Stuff like this always reminds me how much room there is for making a product that makes an inconspicuous everyday activity better, but also how much staying power "good enough" has.
I have nailed making rice by hand with no measuring, the nice thing about cooking it manually is that one can modify the parameters, soggy, fluffy, al dente, all easily achievable and the rice is done in 12-15 minutes.
1. Fill sauce pan at most half way with water
2. Create perfect cone from bottom of pan to the center, just pierce the surface
I've been cooking rice like this for the last 15 years. I recently bought a Zojirushi rice cooker and I now regret not getting one sooner. The Zojirushi makes far superior rice than I ever managed and it makes it perfect every time. Not to mention it also cooks mixed/brown/sushi/grits/steel cut oats perfectly as well. Throw in the fact that I can use the timer to have steel cut oats ready when I wake up in the morning make it worth every penny.
I get that, I used to own a couple rice cookers, both a super low end $20 version and a higher end version from japan that required a transformer (very old, like from the mid 90s I think).
I might go back someday, but I have new found love for portable skills, no machine necessary. If I ate more rice, I'd probably get one again.
I've used several different rice cookers over the course of years, but finally I just don't see the point.
I eyeball the rice I pour into my pot, I eyeball the water I pour in next (without washing!), I crank up the stove until the water starts to boil, and then I turn it down, cover, and set a timer for 20 minutes. When that's up I turn off the stove and look at the clock so I know when five or ten more minutes have elapsed so I can uncover and give the whole mess a stir to prevent sticking to the pot. If I'm cooking rice, I'm also cooking something else, so it isn't a hardship to be in the kitchen to notice the timer.
This technique never fails to produce tasty rice. If one has a stove, why does one need a rice cooker? I've also cooked tasty rice over a coleman propane single-burner before, so you don't actually need a stove either.
Do you have kids or a large family? Are you cooking for more than yourself? How much rice do you cook per day? Do you cook rice every single time you want it?
Have you ever wanted to cook enough rice to last 4 days, at once, and have it kept perfectly for the entire 4 days? If so, you should get a rice cooker!!!
I'd also comment on how consistent does the rice taste? When I made rice on the stove, it was really easy to cook too long and have it be mushier than I like.
I cook for more than myself, but it isn't a "large" family. I don't cook rice every day, but it is probably 90% of the days on which I cook. (Other household members typically prefer to cook other starches.) I often store rice in the fridge. I find that pouring some water with refrigerated rice into a glass bowl, covering, and nuking for two minutes restores it to an edible and tasty state. I have never cared to eat rice on four consecutive days, although when I lived in Asia and in Hawai'i that was often the case.
I think we have a rice cooker in the back of some cupboard, and I certainly have at least one more in storage. I rarely need more than four burners on the stove at one time, so it's just easier to use the pot that's already hanging next to it rather than taking up valuable counter space and electric outlets with a single-purpose appliance. YMMV.
Time. I use the delayed start feature on mine along with a slow cooker to have meals ready when I get home (I go home after work, set up the cooking, go to the gym, return home to a nearly done meal).
Not just for rice. A lot of one pot meal recipes you can cook in a rice cooker faster than they'd cook in a slow cooker, and unlike my stove (more expensive to replace), it can switch to a "warm" setting automatically.
For me, it boils down to this:
I'm a single guy, living alone. I work from 7ish-4ish each day with a 30-minute commute. I go to the gym from 5:30-7:30 most days of the week. I tend to go out of town on the weekends or have plans with friends in town. This means I really only have weeknights to do most of my chores (cleaning, laundry, attend to bills and such). I really like home cooked meals, and a device like this allows me to have that with minimal attention so that my cooking becomes: 5-10 minutes prep, 10-30 minutes of chores, 1-5 minutes of serving/storing/clean-up.
EDIT: I feel like we all dogpiled on you. You're right. Fundamentally, it's not needed. But it does have some very practical use-cases depending on your situation. If I had a live-in partner who I could divide tasks with, I'd be less inclined to use such a device. But that's not my situation so I have to optimize and this is a good spot to optimize and still have tasty home-cooked meals.
At least one other link in this thread has some good ones.
Mostly I just do some sort of meat and rice + vegetables combo. A very simple (and customizable) chicken recipe:
Can't recall exact amounts, but you can play with the ratios of meat:rice.
