Category: Wisdom

The Science Behind Beer Kegs

BY MEGAN RAY NICHOLS

Beer kegs have been serving as the centerpiece of college parties and the backbone of many bars and taverns for decades. Typically available in a half or quarter barrel, the average keg can fill approximately 124 or 62 pints of beer, respectively. While it’s relatively simple to transport, store and use a keg around the home, there are some precautions to remember.

Typical Components of a Beer Keg

Despite the availability of different sizes, shapes and alternate materials, kegs are pretty standard around the world. As such, several components are found on nearly every keg.

  • The keg itself is typically made of stainless steel. While quarter barrels contain 7.75 gallons of liquid, the larger half barrel boasts 15.5. Smaller kegs, which are sometimes available, contain 5 gallons.
  • A coupler, sometimes referred to as a pump, is needed to withdraw beer out of the keg via the topmost valve.
  • Gas, either in the form of carbon dioxide or nitrogen, is used to help the beer flow smoother and quicker. The coupler or pump is often used, especially at parties, although it’s not as effective as gas.
  • Tubing is also required to transport the beer from the keg and into your cup. Commonly made of polyethylene or vinyl, some partygoers chill the tube for additional coldness.
  • If you’d rather forego the manual-powered party pump, your other option is to outfit your keg with a faucet. This ensures consistency between beer pours, which can help keep your party going all night long.

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On Not Knowing

That someone out there would point out, you do not know something, something which is widely popular and somehow you missed it, is a great social fear we live by today.

The fear of missing out on something, snubs some part of you that prevents you from coming out honestly and laying your guts out in the open. There simply is only a negative social incentive for you to be honest about your unawareness, because of the fear.

Like try telling someone that you have never heard of this thing called GoT everyone is talking about. Or Pokemon Go, or the Apple’s latest iPhone model. “Do you live under a rock?,” they will say.

Trust me, there for sure is someone out there who has never heard of it.

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Seven Experiences From 500+ Days of Blogging

By Anupum Pant

Let’s cut the chase right to where the juice is. But before starting, I must warn you that these may be extremely random points, and might sound like self-help mumbo jumbo. But all of it comes from the most honest part of me. This way or the other, you’ll definitely take something away by the end of it. Like I said yesterday, here are my experiences.

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The Illusion of Transparency

By Anupum Pant

Imagine learning something whilst a very experienced person speaks about a subject that he’s been working on for 35 years. Let’s say, we’re talking about a professor here. It’s pretty annoying to listen to them using mysterious abbreviations, jargon and what not. This is a very normal thing for humans to do. Because we are basically not smart. Our brains have their own ways to fail us.

I’m doing my graduate studies and it’s not very rare that I come across very learned professors who aren’t very good teachers. Being a good teacher, speaker or a textbook author isn’t the same as knowing stuff, and is possible to be one when you know one thing, and just one thing.

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The Zipf’s Law

By Anupum Pant

In the year 1949, George Zipf found that most of the words in a language are actually used very rarely. When ranked in the order of the amounts they are used, with the highest used word first, the second one was used almost exactly half the times first one was used. The third one was used a third of times as first. And so on. Considering how natural language is used, without any sense of this pattern, and a pattern still emerges is a very interesting mystery. Michael from Vsauce explains.

Ketchup Origin

By Anupum Pant

Everyone loves ketchup in the US. It must be the most sold condiment, right? No, mayonnaise is. In fact ketchup does not even have an american origin. Ketchup is British, actually Vietnamese.

While in Vietnam, the British loved it and brought it back home. They tried to recreate itwith nuts, sardines and mushrooms. But they failed. When someone tried to add tomatoes in it, he hit the jackpot. Ketchup, the name itself was actually created by Heinz.

Josh tells the story of its origin…

The Reward from Pain and Frustration

By Anupum Pant

A teddy bear that tweets when you squeeze it, or shoes that light up when you dance, or prom dresses that sparkle. Engineering can do it all. You are bound by only your imagination.

At first it’s painful and frustrating. If it wasn’t then it wouldn’t be that wonderful when it works out. It feels like the greatest reward.

That’s some wisdom from the video I connect with well because I’m dealing with a really tough assignment right now. And the only thing driving me is the thought of how rewarding it is going to feel when it is done.

