An unsaved, unnamed notepad document, open on my screen. Its analog equivalent might be a scribble on a piece of tissue so light it could be blown away by the slightest window breeze.

I didn’t start using the doc as my personal RAM on purpose. It is open to serve as a scratch pad, for links copied intermittent of bit.ly-ing, for text pasted in and copied out as a transitory step to remove hidden formatting.

But then concepts started to end up on the white notepad square, phrases I fell in love with that had no immediate application, or names for things I had never thought to name. Recent examples: “mermaidleprechaungenie” (a perfect amalgamized term for any supposed magical entity); “Soup Kitchen Man Is Angry” (a phrase that richly deserves to be illustrated).

Those phrases are no longer on my screen, or written down anywhere (except wherever I originally ran into them). My computer restarted for an update, perhaps, or my husband happened to close the doc when installing my new monitor. Yet I remember them perfectly. Things I enter into the document live in front of my face for a while, and because I know they aren’t safely archived elsewhere, I don’t let them escape. They become part of my current worldview.

When you want to remember something, don’t save it.

Face to face to facepalm.

Zora is in first grade at the Harambee Institute in West Philly, one of Philadelphia’s first and most-successful charter schools. Using Bootstrap, she coded a basic video game: a character (in this case a girl in a ballet outfit) moves up and down around her bedroom, trying to avoid being hit by objects sliding left-to-right across the scene. We saw a demo; it’s nothing fancy, but collision avoidance is the basis of nearly every action game there is.

We were shown her source code, too, although we didn’t get to watch her reproduce it, as she had done at the UPenn Bootstrap Expo — she was understandably too involved in burying her face in her mother’s embrace, scared to tears by the 150 eager adults watching in the audience.

I vaguely remember when the national news stories about Zora popped up, but it didn’t really register. Nothing makes the awesome reality of a young, black girl who loves and is good at computer science impress as much as seeing her live, in person.

Starting the day inspired by a seven year old.

We came across an account today (set up by someone we have met) that shows what it looks like when you pay to look cool, but end up coming off as a fool.

It’s clearly a new account. And yet it has a whopping 2,333 followers while following only 10 others. Unless you’re a movie star, pop star, sports star or robot rover on another planet, that’s a highly unlikely ratio for a just-started account to have.

When you scroll through the followers, it becomes obvious they were purchased in bulk. What do bulk followers look like?

• Most have “egg” avatars, meaning they haven’t bothered to upload a profile photo
• The great majority are following between 1,990–1,999 other accounts (2,000 is the initial Twitter limit)
• “Kumar” is in the name of 201 accounts, nearly 10% of them (Do all bought followers come from Southeast Asia?)
• “Ravi” is in another 50 of the names
• “Lucas” pops up 33 times, along with some Spanish-looking names, so perhaps some bought followers hail from South America, too

If you’re going to cheat, why be sloppy about it? Buy followers a few at a time, at least, 200 one week, 200 the next. Or go follow a few more accounts so the ratio doesn’t look so lopsided as to be unbelievable.

It’s just sad. Very sad.

She flew all the way in from Salt Lake City just to make tacos. Not regular tacos — those can be found in various Tex and Mex styles all over the East Coast — but an entirely new kind. And I missed them.

Navajo tacos, also known as frybread, are extremely popular in the U.S. Southwest. Their origin has cultural meaning as deep as any piece of matzoh: the simple dough of flour, sugar and salt fried in lard was invented to use rations given to the Navajo tribe during their forced exodus from Arizona to New Mexico in the 1860s.

Utah resident Marcie Espinoza is an expert in making the dish, which requires a careful handling of the dough as it is sunk into a vat of boiling oil (this is apparently called “flapping”). She runs a frybread-focused restaurant in her hometown, but was in Philly for one night because her son Marcos (aka Fidel Gastro) organized a Navajo taco popup at dive bar 12 Steps Down.

I was excited to attend the event — how often do you get a chance to try an entirely new kind of taco? — so I made my way two whole blocks through the cold and down the staircase to arrive at the Italian Market bar about an hour after the 9 PM start time.

My husband took one look whiff of the intense cigarette smoke floating out from the packed room (12 Steps is grandfathered in) and skedaddled. I stayed, eager to taste. At the door, I ordered two tacos, one with spicy beef and another with ropa vieja chicken (they were already sold out of the pork ribs variety). Aric, happily playing hookey from regular work for the night, handed me a ticket and said, “Number 20.”

