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A friend of mine works for a consulting company specializing in optics. They invented a machine for one client which sorts wheat grains. The machine does spectr
by yesbabyyes 10y ago
A friend of mine works for a consulting company specializing in optics. They invented a machine for one client which sorts wheat grains. The machine does spectrography of each individual grain, looking for moulds and fungi as well as heavy metals and more. It's a big rotating drum with small chambers for each grain. After doing the spectrography it shoots each grain off into either the selected or rejected direction.
But it doesn't just reject every bad seed, instead it will optimize to keep within legally accepted limits.
- Drdrdrq 10y ago> But it doesn't just reject every bad seed, instead it will optimize to keep within legally accepted limits. This is just... I guess the emotion you feel when reading the last paragraph defines you as either technical guy (outrage / resignation, depending on your age and experience) or managerial guy (pure delight). I am guessing there is a switch that makes it sort properly, you know, for VIP?
- mmirate 10y agoSo if someone reacts with delight to that last paragraph, then they must lack technical knowledge? This seems inaccurate.
- LukeShu 10y agoYou seem to have missed the point of the remark. It isn't about technical knowledge, it is about differing priorities.
- lazaroclapp 10y agoIn all fairness, wasting food needlessly can have important environmental impact issues, and if the legal limits are well calibrated, getting the "allowed" dose of fungus might be a good thing from an immunological perspective. Heavy metals not so much...
- Finnucane 10y agoArguably, separating out grains, etc., that would be actually unsafe to eat is not really wasting food. Throwing out food that is perfectly edible is wasteful.
- yesbabyyes 10y agoI know, it's horrible, right?! But also perfectly obvious. I haven't seen the machine but I envision a panel of knobs you can turn to adjust the acceptable levels of mercury, ergot fungus, mildew... ;-)
- Hello71 10y agoIt seems far more reasonable to me that increasing the true positive rate (bad grains rejected) will also increase the false positive rate (good grains rejected), so it's not the value of the bad grains included (which is almost certainly very small) but instead the value of the good grains which would accidentally be destroyed.
- yesbabyyes 10y agoAccording to my friend, no; it could definitely do a "better" job to select the best grain. But obviously no one is interested in rejecting grain that could be legally sold. Further, I'm guessing that there will always be some trace amounts of heavy metals, poisons and such in any grains so it's necessarily about setting a limit and optimizing the mix for the largest clean yield (in itself an interesting problem since the regulations are not for each grain but instead for all of the grain taken together).
- ThrustVectoring 10y agoThere's a similar issue, IMO, with new home construction. There's a minimum legal quality limit for having a home be sellable, and anything past that basically doesn't get done. It's made worse by the home evaluation metrics - square footage, bathrooms/bedrooms, and location are most of what matters for getting a mortgage (and thus for bidding on and pricing a house). Like, if you look closely at a 100 year old house, you'll find details like "the awnings over the window are just long enough to shade the window in the summer and short enough to get sun in the winter" that basically don't make it into modern homes.
- germinalphrase 10y agoA list of which would make for an interest design book.
- ThrustVectoring 10y agoYou might really enjoy The Timeless Way of Building.
- pkaye 10y agoSpeaking of legally accepted limits, a college friend told me of his first engineering job as a chemical engineer where the factory refined sugar and graded it based on impurities sold at different prices. Sometimes a batch turned out too good so his manager would insist on pouring an amount of sand into the mix to make sure it would meet the agreed upon impurity target.
- NeutronBoy 10y agoThe legal limits probably don't specify rejection criteria on a per-grain basis - they probably say something like "No more than x.x% trace of fungus Y in a given batch", so being able to calibrate on the fly is pretty important.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoI think it probably has to be your first gig as a technical guy to not feel resignation. I mean, "good" grains and "bad" grains? They don't come labeled. It's a noisy, messy spectrum.
- jacobolus 10y agoIn the 1970s, the USA sold a large amount of wheat to the USSR in a famous deal. The contract stipulated that the wheat would contain something like <1% sand. US wheat at the time had effectively no sand at all, so they mixed in 1% of pure sand, staying just within the contract terms. (I heard this from a friend whose friend knew something about it; in searching I can’t find a source online, so the story might be apocryphal. I also might be off on the precise percentage.)
- ue_ 10y agoThat doesn't sound like a very nice thing to do. I wonder if capitalism is to blame, as I would certainly blame capitalism, or good old fashioned egotistical rivalry that I'm told was common in many areas of life then between the USSR and the US. I'd say that feeding humans or even livestock is more important than profits. Or at least, it ought to be.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoOr classical capitalism, because 99 ton of wheat plus one ton of sand is one ton of wheat cheaper than 100 tons of wheat. Sand is heavy and cheap.
- niij 10y agoPerhaps it's 1% by volume instead of by weight.
- nikcub 10y agoI just happen to have bought some sand recently, and it isn't that cheap. Especially not the type of sand that you'd feel comfortable mixing into food. Where I am, a ton of sand aggregate using in construction is ~$100 per ton. The better sand used in gardens, the brown sand (it's used to repel water so you don't over-water crops) is more than than. Considering the wheat/ton spot price is $160 per ton at the moment, I don't think the actual prices would be too different. [0] http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=wheat&months=60¤cy=aud http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=wheat&month...
- taneq 10y agoWell, kind of both. As an engineer I applaud the fact that it optimizes for maximum usage while remaining in-spec. I'd still hope they preferentially discard the really nasty stuff. A few slightly discoloured grains per kg is much better than an entire dead mouse every 100kg.
- jfim 10y agoYou'd be surprised how disgustingly high the legal limits are for food to be considered defective in the US, though. http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/SanitationTransportation/ucm056174.htm#CHPTA http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocuments...
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- david-given 10y agoI have relatives in Australia who worked for the sugar industry. Turns out that unrefined sugar is kept in gigantic open barns, and moved around with bulldozers --- not a clean process. Of course, birds and animals get in, and frequently die there, and then the sugar does... sugar things... to them. As a result there is apparently a legal limit as to the maximum permissible number of crystallised parrots per tonne in Australian sugar.
- nishs 10y agoI apologize in advance for my ignorance. Why are the different kinds of wheat grains mixed in the first place?
- biot 10y agoBecause a field of wheat isn't uniform. The goal is to make all the wheat perfect, but nature foils that by spoiling some of the wheat with mold/fungi; other parts of the field may grow over soil that has a higher heavy metal content. As truckloads of this non-uniform wheat are processed, the machinery sorts the grains to get a mostly uniform end product, rejecting grains that fall outside of an acceptable threshold.