{"id":486,"date":"2020-01-17T20:00:38","date_gmt":"2020-01-18T01:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/?p=486"},"modified":"2020-01-18T20:52:43","modified_gmt":"2020-01-19T01:52:43","slug":"spilled-tea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/2020\/01\/17\/spilled-tea\/","title":{"rendered":"Spilled Tea"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like Japanese food.\u00a0 When you ask for hot tea at most of the Japanese restaurants I go to they bring you a cup and a small cast iron teapot with a flat top on the spout.<\/p>\n

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For a long time, no matter how careful I was, after pouring the first cup there was always a puddle of tea on the table.\u00a0\u00a0 Being still more careful made it worse.\u00a0 I couldn’t even tell where the tea was coming from.\u00a0 I’ve never been particularly graceful but how hard can it be?\u00a0 Tip the pot and the tea pours into the cup.<\/p>\n

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I eventually figured out what was going on.\u00a0 As the cup filled up I was tilting the pot back gradually, reducing the flow in anticipation of a full cup.\u00a0 At some point the velocity and inertia of the flowing tea was too small to overcome molecular attraction for the spout and since bottom of the spout ran downhill, the tea ran along the underside of the spout and ran off at the bottom of the pot.\u00a0 My view was blocked by the teapot so I couldn’t see it happen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

To an engineer this was obviously a design flaw.\u00a0 The fix was to shape the end of the spout so that tea will always pour out away from the pot and not down the outside of the spout.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Yet many teapot spouts, western and eastern, behave like the first illustration.\u00a0\u00a0 Since the time of the Greeks and Romans better spout designs\u00a0 have appeared on pitchers, beakers,\u00a0 amphoras and ewers.\u00a0 Note that on the following pitcher, while the spout does not turn down at rest, it will point down whenever liquid is being poured.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

While the flat top teapot spout is bad engineering,\u00a0 people are good at compensating.\u00a0 I never noticed until later watching British TV shows on Amazon.\u00a0 A tea service seems to appear in at least one scene of every British mystery\u00a0 or police procedural.\u00a0 British actresses, who have been pouring tea very precisely since they were little girls, automatically snap their wrist back slightly to abruptly cut off the flow as the cup fills, avoiding a spill.<\/p>\n

In summary, either (1) this is a major world-wide design flaw requiring mass recalls and government action at the highest levels or (2) since there already is a perfectly good work-around, if you’re not a klutz, it may fall squarely in the Irrelevant Tech category.<\/p>\n

Automated attacks produce automated defenses:\u00a0 Please leave comments using the post in my comments category.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like Japanese food.\u00a0 When you ask for hot tea at most of the Japanese restaurants I go to they bring you a cup and a small cast iron teapot with a flat top on the spout. For a long time, no matter how careful I was, after pouring the first cup there was always … Continue reading “Spilled Tea”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,11],"tags":[66,65],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engineering","category-life","tag-spouts","tag-teapots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":510,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions\/510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}