Chasing Rabbits: Bronson Pinchot

On two separate occasions today Perfect Strangers came up and it made me curious what Bronson Pinchot had been up to, from Wikipedia:

In December 2002, Pinchot became a Freemason.

Since approximately 1999, Pinchot has spent a great deal of time in the town of Harford, Pennsylvania restoring the circa 1839 mansion of former Pennsylvania Senator Edward Jones.  He has since purchased a number of properties in the small, rural town of 1,300 in an effort to return the town to its 1800s appearance. He purchased the town store and demolished it. He paid the volunteer fire company to move outside of town. He is currently in the process of suing the town's historical society for the rights to a small triangular island, one of the last pieces of the town center he does not yet own

Here's a strangely surreal article from a local paper on Pinchot's vision for the town.

Chasing Rabbits: U. S. Open

Our recent move has reunited us with our TV for the first time in a couple of years so I got to watch a little U. S. Open this weekend for the first time in quite a while.  Saw some pretty good matches and was glad to see Federer back in good form but disappointed that there wasn't another epic rematch with Nadal in the finals, a la Wimbledon since I missed that one.  A couple of thoughts:

1.  Nadal looked really tired during his match with Murray and it struck me that tennis seems to be one of the few sports where consistent success puts the top players at a distinct disadvantage.  Unlike team sports you play matches only if you keep winning, obviously the more matches you play the better chance you have of winning and the greater your earnings, etc., but there is no set number of matches that everyone has to play.  Thus, it seems that come the end of the season the physical wear and tear on the bodies of the top players can be much greater than that of the lower or mid range players by simple virtue of number of matches played.  Obviously there is a correlation between greater physical ability and success so maybe it's a moot point, maybe you are a little more tired than the 131'st ranked player in the world you are playing in round one but your greater skill makes up for it (but it could account for at least part of why it isn't unheard of for that kind of upset to happen) however here are the year to date stats (matches won/lossed) on the last four men standing in this year's Open (who also happen to be the current top four players in the world, in c, a, d, b order):

a.  Roger Federer - 54/12

b.  Andy Murray - 27/11

c.  Rafael Nadal - 70/8

d.  Novak Djokovic - 49/12

Nadal played in 78 matches this year!  What was he thinking - it's no wonder he ran out of steam against Murray - who played 40 fewer matches this year(!) and looked incredibly fresh the entire match against Nadal.  I would wager that he drops at least two or three tournaments next year so that he is fresher for the U. S. Open.  Are there other sports that have similar "handicaps" on consistent winning?

2.  I really like the instant replay/challenge system.  Like I said, we haven't had a TV for a while so this is the first tournament that I've seen since it was instituted in 2006.  It's a great use of technology, has a very small footprint on the flow of the game (time players would have used arguing with officials is now used to actually reviewing them, and much quicker at that) and can really make a difference.  There could have been a great case in point tonight during the Federer/Murray final when at a crucial point in the second set (I forget which game) Murray had two break point opportunities and Federer hit one long that would have given Murray the game and possibly put him in position for serving for the set, suddenly it's one set a piece and you're playing the best two out of three for the championship - the psychological lift alone might have been enough to keep Murray around a bit longer, although he was clearly outclassed tonight, as he fell apart mentally pretty early in the third set and it was over - however, Murray didn't challenge the shot.  Chalk it up to inexperience, his first grand slam final, or maybe was just so into the game he didn't even see how close it came - it could have made a big difference.

During one of the matches this weekend one of the commentators mentioned that next year the women's tour will be allowing coaches to consult with players once per set - coaching of any sort, even from the stands, has long been against the rules in both the men's and women's game so it's a big shift.  I'm not sure it will make much of a difference but someone like Murray, fairly inexperienced on the big stage, might have benefitted from a little calm down pep-talk midway through the second set.  However, I do think it might be interesting if they gave coaches the ability to challenge one call per set, again something that would have benefitted someone like Murray tonight.

The U. S. Open has a great page up showing all kinds of data on the player challenges.  Here's a tournament overview for singles play:

Men challenged almost twice as much as women and averaged more than two more challenges per match, but they also play a best 3 out of 5 as opposed to the women's best 2 out of 3 - it would be interesting to see averages per set maybe.  Here's how the last four men's players break down - challenges/# overturned (won)/percentage:

a. Roger Federer - 28/5/17.86%

b. Andy Murray - 21/5/23.81%

c. Rafael Nadal - 11/4/36.36%

d. Novak Djokovic - 10/3/30%

In addition to the data summary the U. S. Open site also has a page with links to video for every point that was challenged during singles tournament play.  Kudos to the U. S. Open for a good use of technology all around.

3.  They also streamed tonight's final online.  Again, kudos on utilizing the technology - sports like tennis and golf in particular have nothing to lose and lots to gain from going online as often as possible and I hope we see more of it.