After finding a spot for my jacket at the crowded bar and waving hello to a few faces in the crowd, I peeked into the bright kitchen. “Can I take photos?” I asked, and the response was a vigorous nod yes.

It was a frenzied scene. Professional chef Lucio Palazzo (usually found at La Calaca Feliz) was running the show, expediting from the head of a table cluttered with a mis en place of colorful toppings. On one side Hawk Krall was arranging ingredients on top of the fried puffs, in his haste somehow still creating designs nearly as artistic as his famous sandwich drawings. On the other side Marcos was doing the same.

At the back was Marcie, doing a non-stop dance: snatch ball of dough, turn it quickly inside out and again over on itself, stretch it just right, drop it in the oil, flip it, move the bubbling bread from the bath onto towels and start again.

I was mesmerized by the ordered confusion. I’ve been in restaurant kitchens before, but a pop up kitchen has a nervous edge all of its own. Numbers were being shouted out right and left as the crew tried to keep up with the runners.

A new order would come in just as quickly as a ready dish was sent out. Paper plates brimming with tomatoes and cheese and meat and crackling bread were tossed back and forth at rapid speed – at one point even in the wrong direction, as two tacos came back from the bar without finding their owner.

After watching and snapping photos for 10 minutes or so, I went back out to wait for my turn to eat the goods. I settled next to an old friend and — when he refused to do a shot of whiskey with me — made a new one, who happily tossed it back. I had a beer.

I regarded at my neighbor’s “dessert frybread” with amusement. I waited. I greeted new friends on arrival. “How was it?” they asked. “Don’t know yet, still waiting!” I replied. I waited. They got their tacos, munched on them, happily. I stewed, jealous. Where was my order?

I looked at my phone. It was past 11 PM. I was hungry and my husband was waiting at home. So much for the tacos, I thought, and on a tipsy whim, turned and hustled out, displeased and unfed. So much for getting to try a new kind of food, echoed inside my head on the short trot home.

It was only the next morning that I realized what had happened. That order I saw being returned to the kitchen — those two tacos without a home — those had been my tacos. But I was involved in taking photos, and there had been no way for the crew to know they were mine, since they were just tagged by a number, nothing more. Moral of the story: never let photography get in the way of tacos. Just don’t do it.

I’ve written before about the AeroPress as the pinnacle coffee-making method. One of its best features is how amazingly easy it is to use, but it can seem daunting at first. All the specifics—how much water to use, how to grind, how and when to pour and press—are left to personal choice.

As a starting point, I present below a step-by-step guide to my brewing process (which I act out every single morning). Tweak the measurements to your taste to create the best cups of coffee you’ve ever had.

You will need:

• AeroPress (available on Amazon for $26, or at your local kitchenwares boutique)
• AeroPress Paper Filter (these come with the AeroPress when you buy it and more can be purchased on their own once you run out)
• Burr Grinder ^note (I use the Bodum Bistro, on sale for $120 at Amazon. Not cheap, but less than 50 cents a day if you use it once a day for a year.)
• Sturdy Mug (the following measurements are designed for use with a 16-oz. mug such as the Anchor Hocking glasses)
• Good Coffee Beans
• Hot Water (an electric tea kettle makes the process a lot easier, but is not a requirement)
• Cooking Thermometer (nothing fancy, a pocket thermometer can be snagged from Amazon for less than $10)

Process:

0) Season your AeroPress. When you buy a new one, there may be a bit of residual plastic factory scent clinging to it. Run the press without grounds, just hot water, in your sink a few times, and it will dissipate.^h/t

1) Boil the water. I use one 16-oz. bottle of spring water per cup. You can also use filtered tap water. While you’re waiting for the water to boil, start setting up your AeroPress (Steps 3–4).

2) Let water cool slightly. Boiling water is too hot to make coffee with; it will scald the grounds without extracting well. I open the top of my electric teakettle to bring the water temperature down to around 190–185°F. Stick the thermometer through the kettle spout to monitor the temp as you go about the rest of the set up. If you’re not ready when it reads 195°F, close the top so you don’t lose too much heat.

3) Invert the AeroPress. Insert the plunger into the chamber piece just enough that it creates a seal.

4) Add the funnel. Stand the attached duo on your counter with the chamber opening facing up and place the funnel inside.

5) Place a new paper filter in the filter cap. Rinse it with hot water from your kettle.

6) Prepare your glass. If you like sugar or sweetener, now is a good time to add it. (I make two cups every morning—my husband’s gets sugar, mine does not.)

