Tabloid beer

Excellent response to the recent click-bait article in the Sun about Craft Beer. The essence of the article was that people who buy "Craft Beer" are essentially just trying to be "hip" because it really tastes horrible, and also stupid because it's horrendously over priced. They then recruited a bunch of miserable old gits to sample various craft beers and do their best impressions of Monty Pythons' four Yorkshiremen. Scores out of 10 varied from 0 to 1 for beers rated on "RateBeer" (a beer rating site populated by tens of thousands of reviewers) at mostly 8's or 9's, I guess it's a case of "you get what you pay for..."

The main example they cite as evidence for this position is an imperial stout (from America) that's on tap at the Craft Beer Co. in Old Street (London) at £22 per pint. Of course the whole point about this beer, called Speedway Stout Hawaiian "Special Edition", is that it's not for drinking by the pint, it's a 12% dark beer brewed in the USA (San Diego) and imported especially. As the name suggests it's a "Special Edition" i.e. only available in minuscule quantities world-wide! A third of a pint would be quite sufficient to try this beer and form an opinion about it and it's producers.

Of course, if you're an avid Sun reader and view beer as simply a delivery vehicle to attaining oblivion on a Saturday night and are looking for the lowest unit alcohol cost and a tasteless, uncontroversial and totally repetitive (dull) experience, then feel free to join your Brexit buddies at the nearest Wetherspoons; I doubt you'll break any hipster hearts. The rest of us (hipster or otherwise) will spend our hard earned cash on whatever the hell ridiculously fruit-laden, kettle-soured, brett-infested, milkshake IPA we fancy and enjoy every minute of it, thanks..

Friday Smirk

I wish they would make this for real, although, the problem would be that no one would make eye-contact and the girls would be way more "dench" than the boys..

Reminder from a Remainer IV

I see "project fear" is chugging along nicely, now even the Japanese are getting in on the act! 

The electronics company Panasonic are moving their headquarters to Amsterdam from the UK, where they've been resident for several decades. There are many Japanese tech companies based in the UK where they employ over 100,000 people, let's hope they don't all read Brexit the same way that Panasonic has, although I don't see any commercial reason why they wouldn't. 

You may be wondering why this move is of any importance to me, well, this office (picture above) is in a town called Bracknell which is approximately 5 miles from my front-door and I know several people who have and are working there! When something like this happens on your doorstep it makes you stop and think (or it should do!) Two years ago I had assumed my kids were growing up in a modern hi-tech area of our country with plenty of investment, expansion and highly paid job opportunities (I pay way over the national average for everything home, leisure and transport related based on that assumption) I wonder what's going to happen to prices, infrastructure and investment around here as prestigious companies like this start to relocate to Europe in ever increasing numbers, but hey, I wouldn't want to "scare" anyone! After all, we've all got so much more "control" now haven't we..

Expected results

As someone much more intelligent than me once pointed out (@5:24).. 

If an omniscient God did really exist then her "instruction manual" for the Human race would likely be unambiguous, unchanging and universally communicated/understood. If such a being didn't exist then you'd expect the world to be saturated with fragmented, contradictory and inconsistent stories authored by many different tribes invented to exert control over others. In this latter scenario, the best we could expect would be a pure invention of what those people thought such a being should say based on their own cultures and parochial concerns at their time in history.

When it comes to the veracity of scripture you have to decide for yourself what the evidence of reality suggests is really true.

Post holiday grin

Back to work today (groan) but this little leaflet cheered me up, those of us of a "certain age" will remember good old Wile E. with much fondness..

Rainbow festival

Spent a chilled afternoon at the Siren Rainbow Project beer festival yesterday, much laughter and great beer with good friends, followed by a delicious curry in town, what more could you want? The sheer quantity of different beers on offer was too numerous to cover in great detail here, but suffice to say the quality was excellent and everyone tried at least 2 or 3 new beers that they really liked! Luckily the weather held out and although it wasn't a scorcher it was sunny (in between the clouds as per the photo above!)

The background of the "Rainbow" project (started in 2013) was to bring together leading UK craft-breweries and US craft-breweries in order to collaborate on producing a beer, each pairing was allocated a particular colour to use as inspiration hence the Rainbow label. For example the brewers who got "red" chose to age their beer in old red wine barrels, i.e. it didn't mean that the beer had to be that colour!

The Rainbow beers were as follows,

Red – Wild Beer Co. & Side Project – A sour saison, barrel aged with pomegranate and rose petals
Yellow – Hawkshead & Modern Times – Barrel aged saison with apricots
Blue – Beavertown – Barrel aged with Pinot Noir grape must
Orange - Burning Sky x 3 Floyds - Barrel-aged Barley Wine
Indigo – Magic Rock & Casita Cerveceria - Barrel-aged Sour w/Blueberry, Apricot and Pea Flowers
Green – Partizan & New Belgium – Wood aged saison aged hops
Violet - Siren x Sante Adairius - Red Wine Barrel-Fermented Saison Blend

There were many other guest and house beers there too, here are a few we tried between us (comments in italics),

Little Sicily – 4.1% Sicilian Lemon Meringue Milkshake – Slim Pickens x Beavertown (OK)

Yellow Belly – 11% Peanut Butter Biscuit Stout – Buxton / Omnipollo (bonkers!)

