Last year, I harvested my hops in September. That was a little bit late. They probably should have been harvested mid-August.
This year, I harvested my hops about an hour ago. It was almost the perfect time to be harvesting them–a whole two months earlier than last year. Here’s hoping for a second harvest.
Tags: beer,Garden,homebrew,hopsThe homebrew group of which I am a member got some local press recently in Creative Loafing. The article covers one of our club meetings and the homebrew exploits of some of our members.
Tags: beer,homebrewThe clary sage that I’m growing bloomed this week. The Homebrewer’s Garden inspired me to grow clary sage. It’s a biennial plant. I planted it last year in a pot and transfered it to the ground after the winter. It hasn’t looked like much until now, just a long stalk with big green leaves, so I’m excited to see the flowers.
The utopian economics of “Star Trek” – How the World Works – Salon.com
This article looks at what young Spock might have meant in his learning chamber when he used the words “nonrival” and “nonexcludable”.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Here is the first of what might be several garden posts coming. This one is about strawberries and I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking. This first picture was taken on April 5. It’s a strawberry plant in our garden:
This next picture I took just a couple of minutes ago. It’s the same plant:
There’s an article in Technology Review called “Brewing with Synthetic Biology.” In this case the “brewing” refers to fermenting beer, as the articles mentions making modifications to yeast to control the time of flocculation. Flocculation is basically the process of yeast clumping together and settling out of beer. I tweeted about this article a little bit ago because it made me a little uneasy. The idea of engineering yeast to control flocculation time strikes me as the stuff of industrial brewing. Now, I know this is a scientific experiment. They weren’t advocating the use of their engineered yeast. It was just what they used for their experiment. All I’m saying is that I don’t think that I would ever want to use this yeast.
I decided to follow up the tweet with a blog post because there was more to say than could be said in 140 characters. Mostly, I want to talk about how I understand flocculation, as a brewing amatuer.
Different yeast strains are more or less flocculent. The more flocculent strains clump together and settle out of beer so that the final product is very clear. Less flocculent strains remain suspended in the liquid resulting in a cloudier beer. In general, British yeast strains tend to be more flocculent and Belgian strains tend to be less flocculent. Clarity and cloudiness can both be desirable characteristics in a beer depending on the style. Next time you have a Belgian beer, note how cloudy it is and then impress your friends by talking about yeast flocculation.
Flocculation occurs, or doesn’t occur, pretty much on its own. This was one of my problems with the article which says that sometimes a chemical is added to initiate flocculation. This is not somethig that I have ever done. Flocculation is just something that happens when yeast is finished eating sugars. From my understanding of the article, the goal of the experiment was to tweak the time of flocculation a bit. Make it happen a bit sooner or later than it normally would. This might result in the beer being more or less attenuated. (A beer that is more attenuated is one that has had a greater percentage of its sugars converted into alcohol.) Yeast can sometimes, due to temperature or some other external factor, flocculate too early leaving the beer too sweet. Part of the art of beer making is knowing your yeast and knowing how to get the most out of it.
So, I think that’s all I have to say about flocculation. I hope you enjoyed this interlude.
Tags: beer,homebrewThis picture was taken to show off the lupulin gland of a hop cone that I grew myself. The yellow at the base of the bract is the lupulin.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Consider this fair warning… There will be spoilers below. So, if you haven’t seen the episode and care about such things, stop reading now.
First, let me say that I mostly enjoyed the final episode. The first half of it was great, after that it went progressively downhill. I think that the episode was undone by the felt need to wrap up all of the various story lines in a nice package. This just didn’t feel right. It felt too easy.
BSG has been, primarily, about people figuring out how to live with each other and have a peace and a functioning community in the face of annihilation. It’s also about how people live with their technology, though I think less so until the final episode. For both of these themes, the journey should never actually end. The questions of how to live with each other and our technology should not be answered. It would have been arrogant of Ron Moore to try. Fortunately, he doesn’t try to answer the questions. Instead, he just punts them.
Abandoning your technology is not learning to use it responsibly. And, honestly, there’s no reason to believe that the human society would end up in pastoral peace in the Earth of the distant past. Why would humans and rebel cylons suddenly start getting along? Why is no one concerned that there might be other living cylons in the universe or that the the centurions that they free won’t come back? It’s just not believable.
I understand that Ron Moore was trying to directly tie the issues of the show into or present day situation. What he should have known is that everyone who watches the show gets that. They don’t need it reinforced with a hokey ending. So, I want to take a moment and look at what Ron Moore is really saying with his ending. I don’t think this is actually what he meant, but it’s what I think is there.
In the end, peace is delivered on a silver platter by God, the gods, or the supreme intelligence or whatever (GGSIW.) This kind of ending is always problematic and particularly when the people in the story have been through a lot of hardship, as have the characters in BSG. It leaves one to wonder why GGSIW waited so long to deliver the peace. Prior to the final episode, one might have decided that the GGSIW was guiding humanity so that they learn for themselves how to live with each other. This interpretation may still be valid, but it feels a little cheap when peace just pops out of your fourth birthday cake. More on this in a minute.
It’s not to much to assume that, by the end of the series, humans and cylons have learned a lot about their relationship with technology. Perhaps they would want to take the lessons that they had learned and use them in building a new society. But no, all technology goes into the sun so that 150,000 years later humanity can be in the same position yet again.
And this seems to be the actual plan of the GGSIW in BSG: To allow humans to advance to the point where they begin to have technology that could be used for self destruction and then force humanity to reboot itself entirely. The hope is that after a number of these iterations, random chance will result in a scenario where humans don’t destroy themselves. That’s it. The final scene of the show tells me that the law of averages is humanity’s best hope. Not learning from our mistakes or even the intervention of a benevolent GGSIW. Random chance. That’s it.
Ron Moore, was that really what you intended to say?
Tags: bsg,tvSetting up Plone 3.2 and Repoze, hackyish
The title pretty much says it all. I was actually trying to do this last week.
Home - Apatar – Open Source Data Integration & ETL
An open source tool for data mashups. Kind of like an open source yahoo pipes. Has plugins available for salesforce, sugarCRM, and more.
seantis :: Deployment Buildout
A full deployment buildout for plone.
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Stories / Eros, Philia, Agape by Rachel Swirsky
A story about a robot finding his identity. It’s better than that last sentence makes it sound.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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