How tea.......should be

[Lucio]

I've always made it milk, then tea but then again I've also always hated the taste of warm milk, so also do the same for coffee.

That said, I rarely have milk in either, unless I fancy a coffee shop milkshake

[OilSheikh]

Take a full cup of Carnation. Microwave for 2 mins. Switch off the microwave just as the bubbles start forming. Dip a PG tips tea bag for a few mins. Squeeze out the liquor. Add a tsp of white sugar. Stir and enjoy!

[Zak33]

Everyones wrong. Tea is only tea when it looks like milk.

that is rank

yeauuch

[tiggerai]

Twinings English Breakfast, brewed for at least 3 mins, Soya Milk sploosh. No sugar, cut that out ages ago.

No biscuits as I'm on a diet. And I love a good dunker.

[peterb]

Hmm. This could get silly, quickly.

Okay, digital as in unique, non-contiguous states, like a watch where the second hand goes tick, tick, tick jumping from one second to the next, as opposed to one sweeping smoothly (*) and continuously round the face. Which, by the way, is one way to detect many fake Rolexs.


(*) In my example, I used "like" to suggest an illustrative analogy, not an identical situation. This is to allow for the point that with such watches, the visual effect of smoothness is an illusion, generated by the fact that the internal ticking of the watch movement might be at a resolution of about 14k/sec, or even 28 k/sec, but the time intervals, and associated effect are the appearance of continuous, analog movement.

At the risk of uxing an analogy within an analogy, if you look at an analog sound source on an oscilloscope, you see a continuous wave, like a true sine wave. Breakmit down to thousands of discrete amplitude values, per second, and you have a dataset that can be reproduced in such a way that the approximation is close enough to fool the human ear in to thinking it heard the analog wave, when in fact it heard a digitally-sampled version.

Therefore, my "DDG" is digital rather than binary because the digital refers, as you mentioned, to the discrete values, true or false, not the number system or sampling rate used to record them.

Your serve. Happy Sunday morning,


PS. What were we talking about?

Oh yeah, tea. That reminds me, cuppa time. BBL.

PPS. And some people ask why I make long posts.

Well without wishing to get into the mathematics of Claude Shannons sampling theorem, and quantisation errors, your last sentence gives the clue

Therefore, my "DDG" is digital rather than binary because the digital refers, as you mentioned, to the discrete values, true or false, not the number system or sampling rate used to record them.

... because your coin can only have two discrete values - heads or tails so it is a binary device. I would concede that it is digital in the sense of not being analogue, but describing it as binary implies that it is digital and so binary is therefore a more precise description!

Phew - I need a cup of.... tea after that! . Anyone got any tips on the perfect cup of tea?

oh - wait er

[Saracen]

....
No biscuits as I'm on a diet. And I love a good dunker.

I tried the no-dunking diet. I called it the 5-second diet, because that's about how long I lasted when offered a dunker.

I have, however, cut it from three digestive/rich tea, to two, then to my current one, and no more than a couple of times I week. More than that will require about 6-months residency at the dunking equivalent of the Betty Ford clinic. And handcuffs.

[Saracen]

Well without wishing to get into the mathematics of Claude Shannons sampling theorem, and quantisation errors, your last sentence gives the clue

... because your coin can only have two discrete values - heads or tails so it is a binary device. I would concede that it is digital in the sense of not being analogue, but describing it as binary implies that it is digital and so binary is therefore a more precise description!

Phew - I need a cup of.... tea after that! . Anyone got any tips on the perfect cup of tea?

oh - wait er

In the interests of galactic peace and harmony, I will concede that, the afore-mentioned 'balance on edge' outcome excepted, it is a digital decision generator, using the binary number system. I would point out I was suggesting the discrete-state nature of the process rather than the number system involved, however. Also, of course, the binary number system includes natural numbers other than 0 or 1 (assuming the defition of natural that does not exclude zero),

My rather more generic description also applies to more varied situations than those with simply two choices, using other DDGs. For instance, from my AD&D days I still have several sets of 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 20 sided dice, all of which are, and were designed to be, DDGs, but not binary. This set of dice, and a coin, used correctly, can digitally generated a random (or, random enough for all practical day-to-day purposes), choice between one and near-infinity (Colm-Shustenburg Theory of Diced-based Random Number Generation, OUP, 1974, written as an offshoot of work on Monte Carlo Game Theory). It demonstrably works well for cardinality of finite sets, but starts to get murky when getting into transfinite sets and the Alephs. But back to basics ....

For instance, 5 is from a ten-sided die, with 1 or 2 being option A, 3 or 4 being B, etc, despite there being no natural 5-sided die.

