Optimization and Coffee Mugs
What you drink from changes your perception of the drink.
Why do you drink coffee? The flavor? the alertness? The ADHD self-medication? Something else?All four?
The vessel you choose may change your perception of the drink.
A shallow, thin walled teacup with a wide top compared to the bottom can get almost dish like, letting all of the delicate floral aromas hit the nose. The act of sipping leads to a greater air intake compared to other cups as well, this also gives the perception of a sweeter, more floral drink. They often grow too hot to grasp without the handle, which often is a difficult shape to hold for long periods, further forcing you to slow down, put the drink down and savor the moment, flavor and experience. These cups are designed for sipping and enjoying the experience of the liquid inside alongside a nice chat or beautiful sunrise.
Meanwhile, the thicker, more cylinder shaped mugs typically used for coffee do not allow for as much of the coffee’s smell to enter the nasil passages. While the opening may be the same size, I do have many mugs where the nose remains outside the cup. They also have a better shape to deliver a greater amount of liquid. The extra wall thickness also provides a few services. It allows you to grasp it like a cup by not getting quite as hot as fast as the tea cups, and the extra height provides ample room to affix a substantial handle, easy to grip and sip. Speaking of sipping, the extra thickness helps with that too, allowing for a better seal between drinker, mug and liquid. The user can suck up coffee, rather than just pour. While a tea cup may be superior for flavor, a mug is truly the better liquid delivery option.
There are definitely other options, travel mugs provide a different set of advantages and disadvantages. I also can’t imagine drinking coffee from a horn or the skull of an enemy, I just feel the vessel itself would give enough energy to the user in its own right and honestly would turn any liquid that touched it to mead. But I digress.
Ok, but I’m a tech writer. Why am I discussing how to drink coffee? It’s not because coffee is such an essential part of software development that I’m looking for novel delivery methods. (Although, some CFD analysis of the situation could be an intriguing place to explore)
No, it’s more an observation about optimization. If I said that “This mug is the most efficient mug.” In the context of this post you’d ask “for what?” Unless of course the mug was made out of a human head, in which case you’d just agree.
What if instead the context was flavor? Getting caffeine into your body after a bad night? Those are both two very different types of mugs.
Let’s hop back to computers again. “let’s optimize this code.” I suspect most of us would immediately start exploring what would speedup operation. But what if, instead we needed to optimize for memory usage? For energy efficiency? That’s a different question altogether.
When it comes to optimization, the discussion is almost always over speedups. There are other realms of optimization available, power and memory efficiency are two. It really seems that power efficiency is always left to the hardware or embedded developers, and memory efficiency is only spoken of as a problem when it’s used up. (See the Chrome RAM memes)
Up to a point, efficiency is a balancing act, which is why quantum computing is so cool. It’s not as extreme as changing coffee to mead, but it gave a framework to create new algorithms. These new algorithms are bound by a different set of advantages and disadvantages, for example the memory growth is exponential, leading to algorithms that thirsts for RAM the way a Viking thirsts for mead, but there’s so much the viking passes out before it’s gone. Or the computation is complete with memory to spare.
And yes, using and creating these quantum algorithms is more complicated than using their classical counterparts, so you can’t do a “lift and shift” to a quantum computer, but it opens up a lot of potential opportunities that would otherwise be impossible.