Chasing Rabbits: Tasting with the Mouth, Fooling the Mind or The Art of the Con

This interesting NYT op-ed follows up on an earlier reported story in which two teenagers used a relatively simple DNA test to discover that several Manhattan restaurants and markets were mislabeling the fish used in their sushi, often replacing higher end fish with much cheaper offerings, by discussing just how easy it is for our mouths to lead our minds astray - and the more we know, or think we know, apparently the easier it becomes:

Experts make the best victims because they jump to unwarranted conclusions. The savvier they are, the quicker they jump, because they see at a glance which way a story is heading. In 2002, for instance, a French wine researcher named Frédéric Brochet gave 54 experts an array of red wines to evaluate. Some of the glasses contained white wine that Mr. Brochet had doctored to look red, by adding a tasteless, odorless additive. Not a single taster noticed the switch.

“About 2 or 3 percent of people detect the white wine flavor,” Mr. Brochet said, “but invariably they have little experience of wine culture. Connoisseurs tend to fail to do so. The more training they have, the more mistakes they make because they are influenced by the color of the wine.”

For the experts, the term “red wine” carries countless associations. Each one points to further questions; each question leads them further off the trail. By contrast, the amateurs’ ignorance keeps them from exploring subtle byways. Seeing only one question — “what do you think of this wine?” — they can’t wander far.

The catch is that, when it comes to food, we all think of ourselves as experts. But we taste with both our tongues and our minds, and it’s easy to lead minds astray. Brownies taste better, for example, when served on china rather than on paper plates, research has shown. And we prefer wine with a pedigree, even if it’s a phony one. Sometimes all it takes is an alluring name. Until a few decades ago, Patagonian toothfish was a trash fish not worth trying to give away. Renamed Chilean sea bass, it sold so fast that it nearly disappeared from the sea.

I had never heard of Brochet and his experiment but came across a couple of articles that mentioned, but didn't focus on, his expermiment, including this one from The Guardian:

Frédéric Brochet, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of Bordeaux, decided to find out. In 1998, he invited 54 specialists to taste wines and write down their impressions.

First, he served a red and a white. The tasters made notes. Next, he served a different red and white. Again, they jotted down comments. To describe the two reds they used terms such as plump, deep, dark, blackcurrant and spice. The two white wines evoked descriptions such as golden, floral, pale, honey, straw and lively.

Unbeknownst to the specialists, the second set of wines they tasted, the red and the white, were identical. Brochet had simply added flavourless food colouring to some of the white wine to create a faux red. Not a single person wrote down that the second pair of wines tasted similar, nor that the "red" tasted like a white. Their descriptions of the dyed white read exactly like descriptions of a red wine. The inescapable conclusion was that the specialists had all been fooled.

Brochet didn't design his studies to knock wine connoisseurs down a peg. His experiments demonstrate the power of perceptive expectation: "The subject perceives, in reality, what he or she has pre-perceived and finds it difficult to back away."

What this means is that the brain does not treat taste as a discrete sensation. Instead, it constructs the experience of flavour by taking into consideration information from all the senses – sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. Paradoxically, it places the greatest emphasis on sight – almost 20 times more emphasis, according to Brochet, than on any other sense. So if our eyes tell us there's red wine in the glass, our brain places more faith in that data than in the information from the taste buds.

The second article, from Jonah Lehrer's blog, mentions a second Brochet experiment:

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat and faulty". Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

What these wine experiments illuminate is the omnipresence of subjectivity. When we take a sip of wine, we don't taste the wine first, and the cheapness or redness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisred, or thiswineisexpensive. As a result, the wine "experts" sincerely believed that the white wine was red, and that the cheap wine was expensive. And while they were pitifully mistaken, their mistakes weren't entirely their fault. Our brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that our prejudices feel like facts, our opinions indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a grand cru, then we will taste a grand cru. Our senses are vague in their instructions, and we parse their suggestions based upon whatever other knowledge we can summon to the surface. As Brochet himself notes, our expectations of what the wine will taste like "can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself."

Unfortunately, Brochet doesn't have a Wikipedia entry (and despite the contrary evidence that this post might present, I don't have time to start one for him) but he is mentioned in a couple of other entries and one of those is the Riedel wine glass entry.  Which led me to this interesting piece from Gourmet Magazine back in 2004 examining "the myth of Riedel wine glasses" and this exchange between the author of the article and Brochet:

“Come on,” I ask Brochet, during a lengthy phone call. “Are you saying that most of us can’t tell the difference between a Chardonnay and a Zinfandel? We can’t tell good wine from bad?”

“No, no, no,” he says. “I’m not saying that. I’m saying that expectations have an enormous impact. People can, in fact, tell the difference between wines. But their expectations—based on the label, or whether you tell them it’s expensive, or good, or based on what kind of wine you tell them it is, the color—all these factors can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself.”

And now we’re getting to the moral of the story.

Look, Brochet says, he’s never studied wineglasses himself, so he can’t prove what he’s about to say. But the research that he and others have done on the science of expectation convinces him that they’ve found the key: Riedel and other high-end glasses can make wine taste better. Because they’re pretty. Because they’re delicate. Because they’re expensive. Because you expect them to make the wine taste better.

And that, says Brochet, can make all the difference.

If so inclined, I will allow you to insert your own connection to Sarah Palin and or Barack Obama here.

Aside:  In the interest of full disclosure we have some Riedel glasses given to us by the dearest of friends and they always make our wine taste better for an infinite number of reasons.