I make a latte every single day. It's become a whole ritual — pull the shot, pour it over ice and almond milk, done. I even get my beans shipped monthly from Atlas Coffee Club. I love my espresso machine, even if I've been eyeing an upgrade lately.

So this research out of UNSW caught my attention. Scientists rigged a filter basket with a transducer that vibrates at ultrasonic frequencies. Those vibrations create tiny collapsing bubbles that fracture the coffee grounds and pull out the flavor in a couple of minutes — at room temperature, no heat required. They ran a blind taste test with a hundred coffee drinkers and nobody could tell the difference from a regular shot.

TIL a new word: quintessence

Hamilton clearly predicted Donald Trump in a 1792 letter to George Washington:

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents … despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government [and] bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day — it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

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I used to be pretty good at pool. Through my 30s, I’d hit the bars around Dupont Circle with friends and we’d spend hours at the table just playing for fun. I loved it. By my 40s, I wasn’t playing much anymore—I was traveling more and bar nights got fewer and far between—and even now that I’m back home in Kentucky with a pool table in the basement, I still don’t pick up a cue nearly as often as I used to.

TIL a new word: octothorpe

I've always known # as the hashtag or the pound sign — had no idea it had a whole other name. Kind of love that.

TIL a new word: sanguine

TIL a new word: clepe

Sentence: “You might clepe your friend a rascal yet mean it affectionately.”