If you want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8Zg3nAtyDc
Thanks. I almost missed this because I searched the comment page for “video” so I’m mentioning video here so others can find it. :)
Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
41–50 of 166 posts
Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
#42I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within…
replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese.
I agree. As soon as you replace humans with machines, the next step is so-called "value engineering," where squeezing pennies out of a process becomes more important than the product.
Let the tech people do tech. Let the artists do art. Food is an art.
Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
#43I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but dump them in by hand. The inspection is still done by ear with a hammer - but when then need to flip the wheels over every few weeks they have a robot grabber thing do it. Obviously, there's some balance in technology that is about right, but where do you draw the line? Because this could abso…
Let the machines do the hard mixing and lifting. Let the humans do the parts that are fun or may require a bit of artistry. It certainly sounds smarter than building AI to do our writing and art so that we can flip burgers for a living.
Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
the problem with automating inspections is humans are good at noticing things that are 'different'. I can make a machine see the common wrong things but if I miss one rare situation that passes bad product. many farmers don't use automated milking machines because you still need a human to inspect each cow and thus the machine doesn't save much labor.
Also the labor is dirt cheap. Ive worked on dairy farms milking cows, 9/10 employees are drunk or addicted to meth, nobody else is going to volunteer to get shit and pissed on for $9 an hour. But the cows don't care if someone is drunk or high on meth.
[deleted]
Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
the problem with automating inspections is humans are good at noticing things that are 'different'. I can make a machine see the common wrong things but if I miss one rare situation that passes bad product. many farmers don't use automated milking machines because you still need a human to inspect each cow and thus the machine doesn't save much labor.
Also the labor is dirt cheap. Ive worked on dairy farms milking cows, 9/10 employees are drunk or addicted to meth, nobody else is going to volunteer to get shit and pissed on for $9 an hour. But the cows don't care if someone is drunk or high on meth.
Drunk, addicted to meth employees need jobs too, in order to buy meth/alcohol, and their vote counts just as much as yours.
Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
#46Probably I'm biased because I'm Italian and I grew up eating them, but Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are hands down the best cheeses there can be. Many people know and consume them only grated on pasta dishes, but they are especially delicious on their own with some good bread or grilled polenta. Also, the crust can be chopped up and added to risotto (as you're cooking it) and they turn into wonderful little c…
I absolutely love them. I don't like how it melts on pasta, so I eat it directly.
Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
#47I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but dump them in by hand. The inspection is still done by ear with a hammer - but when then need to flip the wheels over every few weeks they have a robot grabber thing do it. Obviously, there's some balance in technology that is about right, but where do you draw the line? Because this could abso…
I always find the Italian kitchen a fascinating contrast between an appreciation for artisanal handmade food and the love of shiny stainless steel gadgets.
Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
#48I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within…
- "For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density..." Out of pure curiosity, how would an industrial process engineer approach this problem, de novo?
(Admittedly without knowing much about it) I'll throw Ground Penetrating Radar onto this armchair metaphorical ideas whiteboard. The industrial CT scanner idea uses x-rays, while GPR is more in the UHF/VHF frequencies which probably means cheaper/easier? The tech seems to have some tunability for the specific application:
> Thus operating frequency is always a trade-off between resolution and penetration. Optimal depth of subsurface penetration is achieved in ice where the depth of penetration can achieve several thousand metres (to bedrock in Greenland) at low GPR frequencies. Dry sandy soils or massive dry materials such as granite, limestone, and concrete tend to be resistive rather than conductive, and the depth of penetration could be up to 15 metres (49 ft). However, in moist or clay-laden soils and materials with high electrical conductivity, penetration may be as little as a few centimetres.
Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
#49I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but dump them in by hand. The inspection is still done by ear with a hammer - but when then need to flip the wheels over every few weeks they have a robot grabber thing do it. Obviously, there's some balance in technology that is about right, but where do you draw the line? Because this could abso…
As a controls engineer, building automated manufacturing equipment, the general principle that we've found to work best is to let the humans do human things and the machines do machine things.
A person with a spoon, tediously and laboriously stirring ingredients in a pot, is a poor way to make use of that person's intelligence, creativity, and flexibility. An electric motor just does the job better.
On the other hand, by the Anna Karenina principle, cheese inspection is one of those tasks where there are a thousand unique and unexpected ways for a cheese to be wrong but only one way for it to be right. It's very hard to design an inspection that would catch everything and miss nothing that a human would trivially see, smell, or feel, while also minimizing false positives.
The robotic wheel flipper is somewhere in the middle: humans are great at navigating complex environments, and while you can design a uniform, controlled environment that a complex AMR can navigate, and space the wheels out regularly, it seems like half the task (rotating the cheese) is something ideally suited for a robot arm and half the task (getting to the cheese) is something better suited for a human. Humans can maintain the environment and debug the process, the robots can flip the cheese.
With respect to the cheese testing, I think a good middle ground is tool-assisted human inspection. Instead of/in addition to a hammer, give them an ultrasonic transducer and audio analysis toolset. Let them manipulate the cheese, but also give them objective numerical data on the frequency response and calculated porosity. It's easy for a person to recognize when a cheese is more hollow-sounding than the previous, but the first cheese of the day might be hard to for a human to recognize, and better tools than a primitive hammer can help with that.
Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
#50Probably I'm biased because I'm Italian and I grew up eating them, but Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are hands down the best cheeses there can be. Many people know and consume them only grated on pasta dishes, but they are especially delicious on their own with some good bread or grilled polenta. Also, the crust can be chopped up and added to risotto (as you're cooking it) and they turn into wonderful little c…
I can’t really rate cheeses on a scale; A 36-months comté or emmental has very different flavours from a 36-months Parmigiano and I wouldn’t rate one "better" than the other. Like any good cheese, I agree that Parmigiano Reggiano is best eaten on its own.
I’m French and something that surprise me is that both Italy and France have very good cheeses, but only in France we eat cheese on its own as part of the meal: the traditional French meal is: starter / main plate / cheese (sometimes with salad) / dessert. In Italian restaurants you sometimes find them as antipasti, but not always, and (at least in my experience) at home people don’t really eat cheese on its own.