2 chicken breasts, cubed (1"-2"), marinade
0.5-1 cup rice
Sautee the chicken (don't need to finish cooking it, just get it white on all sides), put it in the rice cooker. Add the rice, stir it in. Possibly some vegetables (steamer tray for this as well). Add 1-1.5 cups water (depending on amount of rice). Turn on the rice cooker. Wait. Eat.
You should be able to do this with other meats but you may want to cook it more prior to adding to the rice cooker to make sure it's done (I've done this with sausage, haven't tried pork yet).
Easily customizable, just add your favorite spices and vegetables.
Soy sauce + hoisin sauce makes a nice marinade, sauté some garlic and ginger before sautéing the chicken. Water chestnuts and a bit of sesame oil when cooking.
Haha, I love a good dogpile. Lots of people have strong feelings about their appliances, and that's wonderful. I worry a bit about eating too much rice, so I value some friction in the process. De gustibus...
There is that. But you can always use it for cooking other things. I've used mine for cooking other grains and pastas (mixed results), and just meats and vegetables. It's a lot faster than my slow cooker, and generally cleaner/easier than a pot on the stove (less monitoring the temperature and reduced concern of things like boiling over, helps that mine is probably too large for a single person but I also try to cook up 3-4 days of food at once for work lunches).
In my case, I was in a dorm and couldn't afford a microwave, and was forbidden from having a burner or hot plate. You can heat up a lot of things in a rice cooker (especially a cheap one, which is little more than a heating coil with a bucket over it.)
I don't know why people have expensive rice cookers, however. I remember a comment by patio11 where he mentioned his wife buying a $600 rice cooker. Rice in Japan is probably the most serious of serious business but I can't even fathom how anyone gets that much value from a rice cooker.
Cheap rice cookers are useful, but expensive ones:
a) have more settings for things other than rice b) have options for delayed start, etc c) come with better materials (ie, teflon-free nonstick pan) d) it's a device that will last years - spending $200 vs $30 is often easily justifiable.
I'm surprised you couldn't afford a microwave - they're like $50-100 these days for something that has crazy high utility.
In my experience, your method of cooking rice doesn't come out as tasty as rice cooked with a good rice cooker. You can get the same results with a stovetop but it is more more involved (ie tweak the heat every 2-5 minutes).
You can make a lot more than rice with a rice cooker. It's just smart enough to set and forget for a great deal of different dishes, which was great in college when I wanted to come back to a warm meal.
Wait, now we don't need a rice cooker, or a stove?
I can throw rice and water into my rice cooker, go grocery shopping, come back 90 minutes later, and have perfect rice nice and hot, waiting for me.
I don't see the point of all the minimalism. It's a tool, an almost perfectly refined one. I can afford it, it has lasted 15 years and running, is energy efficient, and small enough.
Good on you if you want to dedicate an inordinate amount of your life energy to making rice, I guess?
Okay, now tell your SO or a friend or roommate to make the day's rice.
Rice cooking isn't terribly difficult, but a good rice cooker makes a very regular part of my meals something that is routine to prepare. And more importantly for me, makes it something that anyone can prepare, without supervision or trial and error.
Plus, there are a few other benefits: a good keep warm function that can keep rice in a pretty decent state for hours on end, timers, can cook brown rice unattended, lowering/increasing heat as needed, etc.
If you only eat rice once or twice a week, the counterspace a good rice cooker takes up probably isn't worth it. But if rice is a daily process? Then yeah, for me, a good rice cooker pays for itself pretty rapidly.
Even once or twice a week. Once you've prepped the ingredients, stir fry usually only takes a few minutes to cook. I find it super-handy to prep my stir fry and turn on the rice cooker. When I'm ready to eat, the rice is ready and making the rest is 5-10 minutes work. Making rice isn't hard but it does require at least a modicum of supervision.
I'm admittedly something of a kitchen gadget person, but my rice cooker is something that I genuinely use a lot.
I can't say I've ever been successful making stir fried rice with immediately cooked rice. It works much better if you make rice then store it in the fridge overnight.
> Okay, now tell your SO or a friend or roommate to make the day's rice.
Erm, all of those people know how to cook rice on the hob (and would probably be taken aback when asked to use a rice cooker) And I'm not even Asian. We must live in very different worlds.
But... we just told them how! I'm imagining someone saying, "sorry, I never learned how to wash the dishes... I won't be able to help you with that task."
