For anyone looking into this, the field is (usually) called "organic geo-chemistry" and/or "paleo-isotope ecology"; the two fields are interwoven to get results like these, or the diet of early mammals. It's generally a collaboration between anthropologist and paleontologist.
The term "isotopic analysis" is a bit more specific to what's going on here. There are dedicated labs specializing in it that will do samples for (relatively) cheap, especially for the fancier methods. Paleontologists aren't necessarily any more skilled here than anthropologists/archaeologists. Those three are fairly similar roles with a lot of skill overlap that doesn't necessarily include analytical/nuclear chemistry stuff. The labs tend to be staffed by specialists from non-historical departments at the institution they're associated with in my experience.
The literal literary contestation between descriptive and prescriptive dictionaries is alive and well[0], though the war has been lost, and your fellow prescriptivist have yet to surrender.
This is very cool, as a Chinese who likes to drink Tieguanyin(green tea) and Dahongpao(red tea), I am very happy that someone can like Chinese tea culture, I wish your channel better and better.
Edo-kiriko is one of 2 great glass traditions from Japan; the glass is thick, feels similar to Murano glass, with the edges of the cut pattern "sharp".[0]
There is also a tradition of thin glass (without etching), where the glass is blown to be paper thin and you can feel it flex as you hold it.
This is called Usuhari - "Usu" means thin and "Hari" means glass[1]. Shotoku is the best maker, creating a variety of specialty drinking glasses of many shapes.
I have a small collection of Japanese drinking glasses at home which I use regularly and freely use with friends[2] - everyone loves drinking beer or sake from the Usuhari glasses. Shotoku actually did a collaboration with one of the Edo-kiriko makers, by blowing a small sake cup with a thick Usuhari glass ~ it's amazing, and I use it as my personal spirits cup.
[0] Not sharp enough to hurt, yet very noticeably present.
[1] usuhari glasses are exceptionally thin at 0.9mm. Paper is ~0.1mm, so I'm slightly exaggerating.
I don't know the process they use, but it would not be unreasonable to harden such thin blown glass with a "pickling" process. This would make it much harder (to resist scratching), tougher (more difficult to crack), and more safe (breaking into many pieces rather than a few jagged ones). The process replaces smaller (typically Na) with larger (typically K) ions putting the outside of the glass in compression.
Notably, cell phone glass (eg Gorilla) is similarly hardened and can go down to 0.7-0.4mm while maintaining these properties.
Shockingly strong! I've always wanted to see the glass blowing process at their factory in Tokyo, but they've been closed for tours while upgrading for at least ~2 years before covid (when I was frequently in Japan).
My understanding is that they use some type of cold annealing process that strengthens the thin glass.
I've not managed to break one in 4 years of dinner party use.
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Apropos of nothing, I name all of my plants at home... my personal plants are all named after Hellenistic historical figures (Democritus, Herodotus, etc),
but when my girlfriend decided to grow an avocado tree, I named him Maximilian I....
I work with tea both professionally[0] and semi-professionally[1] and will clarify that:
- this is for commercial tea, not specialty or "ceremony" grade tea
- all of the big commodity houses, blending houses, brand buyers, etc have their own modifications on the standard, and this ISO tea prep standard is most definitely not the "standard"
- From elsewhere in the thread: all great tea can be brewed with boiling water. The idea that green tea (or any other type of whole leaf tea) should be brewed with something under ~100C is a technique used by merchants to sell you bad tea.
> From elsewhere in the thread: all great tea can be brewed with boiling water. The idea that green tea (or any other type of whole leaf tea) should be brewed with something under ~100C is a technique used by merchants to sell you bad tea.
Is this "can be brewed" as in you will end up with a beverage that is drinkable, or that you think that in general green tea is fine to be brewed at 100C. The former I can understand (especially with cheap bagged green tea) but I'd be very surprised at the later considering that goes against pretty all modern and traditional guidance I've heard or read.
Tl;dr: yes, use boiling water on very high end Chinese green tea for best results.
Longer Explanation:
In the Chinese tea tradition, water temperature is referred to by the size of bubbles during boiling (crab eyes = small bubbles (cooler) vs fish eyes = large bubbles (hotter)).
