History’s Worst Coffee, Learning Without Concentrating, and Why America Votes on Tuesdays

and it involves haptic feedback. Unrelated, we peel back the veils of time to peer into America's worst cup of coffee, But first steph editor Christopher hassiotis via freelance writer Patrick J. Kaiger has an election story for us, and don't worry, We're not going to political on you. This one's about why u s national elections are held on a Tuesday in November and why some people are campaigning to change that.

Holding elections on a Tuesday in November has been a tradition in the United States since the eighteen forties, but these days, that weekday timing makes it difficult for many people to exercise their right to vote. That's why some activists want to switch to a better system. According to New data from the Pew Research Center, the US ranks relatively low among other countries, at only twenty seven in

the world for voter participation. In the two thousand twelve general and presidential election, only fifty of eligible voters cast ballots. That's embarrassingly low compared to Belgium's seven percent participation rate, and it puts the United States barely above the voting rate in former Soviet republics like Estonia and Slovenia, which don't even have a centuries old tradition of democracy, and participation gets even worse than years when the country doesn't

elect a president. In the two thousand fourteen mid terms, for instance, only thirty six percent of the US voting age population cast ballots. So what's up with that? Why do so few Americans vote? Well, some simply may not like the candidates running in a given year or prefer to do something else that day. Hey, maybe some and forgot that an election was happening despite the bludgeoning media coverage.

But according to the Pew survey of registered voters who didn't vote in two thousand fourteen, the biggest single reason given was scheduled conflicts with work or school, which kept thirty of those registered voters from exercising their rights. These scheduled conflicts occur in large part because of an eighteen forty five federal law which designated a week day as election day, specifically the first Tuesday after the first Monday

of November. But an organization called Why Tuesday is advocating a solution that's already being used successfully in other countries like Belgium, France, Germany, and India. The group wants to change voting law and hold elections at a time that's better suited for modern day Americans. Ideally, they'd like to see election day held on a weekend, though as a fallback option, they'd consider making election day of federal holiday

all its own. Why Tuesday co founder and political scientists Norman j. Ornstein says that the current election day is an outmode and holdover from an age in which the country was very different from today, more rural and more pious. As Ornstein explains it, thety five law was written to take into account the needs of a primarily a grarian society.

There was no uber, no cars, no subway trains. Farmers had to get their products to market in wagons, which usually required a whole day of travel, and for religious reasons, they needed to be home for the Sabbath. Additionally, people settled their accounts in those days on the first day

of the month, so they couldn't vote then. Given those constraints, the first Tuesday that falls after the first Monday in November seemed like the best choice at the time, but that timing isn't so convenient in a modern, industrialized, technologically advanced society like ours. The majority of people who work typically do so during the day from Monday through Friday, and we have to vote near where we live, which isn't necessarily near where we work, making it hard to

vote on a lunch break, for instance. If it were up to Ornstein, he would switch election day to a weekend, more specifically a twenty four hour period from noon on Saturday to noon on Sunday. It also holds three days of early voting on Wednesday through Friday of the week

before the Saturday Sunday election. That would allow flexibility for people with work, religious practices, or out of town travel on weekends to vote, and to make voting even easier or Innstein would set up remote voting stations where people could vote no matter where they lived in a city or state, using ballots personalized to their home location and local issues. Instead of moving voting day, why not just make it a national holiday? Ornstein argues that it would

be more complicated that way. Setting up a new holiday is an expensive proposition for the economy, he explains, and if you tried to piggyback it on Veterans Day a week later, as some have proposed, veterans might feel understandably short changed. Ornstein suggests, we've stayed with Tuesday more out of inertia than resistance. It's changed and how we vote is something that interests you, and you'd like to learn more about Ornstein's organization, check out Why Tuesday dot org

or reach out to your own government representative. Change doesn't happen by itself. After next up, senior writer Jonathan Strickland talks about the potential feature of learning particular skills. In a recent study, participants were able to learn Morse code without even trying in less than four hours. What if you could pick up a new skill without having to concentrate on learning it. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have done it with morse code using Google Glass

and passive haptic learning or PHL. But what does that mean. Let's break it down. The approach is passive because the user doesn't need to engage with the process in an active way. Haptic refers to feedback through touch, so a passive haptic learning system teaches users through touch without them having to focus on it. In this case, Google Glass provided the touch. Similar to most cell phones, Google Glass contains a small vibrating mechanism to alert users to notifications.

