consulting firm called Watermation, which did a lot of good for major cities worldwide. The timing again was ideal due to the rapid development of computing power, such as the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 used by Jim and his team—the same machine that got Bill Gates going on Microsoft.
That’s enough to provide the gist of what Jim did that fascinated me from an early age and still amazes me as a chemical process development engineer and fan of stats and computers. Not only was he a great mind, Dad could do anything hands on—welding, wiring, soldering (a whiz at fixing TV’s and radios), plumbing, woodworking, etc. He brought me and my younger six siblings up to Saint Paul YMCA’s Camp DuNord for many years. Naturally when the time came to put up outhouses, he got volunteered. ; ) On of my proudest memories was Dad winning a contest for log splitting by cutting it in 4 parts with two chops—the advantage of being an engineer (and handy with an ax).
By the way, though a bit too young to serve in World War II, Jim graduated from training in Pensacola, Florida as a Naval Aviator before being honorably discharged in early 1949 due to reductions in the armed forces at the time. His service falls within the window of WWII vets, thus I feel that all-in-all he deserves consideration as an honorable member of the Greatest Generation. I can certainly say there will never be another individual of the caliber of James Joseph Anderson.
*Page down the Selected Urban Storm Water Runoff Abstracts, Second Quarterly Issue for #048 Interim Report to the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration on an May 1969 interim report on this demonstration project.
PS: A few more of Jim’s engineering achievements that I gleaned from searching the internet (probably not comprehensive):
- Publication of “Remote Control of Combined Sewer Overflows” (co-authored by his colleague Robert L. Callery) in the Journal of the Water Pollution Control Federation, Vol. 46, No. 11 (Nov., 1974), pp. 2555-2564 (10 pages)—see the abstract for some very impressive statistics on reduction of pollution due to work by him and Watermation.
- Him speaking on “Present Practice and Research Needs in Wastewater Collection System Design and Operation” for a workshop in 1975 sponsored by the EPA.
- US Patent 4,168,233 for an “Automatic activated sludge control system” (published 9/18/1979)
Distance learning vs in-person training—pros and cons
Posted by mark in Education, Uncategorized on January 7, 2025
In March of 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic came to a head with widespread quarantines, the Stat-Ease training team quickly Zoomed (pun intended) our workshops from in-person (IP) to distance learning (DL). It went amazingly well from the start.
Coincidentally, two of my grandchildren shifted from IP grade-school to DL at our home. The youngest, a kindergartner (Laine), benefited greatly by the oversight of my wife Karen—a retired preschool teacher. I helped the other (Archer), a third grader. It did not start well due to many technical difficulties and troublesome adjustments for teachers and students. We continued our DL home schooling the following school year due to the ongoing quarantine in Minnesota. By the time IP classes resumed, the DL went about as well as could be expected—the most difficult class being physical education, especially in the winter due to our home lacking a gym.
This unplanned experiment on DL across the range of child versus adult revealed a big interaction effect due to the age of the learners—IP being best for grade schoolers and DL being a very viable alternative for mature students. A few weeks ago, I got reinforcement for this observation when teaching cribbage IP as a volunteer to Laine—now in 4th grade—and two of her classmates. This would have been far harder DL.
The reason I’m bringing all this up is that my colleague Shari Kraber, who retired as our workshop manager but continues to provide training, asserts that “in-person training is not as ideal educationally and that the retention of the materials is BETTER using distance learning.”* I’m also a big fan of DL—far easier for me to teach from my home offices in my summer or my winter home (or on the road between). Google’s AI (Gemini) says that there’s no definitive answer on IP vs DL, and that the biggest factor is quality of the teaching and the materials, which makes a lot of sense to me.
Rachel Poleke, our current workshop manager, suggests that another big factor is the preference of individual students for IP versus DL. I totally agree: Ideally the delivery would be tailored to each student. This being impractical, Stat-Ease instead offers on a class-wide basis to deliver private training either way, depending on the preference of our client. For example, one year ago last September I traveled to Netherlands to teach a DOE workshop for a client headquartered in Leiden’s Bio Science Park. That was fun and very gratifying for the great response. It’s nice to take a break from Dl, benefitting by much stronger feedback from students (e.g., the ‘deer in the headlights’ look when clueless) and the ability to watch them work through case studies (our workshops are computer intensive).
Stat-Ease plans to present a rare IP public workshop—Modern DOE for Medical Devices—at our Minneapolis headquarters this year. This brings a huge advantage of DL training immediately to mind: Anyone from anywhere in the world can Zoom in, thus making it far easier for us to achieve a critical mass for class.
One thing I can say for sure—it’s great to have such a viable option for DL nowadays. When I first began working as a trainer of quality-engineering tools in the 1970’s, the technology for DL existed (e.g., PLATO) but, being pre-Internet and all, it could not compete with IP.
It will be interesting to see how things settle out in coming years for IP versus DL, both for corporate training and schooling at primary and secondary levels. Hopefully, the quality of education (based on subjective measures!) will not be lost in the shuffle of convenience for scheduling and the relative costs.
*1/1/25 Stat-Ease blog Ask An Expert: Shari Kraber
Keep your black plastic spatulas for math-challenged scientists
Back in my day, when a boy misbehaved, he would be threatened with “The Paddle” being administered to his back side. I don’t advocate going back to this corporal punishment. However, with the news that scientists raising the alarm about a dangerous fire retardant in black plastic spatulas miscalculated 60 times 7,000 to a product of 42,000—off by a factor of 10,* I think these less fearsome implements could be repurposed to gently tap some math sense into their heads.
As you can see pictured, I found one, very old, black plastic spatula (classic KitchenAid!) in our kitchen utensil drawer, which I will retire from service but retain as a Halloween decoration or donate to the cause of math ‘education.’
*That viral black plastic kitchen utensil study was overblown thanks to a simple math mistake , Mashable, Tim Marcin, December 16, 2024.