I can make tasty bread without a bread machine, too, but there's a place for bread machines. Experts appreciate the convenience of not having to be right there on the spot to take anything off the stove (or out of the oven) and novices appreciate that it's really hard to mess up.
Not quite the same. It's more like, cooking rice takes 20-30 minutes of time and attention (not total attention). A rice cooker turns it into 1 minute of attention (pour in rice, water, wait, remove), but takes about the same time.
So the question is, is it worth it to get in my car and drive 6 blocks, park, and go into the shop, or just walk the 6 blocks? For that distance, it's almost break even on time, but the driving technically requires less effort on my part. Anything less than that, walking is clearly better, anything more than that and driving is clearly better (well, in my case there's nothing after 6 blocks from my place that I'm interested in that isn't at least a mile away so 20+ minutes walking versus 5 minutes driving/parking).
If you use a rice cooker strictly for cooking rice, and don't do it daily, it may not be worth the cost/space.
The cognitive and physical effort required to make decent rice in the rice cooker is roughly 1/10th that of manually doing it.
Crank up the stove until the water starts to boil- several minutes at least
timer for 20 minutes: does not account for any variation in the cooking process as a function of the ingredients. I see variation in my rice over the time I go through a single bag as the humidity varies
give the whole mess a stir to prevent sticking: not really a problem with rice cookers, although they can optionally make the bottom toasty since some people want this.
I swear by my Zojirushi cooker. There will be a host of comments here on how it is possible to cook excellent rice without the gadget. These people are all correct. What the cooker brings to the counter is it is fully fire and forget ... until it plays its jaunty tune on completion, and then maintains the rice at serving temperature for hours if desired without requiring me to do anything but walk over to it with a rice bowl. All hail the elephant!
I also like that on the Zoji there's an hot cereal setting, and unlike my prior rice cooker, where cooking steel-cut oats made a big mess with it boiling over, the Zoji gets it perfect, no fuss.
It'll do 1/2 to 3 "cups" of rice, the cup specified in their ratings is an old Japanese measure. As I recall, that'll get the minimum serving down to 300 calories from 600 for a full cup.
And the absolute winner of a function of telling it what time you want the rice or oatmeal to be ready -- it will figure it out from there. Have oatmeal ready in the morning or rice ready in the evening when I walk in the door, it's incredible.
I just dig that they play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when you fire them up. It's just such an oddball thing, that I get a kick out of it every time I use it.
I've had my Zojirushi rice cooker for probably 3 years now and use it at least 4 times per week. It's bulletproof. The bowl is starting to show its wear, but I'm still in love with the thing.
In addition, I have a Zojirushi countertop water heater for tea and I don't know I lived without that, either. These are expensive gadgets but boy are they convenient.
If you drink any amount of hot drinks, the water boiler is worth it. According to the manual, the 3 liter version draws only 38 watts maintaining 195F/90C water (after the initial boiling cycle).
The manual I found says this boiler takes 1–2 minutes to boil water from "keep warm" at 98°C, or 3–5 from 90°C. I can boil 1 litre in about 2 minutes with a conventional kettle, or 2 litres in about 4 minutes. Add 25–50% if using an appliance that costs €15 rather than €50.
It seems rather wasteful to have something like this at home. It would double the "standby power" use of an average home, even perhaps an American one.[1]
Fuzzy logic differs from classical logic. In fuzzy logic one can model arbitrary (linear or nonlinear) functions.
In particular, in fuzzy logic the law of the excluded middle does not hold. So truth values can be true, false or something in-between. Typically the categorical (true, false) is replaced by the the closed interval [0, 1], with 0 meaning "absolutely false", 1 meaning "absolutely true", and an infinity of possible valid values in between, each to some degree true and to some degree false.
Part of the problem is the name. The late Bob Pease (google him: fascinating character even if you're not an EE) in particular trashed Fuzzy Logic/Fuzzy Control every time he had a chance.
Call it by its alternate name of Multivariate Logic and it seems less... fuzzy.
1. Pease has some good points to make about the use of fuzzy logic in control systems (e.g., difficult to prove robustness of nonlinear models) but it appears that he never stopped criticizing long enough to really find out what fuzzy logic was and the advantages it might bring (e.g., nonlinear control systems, use of human intuitive knowledge in control systems).