7) Place approximately 19g coffee beans into the grinder. The quantity of beans will vary to taste; the 19g is my recommended dose per cup and is equivalent to around 1⅓ large coffee scoops. I hit on this figure after a lot of trial and error. Also, I don’t actually weigh my beans every morning; once you’re used to a certain amount, you’ll be able to eyeball it pretty accurately.

8) Adjust grinder settings and grind. How fine you grind the beans is another thing you’ll want to adjust to taste. I set the Bodum Bistro to just a touch coarser than the notated “drip” setting (the middle icon on the scale from “French press” to “espresso” grind).

9) Pour the grinds into the AeroPress chamber through the funnel. You might need to shake and tap to make sure all (or at least most) of the grounds are emptied—static electricity can cause the grounds to cling, depending on the ambient humidity of your kitchen. Remove the funnel from the top of the AeroPress, tapping lighting to make sure all grounds fall off this, too.

10) Pour 185° water into the AeroPress chamber. Fill it all the way to the top, stirring as you go so there are no dry clumps of grounds. You can use the provided plastic stirrer, or you can use a teaspoon, like I do.

11) Let the mix steep for 15-20 seconds.

Presssss

12) Screw on the filter cap. Make sure to screw it on tightly, but don’t go overboard—if you make it too tight it will be hard to unscrew when you’re done.

13) Invert the AeroPress over top of your mug. Very likely, only a tiny bit of liquid will drip out; there’s a near vacuum inside the chamber, thanks to the pre-wetted paper filter.

14) Press. Use both palms to press down in a smooth, steady motion. You might be surprised at how much pressure this takes, but keep at it. (I’ve heard they sell rocks specially sized to place on top of the AeroPress, to save your wrists from hurting.) Press all the way down, until you hear a slight hiss as the last bit of trapped air goes through the filter.

15) Remove AeroPress and rinse. It’s easy enough to to clean that you might as well do it right away.

16) Dilute the pressed coffee concentrate with more hot water. Fill the cup to as close to the brim as you can without overflowing, stirring to mix as you go.

That’s it! Drink while being happy and productive. Or lazy and snarky, if that’s your style. Either way, you’ll definitely enjoy the coffee.

Special thanks to Mark Henninger for some of the photos

*This is not negotiable. A conical burr grinder creates uniformly sized coffee grounds without overheating the beans. Why is this critical? During extraction, hot water has a set amount of time to pull flavor and caffeine from the grounds, and the whole process is about optimizing that moment. If you have grounds of varying sizes, larger pieces will end up under-extracted and smaller pieces will be over-extracted, leading to bitterness and lack of richness in the final drink. (Over the summer I took my AeroPress to Cape Cod and tried to use beans ground in my aunt’s repurposed spice grinder. Did not work. At all. If the beach hadn’t been so beautiful, it would have been a very sad week.) [Back]

I set about tracing each of the seven curves. There’s something soothing about drawing Bézier curves — the best use as few points of inflection as possible, and guestimating where each one should be dropped and how far the handles should stretch is happily isolated from anything else in the world. I drew each of the seven shapes before realizing that it was a single shape, rotated seven times.

The shape actually reminds me of the Joozians, from the South Park episode “Cancelled.”

At first I just chose colors for each segment that looked pretty, and set the opacity of each to around 25%. That’s the top image. But to be scientific about it, I realized I should divide the visual spectrum into seven equidistant colors, so in the downloadable PDF, those are the colors used. Each shape should also be 100/7-percent opacity, which is around 14%, but with that much transparency, the outer shapes become too light, boring, almost.

Speaking of boring, adding all of the number strings was not the most interesting task. That part took much longer than tracing the shapes. But it was immensely satisfying — I didn’t let myself add the 1234567 string in the very middle until last.

Are there any practical use cases where you’d need to display seven sets of data in all possible combinations (it turns out to be 127 different groupings)? Perhaps not. It’s fascinating and pretty, though. Wonder who discovered the proper shape.

The Backstory

The above is a riff on a line from Robin Sloan’s recent coup d’app, Fish. His tap essay explores the difference between liking something online and actually loving something online. Robin posits that in the overwhelming stream of great posts, articles, pics and videos, something we love on the internet is something come back to, something we read or visit at least twice. Fish is a beautiful essay with a strong point; it’s innovative, well-designed and touching, and I am a big fan.

