Speaker 1: Welcome to House to Works Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
Speaker 1: a researcher and writer. Here at House to Works. Every week,
Speaker 1: I'm bringing you three stories from our team about the
Speaker 1: weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology, and culture.
Speaker 1: This week, we ask could you pick up a new
Speaker 1: physical skill without having to concentrate on learning it? We
Speaker 1: also answer that question, and spoiler alert, the answer is yes,
Speaker 1: and it involves haptic feedback. Unrelated, we peel back the
Speaker 1: veils of time to peer into America's worst cup of coffee,
Speaker 1: But first steph editor Christopher hassiotis via freelance writer Patrick J.
Speaker 1: Kaiger has an election story for us, and don't worry,
Speaker 1: We're not going to political on you. This one's about
Speaker 1: why u s national elections are held on a Tuesday
Speaker 1: in November and why some people are campaigning to change that.
Speaker 1: Holding elections on a Tuesday in November has been a
Speaker 1: tradition in the United States since the eighteen forties, but
Speaker 1: these days, that weekday timing makes it difficult for many
Speaker 1: people to exercise their right to vote. That's why some
Speaker 1: activists want to switch to a better system. According to
Speaker 1: New data from the Pew Research Center, the US ranks
Speaker 1: relatively low among other countries, at only twenty seven in
Speaker 1: the world for voter participation. In the two thousand twelve
Speaker 1: general and presidential election, only fifty of eligible voters cast ballots.
Speaker 1: That's embarrassingly low compared to Belgium's seven percent participation rate,
Speaker 1: and it puts the United States barely above the voting
Speaker 1: rate in former Soviet republics like Estonia and Slovenia, which
Speaker 1: don't even have a centuries old tradition of democracy, and
Speaker 1: participation gets even worse than years when the country doesn't
Speaker 1: elect a president. In the two thousand fourteen mid terms,
Speaker 1: for instance, only thirty six percent of the US voting
Speaker 1: age population cast ballots. So what's up with that? Why
Speaker 1: do so few Americans vote? Well, some simply may not
Speaker 1: like the candidates running in a given year or prefer
Speaker 1: to do something else that day. Hey, maybe some and
Speaker 1: forgot that an election was happening despite the bludgeoning media coverage.
Speaker 1: But according to the Pew survey of registered voters who
Speaker 1: didn't vote in two thousand fourteen, the biggest single reason
Speaker 1: given was scheduled conflicts with work or school, which kept
Speaker 1: thirty of those registered voters from exercising their rights. These
Speaker 1: scheduled conflicts occur in large part because of an eighteen
Speaker 1: forty five federal law which designated a week day as
Speaker 1: election day, specifically the first Tuesday after the first Monday
Speaker 1: of November. But an organization called Why Tuesday is advocating
Speaker 1: a solution that's already being used successfully in other countries
Speaker 1: like Belgium, France, Germany, and India. The group wants to
Speaker 1: change voting law and hold elections at a time that's
Speaker 1: better suited for modern day Americans. Ideally, they'd like to
Speaker 1: see election day held on a weekend, though as a
Speaker 1: fallback option, they'd consider making election day of federal holiday
Speaker 1: all its own. Why Tuesday co founder and political scientists
Speaker 1: Norman j. Ornstein says that the current election day is
Speaker 1: an outmode and holdover from an age in which the
Speaker 1: country was very different from today, more rural and more pious.
Speaker 1: As Ornstein explains it, thety five law was written to
Speaker 1: take into account the needs of a primarily a grarian society.