Nonetheless Pease is funny reading and his writings likely contributed to slow US adoption of fuzzy logic control systems. As a result of this (and the unfortunate literal minterpretations of the term itself perhaps) fuzzy logic control systems in steadicams, helicopter guidance, subway control systems, rice cookers, washing machines, etc. that we use today mostly originate from abroad. .
2. I've never read/heard the term "Multivariate Logic" used as a synonym for fuzzy logic.
I wish I could find the class handouts, but I think the "multivariate logic" term came from a short introductory class on Fuzzy Logic I took a very long time ago.
I wasn't an EE but I still loved his columns in Electronic Design. At one point, we got into some correspondence over the use of lists--which, as I recall, was somehow connected with traveling to Nepal. For some reason I do remember his ongoing campaign against "fuzzy control systems."
I bought this microwave rice cooker at TJ Maxx, that was marketed by Jamie Oliver for awhile.
Love the thing. It has ridges in the ceramic to mark the measurements. I put in the rice, fill to the line with water, microwave for 5 minutes, let stand for 10, and boom, perfect rice.
I tend to use that thing more than my rice cooker, it's easier to clean.
While the ridges and 5/10m cook/stand time sounds perfect, we are often using the microwave for reheating takeout or leftovers (or bringing milk up to room temps for the kiddos). And we have rice (or quinoa) almost every day.
Any other gadget should aim to be as useful, fault-tolerant and straightforward as a rice cooker (microwave is close 2nd).
The author talks about fuzzy logic as being probabilistic and having to do with natural language, and that fuzzy logic is "the kind of logic we most often use here at FiveThirtyEight." However, the rice cooker is not probabilistic at all, and takes discrete input (not natural language):
> In my current fuzzy-logic [sic.] cooker, however, I tell the machine what kind of rice I’m using [white or brown] and how long it has been soaking [a decimal value]. It takes that [discrete] information and decides what temperature it should reach, and for how long. Generally using what are essentially if/then statements, [emphasis mine] it can fine-tune the process.
Anna, what is your reader supposed to think when your only example doesn't meet the requirements you set out for it yourself? It is especially alarming here since the thing you're trying to illustrate is the way your organization thinks.
> “Fuzzy theory is wrong — wrong and pernicious,” Kahan said. “The danger of fuzzy theory is that it will encourage the sort of imprecise thinking that brought us to so much trouble.”
Your "sic" is gratuitous; it's being hyphenated because it's being used attributively/as an adjective.
I guess you could describe the rice cooker as "taking a much larger number of inputs than a traditional rice cooker" but that doesn't seem to work as a marketing slogan as well as "fuzzy logic."
It's not a fuzzy logic rice cooker. I've used [sic] because it's an incorrect characterization of the item.
I agree with your marketing observation. Maybe they could have called it sophisticated logic (or something like that)? The history of fuzzy logic (which was cool) could be replaced with stories of sophisticated problem solving.
[Sic] is used to indicate that a linguistic malformation or variance within a quotation is being intentionally reproduced from the original source, thus preventing the reader from thinking that the disfluency was newly introduced in the act of transcription. Using it to express your personal opinion on the perfectly grammatical and accurately spelled content of the quotation is terribly confusing.
How long it has been soaking is probably a fuzzy measure, unless you want to make the user of the rice cooker to use a chronometer or make the rice cooker itself soak the rice.
As for the if/then statements, even fuzzy logic needs cutoff points.
Fuzzy-logic rice cookers are a luxury (online they range in price from $50 to more than $700), but the awe mine inspires nearly matches the quality of the rice.
Is there any inherent reason that "fuzzy-logic" rice cookers are a luxury item? I'd think that the increased cost of manufacture over a simple mechanical rice cooker would be minimal. Is it more difficult than it seems? Is the market for cheap smart rice cookers too small for anyone to bother?
Someone who knows what they are doing could probably write rice cooking logic that works pretty well in a couple days, and a beginner (like me) could almost certainly get something working in a couple weeks. There'd always be room for refinement after that, but I can't see that the code would be a limiting factor.
But likely you've hit on the real reason there isn't much competition on the low end: making an inexpensive fuzzy logic rice cooker is easy, but if it started selling well you'd probably be sued out of business for patent infringement. I now feel silly for overlooking this obvious explanation.