In Google Glass, the mechanism rests just behind the user's ear and since a low frequency sound that is not heard but felt as a vibration. In their study, the researchers at Georgia Tech took advantage of this design to have the motor tap out characters in morse code while users were distracted with another task. Twelve participants wore Google

Glass while playing an online game for twenty minutes. While they concentrated on the game, half the participants would feel the vibrating motor tap out each letter of a word in morse code. A voice would also say each letter through a small speaker on the headset. The other half of the participants, the control group heard the audio cues

but didn't receive any haptic feedback. The researchers tested participants on their ability to write Morse code, input Morse code on the glass touch pad, and write letters from morse signals. They found that in under four hours, the experimental group displayed greater competence with Morse code than the control group. In fact, experimental group was accurate when encoding each letter of the alphabet in a final test, the control group

was only accurate. The pH L studies group at Georgia Tech previously used similar methods to teach people brail or to play the piano, but in those cases, subjects felt vibrations on their respective fingers. This study showed that you can also use vibrations elsewhere on the body, not just the fingers, to pick up information. PHL might be useful in several practical applications, though the researchers are quick to point out that learning Morse code probably isn't one of them.

It could work well with various text based interfaces, such as learning to touch type on a standard keyboard or smart watch, but the researchers also stressed that it's not a magical way to learn anything, You're not likely to pick up a deep understanding of quantum mechanics this way. In previous work, the research group found that people would forget skills learned with PHL over time, but that it didn't take long for them to become competent agin in

once they picked the haptic technology back up. But there's a lot that remains mysterious. What's the threshold we need to meet to learn a new task with PHL and how long would we retain that skill. We don't have answers to those questions yet, but it's clear PHL could have multiple applications and augment the way we learned. Finally, this week, senior writer Robert Lamb tells the tale of

food industrialization gone wrong in the American Civil War. Demand for coffee on the front lines led to an infamously terrible cup of show. War is hell, and sometimes the coffee is to consider the American Civil War, a four year blood bath that divided the nation and claimed the lives of between sixty and eight hundred and fifty thousand

Union and Confederate soldiers. Looking back on such dark times, there's a certain solace to be found in moments of humanity, like sweeping acts of moral responsibility, or just the small fragments of everyday life that are sprinkled amongst the madness, such as complaining about wretched coffee. Food industrialization has always progressed alongside modern warfare. An army, as the saying goes, marches on its stomach, so the streamline production, preservation, and

delivery of food offers a definitive military advantage. Evaporated milk is a fantastic example of a successful industrialized food product. It's essentially just milk dried into a paste and in the process pasteurized. All you have to do is add water and behold, you've got yourself some reconstituted milk. Condensed milk is roughly the same idea, only with a whole lot more sugar added. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done, which is why the US government purchased

bookoo's of condensed milk for Union Army field rations. But great ideas often lead to terrible ones. In this case, the essence of coffee food engineers wondered, hey, if we can successfully evaporate a glass of milk, and why not an entire cup of joe? This was no trivial matter. As John Grinsman explains in his New York Times article how Coffee fueled the Civil War. The Union Army thrived on coffee. It was their nerve tonic, their sustainer, General

Benjamin Butler, even considered it a decisive strategic factor. The modernization of coffee was nothing short of the modernization of the war effort itself, and so George Hummell unleashed the essence of coffee on an unsuspecting world, evaporating vast quantities of the stuff, complete with boardings, condensed milk and sugar into what is often described as a thick brown sludge or a noxious black grease. By all accounts, Union soldiers

abhorred the stuff. And these were men who, according to Grinsman, would brew coffee with water from quote brackish bays and Mississippi mud liquid their horses would not drink if that's what it took to sharpen their nerves and minds on

the wet stone of holy caffeine. Despite the labels insistence that the product was celebrated and more wholesome than pure coffee, the essence of coffee tested even the standards of these hardened soldiers, and if that weren't bad enough, the men's already supercharged bowels were sometimes further corrupted by spoiled milk sold by sketchy dairymen. According to writer David A. Norris, so attempts to cut the reconstituted essence with fresh milk

could prove a risky gamble. The essence of coffee was soon removed as a ration, but its reputation lingered. A few determined and potentially massochistic Civil War rean actors have recently attempted to recreate the stuff. While some claim to have improved on the recipe and concocted something really quite good, others report the creation of a tough caffy that must be broken up with a rifle butt on cold days before boiling. Can anything good be said for the essence

of coffee? Well? According to historian James T. Hickey, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln may have incorporated the stuff into a high caffeine molasses sweet and concoction to treat her frequent migraines. Plus Union soldiers who could stomach the stuff undoubtedly got their fix a jolt of psychoactive stimulation, and that helped push them toward victory in the War between the States. So think about that the next time your barista serves you a less than perfect pumpkin spy soy latte.

At least you're not forced to endure EF. That's our show for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. And hey, if you're listening to this on the day that the episode comes out, go vote tomorrow for whoever and whatever. Just vote. If you're not subscribed to this podcast yet, do that thing and send us links to anything you'd like to hear us cover, plus a photo

of your Halloween costume. You can send me an email at now Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and of course, for lots of more stories like these, head on over to our home planet now dot how stuff works dot com.