Speaker 1: There was no uber, no cars, no subway trains. Farmers
Speaker 1: had to get their products to market in wagons, which
Speaker 1: usually required a whole day of travel, and for religious reasons,
Speaker 1: they needed to be home for the Sabbath. Additionally, people
Speaker 1: settled their accounts in those days on the first day
Speaker 1: of the month, so they couldn't vote then. Given those constraints,
Speaker 1: the first Tuesday that falls after the first Monday in
Speaker 1: November seemed like the best choice at the time, but
Speaker 1: that timing isn't so convenient in a modern, industrialized, technologically
Speaker 1: advanced society like ours. The majority of people who work
Speaker 1: typically do so during the day from Monday through Friday,
Speaker 1: and we have to vote near where we live, which
Speaker 1: isn't necessarily near where we work, making it hard to
Speaker 1: vote on a lunch break, for instance. If it were
Speaker 1: up to Ornstein, he would switch election day to a weekend,
Speaker 1: more specifically a twenty four hour period from noon on
Speaker 1: Saturday to noon on Sunday. It also holds three days
Speaker 1: of early voting on Wednesday through Friday of the week
Speaker 1: before the Saturday Sunday election. That would allow flexibility for
Speaker 1: people with work, religious practices, or out of town travel
Speaker 1: on weekends to vote, and to make voting even easier
Speaker 1: or Innstein would set up remote voting stations where people
Speaker 1: could vote no matter where they lived in a city
Speaker 1: or state, using ballots personalized to their home location and
Speaker 1: local issues. Instead of moving voting day, why not just
Speaker 1: make it a national holiday? Ornstein argues that it would
Speaker 1: be more complicated that way. Setting up a new holiday
Speaker 1: is an expensive proposition for the economy, he explains, and
Speaker 1: if you tried to piggyback it on Veterans Day a
Speaker 1: week later, as some have proposed, veterans might feel understandably
Speaker 1: short changed. Ornstein suggests, we've stayed with Tuesday more out
Speaker 1: of inertia than resistance. It's changed and how we vote
Speaker 1: is something that interests you, and you'd like to learn
Speaker 1: more about Ornstein's organization, check out Why Tuesday dot org
Speaker 1: or reach out to your own government representative. Change doesn't
Speaker 1: happen by itself. After next up, senior writer Jonathan Strickland
Speaker 1: talks about the potential feature of learning particular skills. In
Speaker 1: a recent study, participants were able to learn Morse code
Speaker 1: without even trying in less than four hours. What if
Speaker 1: you could pick up a new skill without having to
Speaker 1: concentrate on learning it. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of
Speaker 1: Technology have done it with morse code using Google Glass
Speaker 1: and passive haptic learning or PHL. But what does that mean.
Speaker 1: Let's break it down. The approach is passive because the
Speaker 1: user doesn't need to engage with the process in an
Speaker 1: active way. Haptic refers to feedback through touch, so a
Speaker 1: passive haptic learning system teaches users through touch without them
Speaker 1: having to focus on it. In this case, Google Glass
Speaker 1: provided the touch. Similar to most cell phones, Google Glass
Speaker 1: contains a small vibrating mechanism to alert users to notifications.
Speaker 1: In Google Glass, the mechanism rests just behind the user's
Speaker 1: ear and since a low frequency sound that is not
Speaker 1: heard but felt as a vibration. In their study, the
Speaker 1: researchers at Georgia Tech took advantage of this design to
Speaker 1: have the motor tap out characters in morse code while
Speaker 1: users were distracted with another task. Twelve participants wore Google
Speaker 1: Glass while playing an online game for twenty minutes. While
Speaker 1: they concentrated on the game, half the participants would feel
Speaker 1: the vibrating motor tap out each letter of a word
Speaker 1: in morse code. A voice would also say each letter
Speaker 1: through a small speaker on the headset. The other half
Speaker 1: of the participants, the control group heard the audio cues
Speaker 1: but didn't receive any haptic feedback. The researchers tested participants
Speaker 1: on their ability to write Morse code, input Morse code
Speaker 1: on the glass touch pad, and write letters from morse signals.
Speaker 1: They found that in under four hours, the experimental group
Speaker 1: displayed greater competence with Morse code than the control group.
Speaker 1: In fact, experimental group was accurate when encoding each letter
Speaker 1: of the alphabet in a final test, the control group
Speaker 1: was only accurate. The pH L studies group at Georgia
Speaker 1: Tech previously used similar methods to teach people brail or
Speaker 1: to play the piano, but in those cases, subjects felt
Speaker 1: vibrations on their respective fingers. This study showed that you
Speaker 1: can also use vibrations elsewhere on the body, not just
Speaker 1: the fingers, to pick up information. PHL might be useful
Speaker 1: in several practical applications, though the researchers are quick to
Speaker 1: point out that learning Morse code probably isn't one of them.
Speaker 1: It could work well with various text based interfaces, such
Speaker 1: as learning to touch type on a standard keyboard or
Speaker 1: smart watch, but the researchers also stressed that it's not
Speaker 1: a magical way to learn anything, You're not likely to
Speaker 1: pick up a deep understanding of quantum mechanics this way.