If you dissect any low-end appliance, you'll notice that they are almost always have very simple mechanics that work by mechanical physics in lieu of computing where possible. Sensors and electronics are expensive in the context of an appliance that needs to be produced for less than $3.
You can make a coffee maker that can deliver water at a precise and adjustable temperature, but it's going to be a lot more complicated (thus expensive) than a cheap one that relies on a tube, a one-way valve, and the behavior of boiling water.
I think that the low-end market for rice cookers is already dominated by the primitive on/off models. I doubt a smart model can compete on price with a thermal switch.
I'd disagree with the OP that a $50 smart rice cooker is a luxury. These models also serve as slow cookers, vegetable steamers, etc. so they are quite a value in money and space compared with buying each appliance individually. If you don't have a proper kitchen you can do most of what you need in one.
Hasn't the arsenic in rice news been a big thing in the US? Here in Sweden the FDA equivalent discourages people to eat rice too often (the recommendations are a bit vague).
Rice cookers would impress me more if they had some kind of built in stirring mechanism, and even more if they dispensed liquid at a certain rate- then they could crank out perfectly consistent, effortless risotto. As it stands they don't meet the right utility/space ratio to find a place in my smallish kitchen.
I use microwave oven to cook Rice and Buckwheat. Half of cup rice, then cup of water. Wait at least 15 minutes for rice and about 3 minutes for Buckwheat for water to soak in (important step). Then I program oven to cook 4:10-4:50 at full power (800W), then 11-15 minutes at 40% power. Piece of chicken, or one or two eggs (at then end of cooking) are welcome.
I have a rice cooker from Amazon that was less than $100 and works perfectly. I don't know if it uses fuzzy logic or not. Is there an easy way to tell?
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] thread1. Fill sauce pan at most half way with water
2. Create perfect cone from bottom of pan to the center, just pierce the surface
3. Boil in this config for 1 minute
4. stire rice thoroughly, breaking apart clumps, add smidge of olive oil
5. turn down to low heat for 12-15 minutes
To get drier rice, add more above water line, to get more al dente, don't cook for as long.
http://www.thekitchn.com/cooking-rice-do-you-use-the-first-k...
I might go back someday, but I have new found love for portable skills, no machine necessary. If I ate more rice, I'd probably get one again.
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/the-pot-and-how-to-...
I eyeball the rice I pour into my pot, I eyeball the water I pour in next (without washing!), I crank up the stove until the water starts to boil, and then I turn it down, cover, and set a timer for 20 minutes. When that's up I turn off the stove and look at the clock so I know when five or ten more minutes have elapsed so I can uncover and give the whole mess a stir to prevent sticking to the pot. If I'm cooking rice, I'm also cooking something else, so it isn't a hardship to be in the kitchen to notice the timer.
This technique never fails to produce tasty rice. If one has a stove, why does one need a rice cooker? I've also cooked tasty rice over a coleman propane single-burner before, so you don't actually need a stove either.
Have you ever wanted to cook enough rice to last 4 days, at once, and have it kept perfectly for the entire 4 days? If so, you should get a rice cooker!!!
I think we have a rice cooker in the back of some cupboard, and I certainly have at least one more in storage. I rarely need more than four burners on the stove at one time, so it's just easier to use the pot that's already hanging next to it rather than taking up valuable counter space and electric outlets with a single-purpose appliance. YMMV.
Not just for rice. A lot of one pot meal recipes you can cook in a rice cooker faster than they'd cook in a slow cooker, and unlike my stove (more expensive to replace), it can switch to a "warm" setting automatically.
For me, it boils down to this:
I'm a single guy, living alone. I work from 7ish-4ish each day with a 30-minute commute. I go to the gym from 5:30-7:30 most days of the week. I tend to go out of town on the weekends or have plans with friends in town. This means I really only have weeknights to do most of my chores (cleaning, laundry, attend to bills and such). I really like home cooked meals, and a device like this allows me to have that with minimal attention so that my cooking becomes: 5-10 minutes prep, 10-30 minutes of chores, 1-5 minutes of serving/storing/clean-up.
EDIT: I feel like we all dogpiled on you. You're right. Fundamentally, it's not needed. But it does have some very practical use-cases depending on your situation. If I had a live-in partner who I could divide tasks with, I'd be less inclined to use such a device. But that's not my situation so I have to optimize and this is a good spot to optimize and still have tasty home-cooked meals.
