Tuesday Titter

University lecturer keeps his Brexit opinions under wraps as witch hunt by the Daily Mail continues... (I agree with him BTW, as apparently does the Bank of England, oh joy, less workers and more civil-servants bet that'll look good on the balance of payments!)

Monday morning blues

Loads of people "off-sick" this morning, beginning to think that messing around with the space-time continuum isn't our best idea ever; or maybe it's just a flu virus.

Zombie Dust

In the spirit of Halloween I brewed up a monster IPA based on a recipe from the famous US brewer "3 Floyd's Brewing" in Indiana. The beer is appropriately called "Zombie Dust" and is a classic American IPA/Pale ale loaded to the gunnels  with Citra hops which impart a tangy orange/grapefruit flavour which balances nicely with the 6.2% alcohol. For this brew I used a new product called Lupuln2 hop powder which is essentially just the flavorsome parts of the hop flowers (the lupulin glands) extracted and freeze dried; it's potent stuff, and has the benefit that you can dry hop your beer for much longer without imparting any "green" off-flavours from the leaf material that you usually get in hops.

Only had time to try a single glass last night but so far it's looking good, really well balanced, couldn't detect any booze (which is dangerous for a 6%+ beer) but it meant the fruit flavours shone through; it will benefit from a few more weeks of conditioning but pleased with the result, pretty authentic.

Deep Waters

Been listening to a radio interview that Roger Waters did a while back when he released his latest album, "Is this the life we really want". In it he talks about an omitted verse on one of the songs on that album called "Deja Vue" in which he muses on what he would have done if he were "God" It's a thought provoking track, as is the whole album, it's cut from the typical Waters mould (i.e. political activism) and it's hard not to disagree with most of what he says. The music has been produced to a very high standard IMO, highly recommended, anyway, the verse is as follows,

If I had been god I would not have chosen anyone, 

I would have laid an even hand on all my children every one,

Would have been content to forego Ramadan and Lent,

Time better spent in the company of friends,

Breaking bread and mending nets.

If I was God I would have left it in..

Friday Smirk

A little light atheist humour for Friday from theatheistpig.com

Fairness

If I were the governing body of this particular sport I wouldn't let any country host the world championships unless they agreed to treat all competitors equally. Here an Israeli judo fighter wins gold but the host organisers in Abu Dhabi refuse to play his national anthem or show the Israeli flag - so he quietly sings it to himself on the podium, good for him. Why anyone goes to these medieval tin-pot gulf states I'll never know. Actually, scratch that, I do know why, it's entirely about filthy lucre and the lure of 10% off a fake handbag in a crappy shopping mall.

Brexit bias

Bloody Bolsheviks

Progressive?

New J&M today; incredibly "progressive" cartoons.. :)

Dark-side progress update

I transferred my chocolate orange stout across to a secondary container today and racked the now fermented beer onto the Cointreau soaked cacao nibs.. Wow! What a fabulous aroma, plums, coffee, chocolate, orange, figs and the beer is as black you like with a gravity reading suggesting that it should finish up around 8.5% ABV In the photo you can just about see a few of the nibs floating around, I'll leave it here for about a week and then stick it in bottles (having filtered the debris out of course); then we wait patiently as it conditions and carbonates..

Wednesday grin

Might try this at my next board meeting...

On Craft

There's an interesting article on the BBC web site about "craft beer" but I would urge you to take a look at the comments if you want to see a truly "religious" conversation taking place, it's funny and sad at the same time, so much delusion based on incredulity and ignorance.

There are some classic canards being tossed around, I thought it would be fun to pick a few of the more acerbic ones apart..

- No such thing as "craft beer", we've had real ale in the UK for centuries, craft beer is just a new name for real-ale.