However, I don’t quite agree with the disparagement of liking, faving (and even +1-ing) that helps form the essay’s underlying thesis. According to Sloan, when you deign to spend a click on one of these actions, (emphasis his):

“You’re saying to your friends or followers: This is worth your time. (But me, I’m on to the next thing.)”

Certainly, the like or fave is a quick and easy way to leave a mark. It takes an instant and not much, if any, critical thought. It’s not the same as writing a blog post or making a reply video in response to whatever caught your eye, and not even as involved as typing in a comment.

The Defense

But is the action meaningless? No. While friends or followers may or may not notice the act, there is one person who most definitely will: the original poster. This is the motivation that drives my starring, liking and +1-ing; to let the creator of the piece know I appreciated it. The small thrill, the rush of adrenaline, that comes from seeing these accolades, however minute, pop up on something you’ve posted is undeniable.

Furthermore, what these small — and nearly effortless — interactions add up to is a new network. This tertiary lattice lays on top of the world wide web like marginalia. Our likes and faves are a uniquely digital form of doodling in the margins of the internet, doodles that can mean even more than underlines or asterisks on a physical page because they have a chance to elicit a response in the author.

I’m looking forward to the album view of the internet Fish has inspired The Atlantic Tech to attempt to create, and I’m certainly going to return to Robin’s tap essay many more times, but I’m not going to feel bad about giving out likes and faves. The torrent of valuable knowledge flowing through the internet is not going to ebb any time soon, and favoriting will continue, creating an outer valence shell of information that may eventually take on characteristics of its own.

I started drinking coffee early on. Growing up in New York City, it was unavoidable. Starting around 9th grade, I would cop Anthora paper cups at the deli around the corner from my Upper West Side apartment. In 10th grade I officially became a regular at the diner down the street from my high school, where I’m sure the waitress loved when we piled in to a booth, six at a time, and ordered only cups of steaming, burnt swill, accompanied perhaps by a side of grilled corn muffin.

It wasn’t until sophomore year in college, when I met my future husband, that I actually tasted really great coffee. My caffeine addiction – by this point I couldn’t make it coffee-less past noon without a splitting headache – led me to spend an large amount of time in the many cafes of  Providence, RI. While Starbucks had already begun its march to nationwide dominance, the green mermaid had yet to reach this New England town.

Independent coffee houses were everywhere, and my man was the manager of several, even learning to roast for Ocean Coffee Roasters, who provided many establishments with locally cooked-off beans (back in the early ’90s, before local was cool). In our loft we had a vacuum pot – or several, as the delicate multi-piece glass contraption had a knack for getting smashed to bits – and we reveled in brewing interesting blends of African, South American and Indonesian strains. Thanks to the cafe connections, we even had access to prized Hawaiian Kona and Jamaican Blue Mountain beans, now and then.

Over the past two decades, our coffee routine has varied. There was a time, stuck living in the suburbs of South Jersey, that we saw fit to brew each morning using an industrial Bunn automatic drip brewer. There was an espresso phase, brought on by his spontaneous purchase of a $1000 all-in-one machine, a compact Italian-made device, the open-box floor model on sale for half-price at the Starbucks the next town over. Several methods were explored for home-roasting our Sweet Maria’s-ordered green beans, too: tiring our arms by hand-shaking a hot-air popcorn popper, getting frustrated over the inconsistency of a micro-batch air roaster. We settled on the dog-bowl method, using a heat gun, which we still use to this day.

By the time we moved back to the city, Chemex carafes were all the rage, and after I had the chance to pick one up for free (a friend got married and served the whole party  Chemex-brewed goodness along with the wedding cake, so she had extras), we turned to that for our daily cup. Along the way we tried simple porcelain hand-pour cup-toppers, and even the Clever Coffee Dripper, the first time a plastic brewing device impressed me.

Last year, my husband happened upon an AeroPress while shopping in Philadelphia’s Italian Market, and brought one home so we could chuckle together about this odd-looking brewing device from the makers of the better-than-a-Frisbee Aerobie. With some trepidation, we tried it out, growing ever more excited as our tweaks to the ratios of grounds and water and timing produced ever tastier sips.

When I made a cup after self-proclaimed coffee nerd Mat Honan tipped me off to the inverted brewing method, used by many competitors at the World Aeropress Championships (oh, yes they did!), I knew I had found coffee nirvana.