Being Busy

By Anupum Pant

In our culture, to demonstrate your value, your importance and that you are needed, you need to show out your busyness badge. You are to walk fast, have no time for sitting down, doing nothing. And soon enough, before you’ve even realised the phoniness of all of these things we do because we were forced to start doing them in the first place, you find that they have become your hard behaviour.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. —Herbert Simon, recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic.

We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider, a dazzling collection of humor and insight. It talks about something similar too, in a very insightful manner. Following is an extract from the book that you must listen to. It might actually change your life.

via [FourHourWorkweek]

Knowledge is Not Understanding

By Anupum Pant

Let’s say you know how to ride a bike. One day, like Destin, you flip the bike’s handle. That is to say, when you turn the handle left, the bike turns right and vice versa. Yes, a welder can easily do that to your bike with help of a tiny gear system.

The thing about knowing how to ride a bike is that you don’t really understand how you do it. Millions of things go running in your mind when you do it. The algorithm is hardwired. So many things happen in there unconsciously, you never realize. Unless…

You do the flipping and try to ride this new flipped bike. You just can’t. Assuming you know your bike well, you think it’s going to be just a matter of time that you learn to ride this new thing. But it’s not that easy. Especially when you are old. Destin goes around the world offering people $200 to ride this thing for 10 feet without putting down their feet. No one has been able to do it. It takes effort.

Destin put in this effort. He unlearned his old way of riding a bike and took 8 months to master this new flipped bike. To his amazement, he learned it suddenly. One minute he wasn’t even close to riding it and the other minute he was gliding past in his new bike. But it took 8 months and a lot of practice.

Now, he took it a level further. He hopped on to a normal bike, and guess what? He couldn’t ride it. His brain had learned to ride the flipped bike too well. The algorithm inside had changed.

And suddenly, like he had learned to ride the flipped bike, after some practice, something clicked and he was back to riding the normal bicycle. He documented all of it in a video below. Which I think has a very deep message for all of us. It can’t be put into words. It’s a realization.

Also, his son, with a much more plastic brain than his could learn to ride the new bike in just two weeks. Learn it young is another direct message this genius experiment gives us.

500+ Days and Counting

By Anupum Pant

AweSci has been up and running for more than 500 days now. I started it off with an impulse. It was an experiment on my own self to test if I could persist. The aim was to learn one new thing everyday. Something that I genuinely found interesting and wanted to share with the world. There could be no excuses. The rule was to make one entry everyday, just one, not more, not less.

How did I do? Well, I’m proud to say that I did not miss a single day. Right now, the age of this blog in days is equal to the number of posts it has. Of course I had a lot of time some days and much less time for most days. That dictated the kind of posts I shared. I took support from the amazing videos people had made and uploaded on the web. Anyway, an entry was made every day without fail. Initially when I used to have full free days, my posts clearly were detailed and well researched. Those posts definitely were the most popular ones, like the crocodiles do not die post. Although I hold well researched posts in high regard, like those of “waitbutwhy” that was not the point here. Also, there might have been a counting mistake once or twice because I travelled across the world and days changed.

How did it grow in terms of the readers? To be honest, my growth was completely organic. That is to say, I used no advertising or any tricks to increase the traffic whatsoever. I just focused on writing. Agreed, I was excited for the first few days and shared my links at many social media outlets but soon stopped doing that because it wasn’t my aim to achieve big traffic. But, I’m a human being, big traffic of course made me happy. Like one one day, awesci got 17,000+ unique views when a post had shot up on Reddit.

All these days, keeping up with the goal I had set for myself, I learned a couple of things which I’d like to share here, in a new section which I’ll call wisdom (for now). Thus, I’ll not necessarily learn a new thing everyday (Old kind of stuff will keep coming too). I’ll share stuff in “freestyle.” Not just narrowing myself to not writing something unless it has some interesting factoid attached. After all everything, every experience shared has something worth learning, if you look carefully. And that’s science for you.

Instead, I’ll just write what comes to me. I know, the name of the website will not make great sense if I do that. So there will also be posts like they used to be before.

It’s a blog, and I want to keep it like a blog, with opinions and my guts laid out in the open. For the sake of getting it started, making the ball roll, the thing I did was great.

So, if you are looking to start a blog, you might want to hear and learn from the experience I have had with this one. That’s what is coming tomorrow. Watch out.