In theory, all water at boil is 100°c, but in practice, there is often a temperature gradient within a kettle and only the gas (the bubbles) is at exactly 100°c (assuming you're at sea level), which is why even some culinary recipes will call for a "rolling boil".
In any case, the strength of the stream when pouring will have a greater effect on the resulting flavor profile of very good green tea than the variation in bubble size, as bubble size is a variance of ~2°c while water can lose up to 5°c in a high slow pour.
Thus, boiling water at crab eyes with a thin slow (but not high) pour is the method used for high end Chinese green tea amongst high level Chinese tea practitioners.
Okay, I'm familiar with measuring temperature by the eyes and I get your point (which essentially seems to be the same as traditional guidance i.e. don't steep the tea in boiling water. You're just accounting for the variance in temperature from boiling and pouring) but I'm not sure I follow how this means merchants are trying to sell you bad tea.
Plus there doesn't account for other green teas that aren't poured in accordance with Chinese tea ceremony, such as the Nepalese green I had earlier today.
Yes, the general idea is to adjust your boil and pour method for the type of tea you're brewing, but that is true for all tea. Water will lose the same heat under the same conditions whether you're brewing oolong or green tea.
To summarize the points addressed here:
- High-end Chinese green tea can be brewed with "boiling water" just as oolong or black tea can; the adjustments are within the range used for other classes of tea.
- Merchants recommending cooler water for green tea do so to reduce the astringency and/or grassy flavor found in lower quality tea.
- Nepal does not have a historical tea tradition and the cultivation of Nepalese green tea is a modern development. Nepal inherited its tea habits from India whom had it imposed on them by the British who stole the seeds from China. While Nepal produces good tea on par with Darjeeling, it does not compare to the highest end Chinese green teas, which are an order of magnitude more expensive, if not more.
They are not! Sencha should be brewed with off-boiling water, anywhere from 85 - 95°c (which is still a higher temperature than low end sencha).
What accounts for this difference?
High-end sencha is steam processed at a lower temperature. Steam only gets to ~100°c depending on altitude and that is the highest temperature it is exposed to throughout its production.
High-end Chinese green tea is partially processed in a wok to denature the oxidizing enzymes. The saying for Chinese tea is that "tea remembers the heat of the wok", which is the pan frying process at upwards of ~200°c.
So all wok processed green tea can be brewed with hotter water than steam processed green tea.
I was under the impression that this document exists to have -a- standard such that if followed before performing some sort of experiment whether directly tea related or not, you could more easily exclude preparation differences as a confounder when comparing results with people who'd also followed the document.
Certainly this is how the old coworker who had a paper copy pinned up behind their desk explained it to me, and that understanding was why they found its existence so amusing even if their preferred cuppa's preparation process was substantially different.
This could of course be entirely wrong but seeing the paper copy pinned to the wall always did make me smile.
This is not used for tea sourcing. The document explicitly states its purpose as being for the preparation of tea for sensory tests. It has nothing to do with brewing tea for enjoyment.
Sensory testing (which is what is what I and my company specialize in) is a large component of tea sourcing and absolutely part of the process.
To illustrate this:
Just as coffee has "cupping", a method of preparation used for sourcing and evaluation but which no consumer would ever use to prepare coffee for enjoyment....
Commodity tea has this ISO standard (also called cupping).
The reason that this method, over a method that results in a better tasting cup is used, is because commodity tea is selected via flaw minimization and consistency testing.
I'm unsure why you presented the entire point of the conversation as if it was a gotcha, but assuming it was a genuine mistake I can only suggest that you read my comment again.
I made the other comment about not using boiling water. I've also run a tea shop and have imported very high quality tea. I've tried green and white teas with boiling water and they definitely did not taste as good as with 70-80 C water. At boiling temperatures they taste somewhat burnt and astringent.
Social media is damaging to society, doing things for likes is damaging for the ego, and curating your world for Instagram or TikTok likes is choosing to live in a simulacra.
No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, WeiBo, or TikTok for me ~ just Hacker News. Upvote me here so I know you agree and we can influence others not to be influencers.