It's impossible to completely generalise, but, anyone who has actually made beer will understand why "traditional" bitters, i.e. real-ales (if we're talking about the UK) are different from more modern "craft" incarnations. It's all about the ingredients and how the beers are made. Firstly there are completely different hops involved, the "craft" movement came from the USA and hence the predominant varieties of hops used are American ones. Hops like Citra, Simcoe, Centennial and Cascade rather than more traditional English varieties like Fuggles, Goldings and Challenger. Often different adjuncts will be used, for example flaked oats in pale ales, pilsner malts in ale recipes or perhaps even fruit during the fermentation. Next the beers are made using different (non-traditional) techniques, like dry-hopping and barrel ageing. Of course some brewers will mix and match old and new ingredients and techniques but generally "craft" describes a style of beer that is much more hop-flavour forward, generally higher in alcohol and almost certainly using more exotic varieties of things like yeasts, hops and malts. (hence why they're usually more expensive) - it's all about variety and the taste experience, not necessarily better (that's the subjective part), but certainly different.

- It's nothing but expensive american type beer pushing proper British beer off the shelves. Mainly bought by people with skinny jeans and beards who used to drink cider with ice in it.

I guess when you don't have a real argument you attack the people involved for what they look like? Generalisations like this aren't based on facts, some of the best craft beer you can get is from the UK and Europe. When the best brewers, with unique heritages and a vast well of experience to draw on get their hands on new, exciting ingredients and are released from the shackles of the bean-counters of industrial breweries, guess what! They tend to produce some fantastic products, that's "craft", i.e. it's also about the scale of production, which tends to be small and local in character.

- Craft beer :) it’s home brew for God’s sake

What's wrong with home brew? It's probably fair to say that craft beer is often only one step removed from home-brew; most of the people involved in the scene started by brewing for fun. Often that enthusiasm, passion and spirit of experimentation is what distinguishes craft beer from "big-corporation beer", for many that's a plus rather than a minus.

- A re invention of a product and a flash in the pan

Sometimes in commerce it's a really good strategy to "re-invent" a product, evolution is often a much cheaper, quicker and more profitable way of expanding or disrupting an existing market. Is "craft" a flash in the pan? The quick answer is, so what if it is? But, a look at the data would suggest not.

At the top end (i.e. the top 20 or so companies) in the UK are growing in excess of 100% per year, this growth far outstrips that of the industrial conglomerates that have dominated brewing over the last few decades. Some of this growth is the law of small numbers, but if you examine the statistics around (traditional) pub closures vs. craft beer bar openings you will see a similar picture, people are queuing up to buy the stuff. There are now more breweries in the UK than there has been since the 1930's (up 60% in the last five years alone), these are all commercial indicators that this wave is real and will last for some time to come.

In the final analysis whenever a market is disrupted and things change there are some that are for it, some against it and some it passes by completely. It's about the forces of supply and demand, some see choice as a desirable commodity others see it as a threat, in the end, the consumer will decide.

Reasonable requests?

A nice response to the story this week that MP Chris Heaton-Harris sent a rather odd letter to University Vice-Chancellors asking for details of what they were discussing about Brexit. The request was fairly broadly criticised for being a) unnecessary as most of the information requested was available on public web sites and b) slightly "Stalinist" in it's tone. Heaton-Harris is now claiming that the purpose of request for information was as research for a book he "might" write, sure, I guess that's plausible (perhaps he needs to focus on his political work first?), but anyway, I still think the best response to this is not indignation, but mockery and ridicule. Lord Buckethead seems to have the lead on that front so far.

Put it on my bill

If your looking for a good example of how evolution works then look no further than out of your kitchen window! Two populations of Great Tits have been studied since the 70s one in the UK and the other in Holland, turns out that the UK population has a (significantly) higher percentage of birds with slightly longer beaks than their Dutch cousins. One possible cause of this difference is the higher propensity for people in the UK to use bird feeders in their gardens, leading to the longer billed variants successfully raising roughly one more chick in every five. Of course over time this difference would lead to the longer billed variants coming to (eventually) dominate the population over here. 