Hop Fizz – 6% Brut IPA – Siren (good)

Red Berry Sour Shake – Sour Berry Smoothie 5% – Siren (the girls loved this, the boys less so)

Suspended in Rainbows – 4% Hazy Pale Ale – Siren (solid)

Sound Wave Sessions Double Simcoe – 4.3% Session IPA – Siren (double-solid)

Much Ado About Muffin – 5.5% Blueberry Muffin Pale Ale – Siren / Lervig (meh)

Low Side – IPA 6.8% – Siren / Finback (Outstanding)

Broken Dream – 6.5% Breakfast Stout (Champion Beer of Britain) – Siren (v. good)

Yu Lu – 3.6% Loose Leaf Pale Ale – Siren (solid)

My favourite beer of the festival was Low Side IPA a collaboration between Siren and Finback, a brewery in Queens New York, an excellent hazy IPA made in a typical East-Coast style, delicious!

All in all a great day out, congratulations to Siren for hosting the event, it seemed to go off without a hitch, shame its the last Rainbow festival but hey ho, next year you'll just have to think of something else! (TBH any excuse to sample beer this good and this "local" would be just fine with us!)

Friday Smirk II

Venn-diagram of the week!

Population Map

Cool map that shows countries scaled to the size of their population.. 

Friday Smirk

Excellent J&M today - If the Catholic Church were any other kind of human organisation, company, government, charity or group it would have been taken apart and scrapped but apparently "Religions" have special dispensation when it comes to tolerating immoral behaviour, now there's a conundrum for future historians they will be wondering why the hell we put up with it?

Cultural appropriation

Those people who seem to make it their life's mission to attribute everything bad (or simply positions that they don't agree with) to racism and/or cultural appropriation need to get out a bit more! Take a day or two off from the virtue signalling bubble now and again, I promise you'll feel better for it..

Mid-week grin

Seems a bit harsh?

Sod's law..

Guess which is the only day I don't need to be stuck in an office...

God's plan

Saw this little cartoon the other day, it made me smile. I'm always amazed when otherwise intelligent people claim that the chaotic, random and largely malevolent, occasionally wonderful life that we all find ourselves living is somehow being directed by a cosmic puppeteer with a "plan". All I can say is, some plan!

NHS Musings

I've been dealing with the NHS quite a lot recently, fate would have it that a couple of family members have had some serious health challenges that require intervention. I must say that the people in the hospitals and surgeries are are pretty much universally polite, competent and seem genuinely keen to help. The "system" on the other hand often seems slow (I realise that's a relative measure) and also quite impenetrable in places. Having said that, I don't envy the challenges they face, it's clearly a gargantuan task to coordinate and manage health care for so many people on such a large scale, I can only imagine what carnage used to occur when the service didn't exist and people had to rely on hard currency to get help. So, don't read me wrong, I'm a fan, it's a good idea, fair and the right thing to do at the societal level, but I feel could be improved a fair bit.

I had to visit the hospital on Sunday evening, I took my Wife's mother there on the advice of a doctor, it wasn't an emergency but I'd say it was urgent. The doctor phoned ahead and gave me a note, I was hoping that someone would be expecting us. Having located the particular department that I'd been directed to (which was deep in the bowels of the facility and really hard to find) the reception was deserted and the corridors all around completely dark, no problem I thought, just go back to the main entrance (where there were people milling around) and ask. I did that, and a helpful porter directed me to the A&E department, this wasn't really what I wanted, after 30 minutes of queuing the A&E receptionist directed me back to where I was at the start, apparently I did find the right place but clearly needed to be more adventurous in finding someone. I did all that and managed to find a helpful nurse and she took the paperwork and advised me to grab a wheelchair and go get my mother-in-law (still waiting in the car-park), at this point I'd made the return trip to this far-off department three times, it was starting to feel like a gym workout!

The next hurdle was the the admissions process, unfortunately the NI number on the form completed by the doctor was incorrect, and they couldn't find her on the computer system (even though she's been before) - tracking her down in the database took about 2 hours! This didn't delay treatment of course but it did mean that she couldn't be allocated a bed and pre-existing records couldn't be seen by the attending doctor. Eventually things got straightened out (via much phoning around) and the process started to function smoothly, many tests were done, lab results arrived within an hour and more comfortable accommodation was secured, the machine clearly took a while to wind-up to speed but once there it worked very well, we got home about 3 am, it was a long night.

Whilst hanging around in the waiting room I got to thinking about how the process might be improved, being in the technology/software industry myself my mind was obviously drawn to how computer systems might assist. 