Mostly I just do some sort of meat and rice + vegetables combo. A very simple (and customizable) chicken recipe:
Can't recall exact amounts, but you can play with the ratios of meat:rice.
2 chicken breasts, cubed (1"-2"), marinade
0.5-1 cup rice
Sautee the chicken (don't need to finish cooking it, just get it white on all sides), put it in the rice cooker. Add the rice, stir it in. Possibly some vegetables (steamer tray for this as well). Add 1-1.5 cups water (depending on amount of rice). Turn on the rice cooker. Wait. Eat.
You should be able to do this with other meats but you may want to cook it more prior to adding to the rice cooker to make sure it's done (I've done this with sausage, haven't tried pork yet).
Easily customizable, just add your favorite spices and vegetables.
Soy sauce + hoisin sauce makes a nice marinade, sauté some garlic and ginger before sautéing the chicken. Water chestnuts and a bit of sesame oil when cooking.
Haha, I love a good dogpile. Lots of people have strong feelings about their appliances, and that's wonderful. I worry a bit about eating too much rice, so I value some friction in the process. De gustibus...
I don't know why people have expensive rice cookers, however. I remember a comment by patio11 where he mentioned his wife buying a $600 rice cooker. Rice in Japan is probably the most serious of serious business but I can't even fathom how anyone gets that much value from a rice cooker.
cheap rice cookers are quite handy.
I'm surprised you couldn't afford a microwave - they're like $50-100 these days for something that has crazy high utility.
I think that implies college student who didn't have a lot of money to spend
But then again personal tastes for rice may vary.
A quick search results in this, for example: http://greatist.com/eat/super-surprising-rice-cooker-recipes
I can throw rice and water into my rice cooker, go grocery shopping, come back 90 minutes later, and have perfect rice nice and hot, waiting for me.
I don't see the point of all the minimalism. It's a tool, an almost perfectly refined one. I can afford it, it has lasted 15 years and running, is energy efficient, and small enough.
Good on you if you want to dedicate an inordinate amount of your life energy to making rice, I guess?
Rice cooking isn't terribly difficult, but a good rice cooker makes a very regular part of my meals something that is routine to prepare. And more importantly for me, makes it something that anyone can prepare, without supervision or trial and error.
Plus, there are a few other benefits: a good keep warm function that can keep rice in a pretty decent state for hours on end, timers, can cook brown rice unattended, lowering/increasing heat as needed, etc.
If you only eat rice once or twice a week, the counterspace a good rice cooker takes up probably isn't worth it. But if rice is a daily process? Then yeah, for me, a good rice cooker pays for itself pretty rapidly.
I'm admittedly something of a kitchen gadget person, but my rice cooker is something that I genuinely use a lot.
Erm, all of those people know how to cook rice on the hob (and would probably be taken aback when asked to use a rice cooker) And I'm not even Asian. We must live in very different worlds.
So the question is, is it worth it to get in my car and drive 6 blocks, park, and go into the shop, or just walk the 6 blocks? For that distance, it's almost break even on time, but the driving technically requires less effort on my part. Anything less than that, walking is clearly better, anything more than that and driving is clearly better (well, in my case there's nothing after 6 blocks from my place that I'm interested in that isn't at least a mile away so 20+ minutes walking versus 5 minutes driving/parking).
If you use a rice cooker strictly for cooking rice, and don't do it daily, it may not be worth the cost/space.
Crank up the stove until the water starts to boil- several minutes at least
timer for 20 minutes: does not account for any variation in the cooking process as a function of the ingredients. I see variation in my rice over the time I go through a single bag as the humidity varies
give the whole mess a stir to prevent sticking: not really a problem with rice cookers, although they can optionally make the bottom toasty since some people want this.
It's all about saving time for other things.
http://www.amazon.com/Zojirushi-NS-TGC10-Cooker-Warmer-Stain...
It'll do 1/2 to 3 "cups" of rice, the cup specified in their ratings is an old Japanese measure. As I recall, that'll get the minimum serving down to 300 calories from 600 for a full cup.
In addition, I have a Zojirushi countertop water heater for tea and I don't know I lived without that, either. These are expensive gadgets but boy are they convenient.
Next stop, bread maker!