Unlike Darwin, who also noticed variations in the beak shapes of similar birds, scientists today now understand the mechanism for these differences. The specific genes that control facial shape have been isolated and do indeed show evidence of selective changes in the the two populations. The hypothesis regarding the bird feeders being the driver for this difference is, as yet, unproven, but never the less it's certainly credible and fascinating if true.

Problems

Sometimes my days feel like this...

London treats..

Special treat for us yesterday, we attended a service at Westminster Abbey that celebrated my daughters school (which was founded in Westminster) It was delightful, the girls put on a great show, choral and dance performances all very polished in a wonderful setting. I also learned that the ex-head girls of her school are allowed to marry in the Abbey, now there's an incentive! Of course I was less keen on all the God stuff, but being in the presence of Darwin, Newton, Rutherford, Thompson and Faraday, I couldn't really complain, you can see Newtons tomb centre picture. 

Afterwards we went for a great meal at Temper in Soho, an open fire-pit (mostly) beef & lamb restaurant. It was also great to see tons of people out enjoying themselves on a Friday night, it was a beautiful sunny afternoon and the streets were heaving; feeling more like August than late October. We caught the train home around 9 and were all tucked up in bed by 10:30, a memorable family day out.

Fat-pipes

Yep, this is pretty much what my kids would think.. 

Back in the day, I remember trying to buy a copy of Windows 3 while working in Cape Town. Back then the old style 5 inch floppies were the norm down there but my computer (a relatively new one) was fitted with a 3.5 inch drive. Predictably, the shop I was in only had the software on the old larger floppy disks and I think Windows came on a pile of about 20 of them!

I explained my predicament to the chap in the shop and, after much confusion, he suddenly realised what I was on about and said in his thickest Afrikaans accent "ah so you want a stiffy" I'd never heard these disks called that before and it took me a while to realise what the hell he was on about (I did initially think the conversation had taken a rather odd turn), but, it made perfect sense, you have floppy's and stiffy's. For years afterwards I deliberately and mischievously used this term, predictably with much associated giggling from my Northern hemispheric colleagues, of course the joke died with the device, still, now we have pokes and fat-pipes to snigger about instead.

Eternal unchanging truth..

Delicious skewering of religious "logic" by J&M..

Militant Atheists

So this is what "militant atheist" means (in the eyes of believers)...

Tuesday titter

I've only felt like this for a very few box-sets, House, Soprano's, Breaking Bad not much else..

Collide and conquer

I was sitting in the car with my teenage son yesterday and we were listening to someone on the radio talking about the announcement from scientists at the LIGO detector this week. In it they were discussing the incredible detection of both visible and gravitational waves from a neutron star collision, in which the flash of the smash was seen via telescopes at exactly the same time as a gravitational wave passed through our planet, distorting space-time under our very feet. I noticed that he (my Son) was fiddling with his phone and not really paying attention, I asked if he was impressed at this detection but he said that he wasn't very interested in it and didn't really understand what was being said. I can understand his frustration, it's unlikely that many people really understood the magnitude of this feat nor the amount of skill, dedication and hard-work required to achieve it. 

I took some time to try and break it down for him, explaining what happens to stars as they grow old and run out of fuel, how gravity causes them to collapse and become super dense and how even a teaspoon of matter from such a star would weigh millions of tons. Then I asked him to imagine what it would be like for two of these super-heavy monsters to smash into each other, creating a black-hole and completely obliterating themselves causing ripples in the very fabric of space-time itself, and, how unlikely it was that we would be able to see all of this from Earth and detect the minute distortion at exactly the same time as seeing the explosion through various telescopes, demonstrating that gravity travels at the same speed as light. Then to cap it all, to think about the fact that all this mayhem was actually going on over 130 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed our planet and before Human beings had even evolved on the savannas of Africa, ergo, it's amazing what we can achieve and learn when we just collaborate.