@phillydesign I love mine too, it’s fantastic. Tried making it upside down? timwendelboe.no/2009/06/top-3-…

— apocryphal mat honan (@mat) December 16, 2011

Why does this hand-sized apparatus work as well as it does, and where did it come from? Palo Alto-based inventor/engineer Alan Alder holds over 40 patents, including one for the Aerobie flying disc, and he set out to create the perfect way to make coffee. After much experimentation, he came up with the final design, which has three distinct parts, made of three types of plastic: copolyester, polypropylene and a rubber-like thermoplastic elastomer (all of which are entirely food-safe).

The AeroPress achieves a great quaff thanks to achieving several of the “holy grails” of great coffee making. Here are brief descriptions of a few:

• Full immersion – ideally, all of the coffee meets all of the water for a short, set time. This is also the idea behind a vacuum pot. In drip brewers, water courses unevenly through the grounds, extracting not enough flavor at the start and over-extracting at the end, with more hitting the center of the filter basket than the edges. Pour-over methods attempt to fix this by allowing you to hand-distribute the water around the grounds.
• Proper temperature – boiling water is not optimum for extracting flavor from coffee. Water that’s too hot will scorch the grounds and pull too much acidity from them. This can happen easily in a vacuum pot, where the water is required to come to a boil just before meeting the coffee. Because you pour the water directly on to the grounds in an AeroPress, you can allow it to cool to the desired temps first, and because the process is so quick (see below), it will not cool too much before extraction is complete.
• Fast, even extraction – once the water and coffee come in to contact and have been allowed to mingle to create the desired strength brew, extraction should be as even and quick as possible. Commercial espresso machines rely on a (hard-to-get) very fine grind to allow water to move through the grounds with great speed. In the AeroPress, any size grind will work, and the precision with which the parts fit together creates air pressure, which is harnessed for a non-varying 20-second plunge.
• Good filtration – unless you’re a fan of the gritty dregs at the bottom of Greek or Turkish coffee, any particulate matter should be filtered from the final sip. The AeroPress takes a small paper filter, inserted above the screw-on filter cap, and when the disc is pre-rinsed with hot water, no paper taste attaches itself to the brew and zero grounds make their way into the cup. This is in total contrast with a French press, which produces “dirty,” or grounds-filled coffee.
• Ease of cleaning – coffee was once considered a luxury, but in our times, it’s a necessity (for most of us, anyway). The ability to easily deliver that morning cup as we rush around on our way to work or school is the reason automatic brew machines are so popular. Unfortunately, even those drip-monsters are much tougher to clean than the AeroPress. A few rinses in hot water and the parts are ready to go again. (Another direct contrast with the finicky French press, or with the fragile and convoluted vacuum pot.)

The other fantastic thing about this coffee-head/design-o-phile’s dream? Despite all parts being manufactured in California, it’s extremely affordable, ringing in at less than $30 on Amazon.

What are you waiting for? Go forth and press!

Greatest Movie examines the effects of self-awareness on advertising, and finds the two are not mutually exclusive. This is a good thing. Advertising is not going to disappear any time soon; it has become part of our global culture. And even if it could, would we really want it to? Marketing and advertising are effective methods of disseminating information. What we don’t need is false advertising. The more enlightened companies are – in terms of what goes into making their products and what their customers are looking for – the more progress we can make as a society.

One of the major goals of humanity – of existence, in general – should be to become more self-aware. To explore the boundaries of awareness, as beings in this universe (as part of this universe). How much can we realize about the “now,” the present? How far does our perception extend, and what factors are influencing it, in real time?

NASA’s Cassini orbiter recently snapped this real life photo of Saturn and its rings

Linking up with other beings to form larger networks is a tool in this quest. Corporations and companies of all kinds are these conglomerates (used without the evil connotation that word has acquired), with resources and insights far greater than any one person alone could hope to achieve.

Nations are examples of these greater-than-one organizations. But our affiliations are slowly shifting away from geographic and political boundaries. Because of the internet (itself a fast-growing omni-being), corporations are no longer shut off from regular people. They can connect a person in Delhi, India with one in Delhi, New York, as coworkers or as like-minded consumers. Social networks are continually enhancing these links, be they person-to-person, company-to-company, or person-to-brand.

US Congress recently afforded corporations more of the same rights as a person, as related to political spending and free speech. What Spurlock highlights is that if corporations are people, they should embrace other parts of being human. They should have a sense of humor. Care about their effect on the environment. And be self-aware, engaging their audience for feedback and the betterment of their products. Consumerism is dead. Long live consumerism.