Speaker 1: In previous work, the research group found that people would
Speaker 1: forget skills learned with PHL over time, but that it
Speaker 1: didn't take long for them to become competent agin in
Speaker 1: once they picked the haptic technology back up. But there's
Speaker 1: a lot that remains mysterious. What's the threshold we need
Speaker 1: to meet to learn a new task with PHL and
Speaker 1: how long would we retain that skill. We don't have
Speaker 1: answers to those questions yet, but it's clear PHL could
Speaker 1: have multiple applications and augment the way we learned. Finally,
Speaker 1: this week, senior writer Robert Lamb tells the tale of
Speaker 1: food industrialization gone wrong in the American Civil War. Demand
Speaker 1: for coffee on the front lines led to an infamously
Speaker 1: terrible cup of show. War is hell, and sometimes the
Speaker 1: coffee is to consider the American Civil War, a four
Speaker 1: year blood bath that divided the nation and claimed the
Speaker 1: lives of between sixty and eight hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 1: Union and Confederate soldiers. Looking back on such dark times,
Speaker 1: there's a certain solace to be found in moments of humanity,
Speaker 1: like sweeping acts of moral responsibility, or just the small
Speaker 1: fragments of everyday life that are sprinkled amongst the madness,
Speaker 1: such as complaining about wretched coffee. Food industrialization has always
Speaker 1: progressed alongside modern warfare. An army, as the saying goes,
Speaker 1: marches on its stomach, so the streamline production, preservation, and
Speaker 1: delivery of food offers a definitive military advantage. Evaporated milk
Speaker 1: is a fantastic example of a successful industrialized food product.
Speaker 1: It's essentially just milk dried into a paste and in
Speaker 1: the process pasteurized. All you have to do is add
Speaker 1: water and behold, you've got yourself some reconstituted milk. Condensed
Speaker 1: milk is roughly the same idea, only with a whole
Speaker 1: lot more sugar added. It's not perfect, but it gets
Speaker 1: the job done, which is why the US government purchased
Speaker 1: bookoo's of condensed milk for Union Army field rations. But
Speaker 1: great ideas often lead to terrible ones. In this case,
Speaker 1: the essence of coffee food engineers wondered, hey, if we
Speaker 1: can successfully evaporate a glass of milk, and why not
Speaker 1: an entire cup of joe? This was no trivial matter.
Speaker 1: As John Grinsman explains in his New York Times article
Speaker 1: how Coffee fueled the Civil War. The Union Army thrived
Speaker 1: on coffee. It was their nerve tonic, their sustainer, General
Speaker 1: Benjamin Butler, even considered it a decisive strategic factor. The
Speaker 1: modernization of coffee was nothing short of the modernization of
Speaker 1: the war effort itself, and so George Hummell unleashed the
Speaker 1: essence of coffee on an unsuspecting world, evaporating vast quantities
Speaker 1: of the stuff, complete with boardings, condensed milk and sugar
Speaker 1: into what is often described as a thick brown sludge
Speaker 1: or a noxious black grease. By all accounts, Union soldiers
Speaker 1: abhorred the stuff. And these were men who, according to Grinsman,
Speaker 1: would brew coffee with water from quote brackish bays and
Speaker 1: Mississippi mud liquid their horses would not drink if that's
Speaker 1: what it took to sharpen their nerves and minds on
Speaker 1: the wet stone of holy caffeine. Despite the labels insistence
Speaker 1: that the product was celebrated and more wholesome than pure coffee,
Speaker 1: the essence of coffee tested even the standards of these
Speaker 1: hardened soldiers, and if that weren't bad enough, the men's
Speaker 1: already supercharged bowels were sometimes further corrupted by spoiled milk
Speaker 1: sold by sketchy dairymen. According to writer David A. Norris,
Speaker 1: so attempts to cut the reconstituted essence with fresh milk
Speaker 1: could prove a risky gamble. The essence of coffee was
Speaker 1: soon removed as a ration, but its reputation lingered. A
Speaker 1: few determined and potentially massochistic Civil War rean actors have
Speaker 1: recently attempted to recreate the stuff. While some claim to
Speaker 1: have improved on the recipe and concocted something really quite good,
Speaker 1: others report the creation of a tough caffy that must
Speaker 1: be broken up with a rifle butt on cold days
Speaker 1: before boiling. Can anything good be said for the essence
Speaker 1: of coffee? Well? According to historian James T. Hickey, First
Speaker 1: Lady Mary Todd Lincoln may have incorporated the stuff into
Speaker 1: a high caffeine molasses sweet and concoction to treat her
Speaker 1: frequent migraines. Plus Union soldiers who could stomach the stuff
Speaker 1: undoubtedly got their fix a jolt of psychoactive stimulation, and
Speaker 1: that helped push them toward victory in the War between
Speaker 1: the States. So think about that the next time your
Speaker 1: barista serves you a less than perfect pumpkin spy soy latte.
Speaker 1: At least you're not forced to endure EF. That's our
Speaker 1: show for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in.
Speaker 1: And hey, if you're listening to this on the day
Speaker 1: that the episode comes out, go vote tomorrow for whoever
Speaker 1: and whatever. Just vote. If you're not subscribed to this
Speaker 1: podcast yet, do that thing and send us links to
Speaker 1: anything you'd like to hear us cover, plus a photo
Speaker 1: of your Halloween costume. You can send me an email
Speaker 1: at now Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and
Speaker 1: of course, for lots of more stories like these, head
Speaker 1: on over to our home planet now dot how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com.