After Thanksgiving dinner, my parents figured out they could brew more coffee faster if they had two coffee filter cones—they could brew two pots at the same time. They haven't had much luck finding cones, though. Nowadays, you can find the hopper truncated cones and the not-quite-a-cone-almost-but-with-a-ridge-at-the-bottom-cones, but not the right kind.

So I said "Don't worry, machine learning will save the day." I snapped a photo of the good cone with my phone and told Google Image Search to find similar images. I figured this would show me various web merchants' product pages for similar cones. Thus harnessing the power of a billion mapreduces, I was soon looking at
screen shot: Google thought I took a photo of a ceiling fan

So that's why next year's plan is to make the coffee by pouring it through a ceiling fan. It's not super-clear at this point exactly how we get the coffee from the fan into the cups, but it probably involves a lot of pipe and maybe some sort of laminar flow hood.

Also I found out I had a great-great grandmother from Vienna who had a wooden leg and worked for the circus.