First there's the problem of having a "joined-up" process, the doctor who initially visited could/should have had access to the historical records, he had a tablet computer but only seemed to be using it to take notes. I'm not sure why, in this age of cloud hosted applications, it wouldn't be possible to have all NHS personnel accessing the same system? The second problem was one of identification, not being able to "find" someone in your database seems like a fairly basic issue to me these days, perhaps something that would help would be for someone to develop a client-app running on mobile phones  (which most people seem to have) that identifies you to the NHS. This could then be used (somewhat like checking-in to airports) to scan your Id (and visit purpose) when arriving at hospitals, and could also be used to direct you to where you need to go! Alerting staff to incoming patients/visitors might also help them in terms of having the right kit identified and acquired in advance or at least thought about. Using devices like phones or tablets as a means of identification via a custom app would also potentially save a lot of "typing" (much of which seems to be duplicated on every visit) - I've lost count of the number of times we've been asked for basic information like name, address, phone-numbers etc. It seems as though a mountain of paper is still created every time there is any interaction when a quick swipe of a QR code or similar might eradicate all that completely and improve accuracy. 

The other area that a mobile/web app might help is in the dissemination of information, once someone is in hospital the relatives and friends want to know what the status is, currently this has to be done by phone which can be a very disruptive process. It might be better (in some cases) for status notifications to be sent by text and/or via a custom app to registered groups of people (i.e. interested parties) allowing hard pushed front-line staff more time with patients and less time on paperwork and answering the phone? 

Of course there are data-protection issues with all of these ideas but nothing that I haven't seen solved before with a decent authentication system and some proper logging and auditing processes. Seems doable to me. There's just the small issue of what it would cost, I'd wager a lot less than paying people to do it but then again the Government hasn't got a great track-record in procuring software systems, especially at this kind of scale! We live in hope.

Self destruction

Interesting article on the BBC site today about Measles. Data for the first 6 months of the year (2018) show that more than 41,000 people in Europe (800 in the UK) have caught the disease and 37 have died in that period. This is compared with 24,000 for the same period last year and 5,000 for the year before that. This is a spectacular increase a real "hockey-stick" curve in statistical terms, and entirely due to people not getting their kids vaccinated. We can certainly debate why people aren't heeding the advice of experts and getting protection, but it's highly probably the the current populist sentiment of being "anti-expert", or the "Dunning-Kruger" effect as I prefer to label it, combined with the totally fraudulent "vaccinations cause Autism" scare 20 years ago have probably both largely contributed, with a predictable outcome.

You'd be justified in thinking that there's a real determination on the part of many people to destroy the advances of recent decades, scientifically, economically, culturally and politically, it beggars belief sometimes.

Monday Mirth

I see that the best joke at Edinburgh this year was about redundancy (sign of times?) anyway, like all "best jokes" it's pretty tame but still makes you smile..

"Working at the Job-centre has to be a tense job - knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day."

Boom, boom..

The best (food)

So, the best restaurant in the world for 2018 is Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. A mere 250 Euro for the tasting menu (10 courses) without wine! This would perhaps seem extravagant to most poeple, but then again, it's probably the whole point! With dishes like "A singular interpretation of beef fillet alla Rossini with foie gras and caviar" and the labour that entails, what should we expect?

If I had unlimited funds then restaurants like this would probably make up a small, but regular proportion of my eating habit and venue, however, they would never be 100%. There always remains a place for home-cooked and rustic food in my life. I couldn't be happy without a periodic and substantial honest plate of pasta and tomato sauce, or quality beef burger with fries, perhaps even steak and chips!

When we examine what really feels good, there's no substitute for diversity!

DIPA

A new beer for Friday evening. 

Lucky DIPA (Double IPA) from Siren, ultra-hazy and (tropical) fruit filled. I can hardly detect the 8.5% ABV, but after 2 (halves) you can certainly feel a beer buzz! V. smooth for the style, made with a ton of Citra, Motueka and Vic Secret hops, the aroma hits you long before the alcohol does, like an alcoholic hop-smoothie, wonderful mouthfeel, balanced sweet vs. bitterness, a flavour triumph, highly recommended (in small dosages!)

Friday Smirk

One for the science nerds this week from the excellent xkcd

It's not the size that counts..

Reading an interesting article about DNA at the moment. As most people know DNA is organised in the nucleus of our cells in structures called Chromosomes (see picture above). Since DNA is encoded information about how to build brains and bodies then common sense might suggest that the smarter or more advanced you are as a species then the more chromosomes will be required? However, cell biology being what it is (slippery) this is not the case, and it's somewhat of a mystery why. 

Here are some numbers around chromosomes, they're quite surprising..

Human: 46 chromosomes
Potato: 48 chromosomes
Chimps: 48 chromosomes
Rats: 21 chromosomes
Fruit fly: 8 chromosomes
Apple: 17 chromosomes
Giraffe: 62 chromosomes
Hermit crabs: 254 chromosomes

Using common sense Hermit crabs should rule the Earth but as we all know you're never more than 10ft away from a rat! Evolution is probably the explanation for these differences and the important facts that not all of a genome is actually used to build bodies and that sometimes chromosomes split (and join) for fairly random reasons like copying errors and viral infection etc. It is well documented that the explanation for Chimps having one more pair of chromosomes than Humans, even though we are so closely related, is that at some point in history something caused one pair of chromosomes to fuse. If you examine Human chromosome number 2 you can find the exact point this happened, which is an amazing discovery as well as an amazing piece of evidence for evolution itself.