Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The Downside


Yesterday, I mentioned some the benefits of being home alone while Kellie takes a vacation without me.  But there are also some disadvantages:
  • Kellie’s dogs will not use the doggie door I installed for their convenience if it’s raining outside; they are perfectly content to do their business on the living room floor when the weather is inclement. 
  • Day old oatmeal sticks to a pot like cement. 
  • With Kellie gone, her dogs follow me everywhere.
  • My bed is cold, and spooning with the dogs isn't much fun.
  • Three nights by myself = Three nights of eating ravioli.  It would have been four nights, but our friends, Dave and Melissa, feed me dinner yesterday.
  • I have not learned how to make a half a pot of coffee that doesn’t taste like mud or coffee colored water.  
Apparently, the coffee to water ratio is not linear as you vary the number of cups brewed.   I could do some experiments to derive an equation that describes the coffee concentration as function of: the number of cups brewed, the quantity of beans, and the fineness of the grind used to brew the coffee. Mathematically, it might look like this:
coffee concentration: f(j, o, e) = ajx + boy + cez
where:

a, b, and c are coefficients
 j = number of java beans used
o = ounces of water used
e = effective cross section of the ground beans
I need to find a way to measure the concentration of the coffee.  If the concentration is inversely proportional to the amount of light that can pass through a given quantity of brew, then I could use a laser and a light detector to measure the concentration. Once I’ve brewed enough coffee to collect sufficient data, I can do a regression analysis in Excel to derive the needed equation.  Or, I could just go to Starbucks.
I think, maybe, Kellie should come home soon.


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7 comments:

  1. If you are figuring out that equation, you clearly have too much time on your hands while Kellie is away !

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    1. Or I'm just a geek. Or maybe a geek with too much time on his hands.

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  2. Ah! the tables are turned and we find ourselves on a path of introspection. Will our protagonist discover a kindred liking to the desperate house husband of "Mr. Mom" ...falling to pieces when his wife is away? or will we see him flourish without the woman (as with Billy Joel ~ evidenced between 'the piano man and subsequent collosal artistically lobotomized "uptown girl"? Or will the man simply Hemmingway out of the whole damned thing altogether? We will have to stay tuned! And THEN do the math. :)

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    1. We may never know the answer, she returns on Sunday.

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