It's weird I just had this conversation last night. My wife asked if I could be 17 again, would I want to go back in time or be 17 now. I immediately blurted out back in time, and reminisced about how everything seemed simpler. No smartphones, no social media, no constant fear and hate mongering. Made me really sad for some reason. But part of that could just be getting old and resistant to change, as people are known to do.
Getting bullied in school was hard enough… I'd rather not go through that again with after-school bullying via social media on top of that. I'm glad I grew up without Facebook and the likes.
But if I could go back with the same knowledge I have now, the bullying becomes more tolerable when I know that one of the biggest bullies in high school will have ended up in and out of jail before finally dying of a drug overdose (he had a hard home life which led to his bullying and post high school problems), and that the high school jock that was the most popular guy in school ended up overweight and working in a car dealership... he turned out to be a nice guy though.
It's hard to understand in high school that the class structure in high school completely falls apart at graduation. But the class structure in college is more permanent.
I often think about what it would be like to live childhood and teenage years again with all you know now. I think in most cases I’d be able to ultimately befriend the bully and be a positive influence on them. I now also understand things like fitness and work ethic, discipline.
That train of thought then makes me realize people who grew up with really good parental influences basically had those sorts of powers on their first go because they were taught.
I got bloody noses and migraines constantly while growing up because nobody ever told me to drink water. That tidbit alone would be life changing.
That's because you were young and had no idea what was going on.
A hilariously depressing exercise is just reading old news paper headlines from whatever decade you want to pick and seeing what the world was like then.
I've yet to see a decade where the average person wasn't a hairs breadth away from dying in various unpleasant ways, some musical accompaniment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
Well sure, that's part of the point. There didn't exist a concept of constant access to news and happenings at every point of your day. Couldn't just pull out your phone and check Fox/CNN, or get updates via social media.
It's like we have access to everything one could want now, which is awesome, but that feels like it's bad for us, collectively, since we have no self control.
>Well sure, that's part of the point. There didn't exist a concept of constant access to news and happenings at every point of your day. Couldn't just pull out your phone and check Fox/CNN, or get updates via social media.
In the 90s you might not have had a mobile phone, but every place you went had a TV with one of the news channels on, and you'd be bombarded with what was happening on CNN, or Fox, or if you were in a really highbrow place the BBC, every 15 minutes. I'd say I'm less exposed to news today because I have earbuds that isolate me much better than anything I could plug into a walkman in the 90s.
Your 90s experience doesn't match my own. I'm not saying your version is wrong, just speaking from my experience, in the south USA. NY or some other metropolis could be miles different I'd imagine.
At one point I had two part time jobs and took night classes. At none of those places were a TV.
In fact, the only places I distinctly remember with TVs were airports and bars/restaurants, and those were hit/miss with having news playing.
>Social media is damaging to society, doing things for likes is damaging [...]No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, WeiBo, or TikTok for me
This seems like a generic complaint that's not specific to this particular thread's article. This article is about the rise of middleman agency platforms to connect brands to internet celeberties with a following.
And then there's this:
>I for one don't want to be an influencer.
But you're the CEO of:
>Gastrograph AI is an artificial intelligence platform [...] to predict consumer preference of food and beverage products.
>We helps food and beverage companies [...] optimize existing brands.
With your business background, you're actually one of the folks that can add substantive commentary to this. You want to help brands reach consumers. So do internet celebrities.
>This article is about the rise of middleman agency platforms to connect brands to internet celeberties with a following.
I found the articles thesis more general, that many more individuals want to become paid influencers, and the lower acceptance rate of middleman agencies as proof that the supply of want-to-be influencers has increased.
>You want to help brands reach consumers.
I am the CEO of AFS, but my company works on flavor profile development of new and existing products - deep R&D of flavor, aroma, and texture optimization. This is far upstream of marketing and branding which we are uninvolved with.
Let's add a 3rd option! You can be 17 again, but can choose from when you were originally 17, right now, or the difference between the 2 in years into the future.
What social trends will influence your decision? Will the future be better (correction) or even worse (exacerbation)?