The manual I found says this boiler takes 1–2 minutes to boil water from "keep warm" at 98°C, or 3–5 from 90°C. I can boil 1 litre in about 2 minutes with a conventional kettle, or 2 litres in about 4 minutes. Add 25–50% if using an appliance that costs €15 rather than €50.
It seems rather wasteful to have something like this at home. It would double the "standby power" use of an average home, even perhaps an American one.[1]
[1] http://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/795343
http://teaching.idallen.com/dat2330/04f/notes/deep_nesting.t...
Fuzzy logic differs from classical logic. In fuzzy logic one can model arbitrary (linear or nonlinear) functions.
In particular, in fuzzy logic the law of the excluded middle does not hold. So truth values can be true, false or something in-between. Typically the categorical (true, false) is replaced by the the closed interval [0, 1], with 0 meaning "absolutely false", 1 meaning "absolutely true", and an infinity of possible valid values in between, each to some degree true and to some degree false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic#Overview
Call it by its alternate name of Multivariate Logic and it seems less... fuzzy.
Nonetheless Pease is funny reading and his writings likely contributed to slow US adoption of fuzzy logic control systems. As a result of this (and the unfortunate literal minterpretations of the term itself perhaps) fuzzy logic control systems in steadicams, helicopter guidance, subway control systems, rice cookers, washing machines, etc. that we use today mostly originate from abroad. .
2. I've never read/heard the term "Multivariate Logic" used as a synonym for fuzzy logic.
If rice_is_not_done_yet is more than 90% false and rice_is_overcooked is more than 10% true stop cooking it!
Love the thing. It has ridges in the ceramic to mark the measurements. I put in the rice, fill to the line with water, microwave for 5 minutes, let stand for 10, and boom, perfect rice.
I tend to use that thing more than my rice cooker, it's easier to clean.
Any other gadget should aim to be as useful, fault-tolerant and straightforward as a rice cooker (microwave is close 2nd).
> In my current fuzzy-logic [sic.] cooker, however, I tell the machine what kind of rice I’m using [white or brown] and how long it has been soaking [a decimal value]. It takes that [discrete] information and decides what temperature it should reach, and for how long. Generally using what are essentially if/then statements, [emphasis mine] it can fine-tune the process.
Anna, what is your reader supposed to think when your only example doesn't meet the requirements you set out for it yourself? It is especially alarming here since the thing you're trying to illustrate is the way your organization thinks.
> “Fuzzy theory is wrong — wrong and pernicious,” Kahan said. “The danger of fuzzy theory is that it will encourage the sort of imprecise thinking that brought us to so much trouble.”
I guess you could describe the rice cooker as "taking a much larger number of inputs than a traditional rice cooker" but that doesn't seem to work as a marketing slogan as well as "fuzzy logic."
I agree with your marketing observation. Maybe they could have called it sophisticated logic (or something like that)? The history of fuzzy logic (which was cool) could be replaced with stories of sophisticated problem solving.
As for the if/then statements, even fuzzy logic needs cutoff points.
Is there any inherent reason that "fuzzy-logic" rice cookers are a luxury item? I'd think that the increased cost of manufacture over a simple mechanical rice cooker would be minimal. Is it more difficult than it seems? Is the market for cheap smart rice cookers too small for anyone to bother?
Someone who knows what they are doing could probably write rice cooking logic that works pretty well in a couple days, and a beginner (like me) could almost certainly get something working in a couple weeks. There'd always be room for refinement after that, but I can't see that the code would be a limiting factor.
But likely you've hit on the real reason there isn't much competition on the low end: making an inexpensive fuzzy logic rice cooker is easy, but if it started selling well you'd probably be sued out of business for patent infringement. I now feel silly for overlooking this obvious explanation.
You can make a coffee maker that can deliver water at a precise and adjustable temperature, but it's going to be a lot more complicated (thus expensive) than a cheap one that relies on a tube, a one-way valve, and the behavior of boiling water.
I'd disagree with the OP that a $50 smart rice cooker is a luxury. These models also serve as slow cookers, vegetable steamers, etc. so they are quite a value in money and space compared with buying each appliance individually. If you don't have a proper kitchen you can do most of what you need in one.
I use rice cookers since 35 years (I am 43) I don't care about brown rice or whatever the fuzzy logic. I just adapt according to my own experience.
But I guess people don't want to have experience any more and prefer to be assisted as a hero of Wall-e?