Of course, it did provoke arguments as to whether 3 should be generated using 1 and 2 for s on a 6-sider, etc, or whether A should be opposite sides, adding up to 7 (I.e. 1 or 6 = A, 2 or 5 = B, 3 or 4 = C). Purists maintain that the opposite sides increases randomisation. Me, I don't give a ..... darn.

Need a cuppa? I need a brandy, and I don't drink.


PS. Good luck Googling Colm-Shustenburg. It's not a widely read work.

[Bagnaj97]

I've been away so I've not followed this thread too closely, so I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103

[tiggerai]

I tried the no-dunking diet. I called it the 5-second diet, because that's about how long I lasted when offered a dunker.

I have, however, cut it from three digestive/rich tea, to two, then to my current one, and no more than a couple of times I week. More than that will require about 6-months residency at the dunking equivalent of the Betty Ford clinic. And handcuffs.

Luckily I don't work in the office that has a biscuit tin.

And I get my tea with a handy anti-dunking device (we have a subsidised "costa" as our cafe so my tea comes with an anti-tigs spillage device which doubles as an anti-dunking device)

[Saracen]

I've been away so I've not followed this thread too closely, so I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103

Yes, but ....

This standard is not meant to define the proper method for brewing tea, but rather how to document the tea brewing procedure so sensory comparisons can be made.

The flaw is that while this can be used to compare teas brewed with that method, it doesn't allow for the possibility of different results and ranking s of teas brewed other than by that method.

Therefore, person A might prefer tea X over Y when brewed under ISO-3103, but that is consistent with the same person prefering Y over X if brewed differently.

It provides limited comparisons between teas, and none between brewing methods.

[peterb]

Yes, but ....

The flaw is that while this can be used to compare teas brewed with that method, it doesn't allow for the possibility of different results and ranking s of teas brewed other than by that method.

Therefore, person A might prefer tea X over Y when brewed under ISO-3103, but that is consistent with the same person prefering Y over X if brewed differently.

It provides limited comparisons between teas, and none between brewing methods.

Indeed - it is a tea comparison method. ISO would argue that compare brewing methods you would need a 'standard tea' so that the only variable would be the brewing method - and they would be quite correct. But that ignores the fact that person 1 may find that Tea A brewed under Method Y is nice than Tea B brewed under method Y. But they may think that Tea B brewed under method Z is better than Tea A brewed under method Z. Person 2 might find the opposite result, so there would have to be several testers to get a statistically meaningful result!

Pass the (standardised) biscuits please!

[tiggerai]

Indeed - it is a tea comparison method. ISO would argue that compare brewing methods you would need a 'standard tea' so that the only variable would be the brewing method - and they would be quite correct. But that ignores the fact that person 1 may find that Tea A brewed under Method Y is nice than Tea B brewed under method Y. But they may think that Tea B brewed under method Z is better than Tea A brewed under method Z. Person 2 might find the opposite result, so there would have to be several testers to get a statistically meaningful result!

Pass the (standardised) biscuits please!

I've missed you guys. <3

[peterb]

Everyones wrong. Tea is only tea when it looks like milk.

that is rank

yeauuch

It's going to feature in "This weak in HEXUS"










/fetches coat - again

[Xlucine]

Indeed - it is a tea comparison method. ISO would argue that compare brewing methods you would need a 'standard tea' so that the only variable would be the brewing method - and they would be quite correct. But that ignores the fact that person 1 may find that Tea A brewed under Method Y is nice than Tea B brewed under method Y. But they may think that Tea B brewed under method Z is better than Tea A brewed under method Z. Person 2 might find the opposite result, so there would have to be several testers to get a statistically meaningful result!

Pass the (standardised) biscuits please!

The important question is whether tea A brewed under method Y is better than tea B brewed under method Z - with the wide variety between teas and brewing results possible, the only proper way to answer this question is with a brute force search. I humbly volunteer to taste test, to save the rest of you all from the burden

[Lucio]

Tonight at 7pm on BBC2 is Inside the Factory about how tea bags are made. It is a repeat from earlier in the week, so should also be on iPlayer. Some interesting information about how the plants are picked and processed as well as how to make a decent cuppa; filtered water and leaving the tea bag in for 5 minutes seemed the most important.

Thanks for the heads up on this, me and the Ms' watched this and it was thoroughly fascinating. Even more impressive is it gave us a piece of tea-trivia that she didn't know about the Horniman's brand being instrumental in the origins of modern tea selling.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interestingly enough you actually get tea strainers which fit over a mug,so you can use loose tea instead of a tea bag. Also quite useful if you want to add some other stuff to the tea too.