Brewery Upgrade!

Now
sporting the 5 gallon secondary full of "Norse God," Igloo fermenter (filled right now with fresh "Fizzin' Red Ichor") and storage for 25 liters of bottles, in this case about half that much "Bohagrius Strong Ale," festival pig keg, secret recipe file and not least its iconic namesake, the Pig Stein Brewery is approaching maximum capacity in preparation for the holidays!

This is set up in the back of the house where it's cool. I'm way too psyched about what's really just a shelf full of crap.  I need some help with the airlock: I've had three batches blow the lid off the cooler, probably because the little airlock gets plugged up when it has a lot of sticky foam (maybe with hops mixed in) trying to squeeze through the tiny pinholes on top.

And, here's the next beer: It should be done around the mid November. Fun label. Obviously the labels are going to be a lot more collectible than the beer.  This is the wikipedia etching for Odin, or something like that. Obviously the woman must be Frigga, "foremost among godesses" and she's simultaneously swooning, and working on leverage to pry his hand OFF by breaking his thumb.  For his part, Odin's used to getting his way and he's not gonna notice a little thing like a broken thumb, not when his shaft is so hot it can set fire to granite!  Plus, in the end she's bound to fall for the way cool helmet, which I bet he doesn't even take off.  Wikipedia's last word on Frigga is that it comes from Icelandic Frja, "to love" so there's the root of your primary cuss word, folks.  All this embodied in a simple beer, you ask?  But of course!  What could be more elemental?

Gunnlöd , meaning "war foam"

A quick review shows she could also be Gunnlöd, (pictured below).  Apparently Gunnlöd traded Odin three nights of passion for three sips of mead, so that's how good this beer is! Or wait: I got it wrong! She had the mead, which she traded for three nights of Odin, so that's how good HE was. Why would he make the trade? Because this mead imbues you with the berzerker rage of poetry or something.  The Vikings were a wee unclear or perhaps casual about the difference between these? (I'm not making this stuff up folks, it's all just a click away in wikipedia.) Anyway the mead was made from honey and Kvasir's blood (hence the red color) and if you drink it you will become intelligent.  I've known this about myself and beer for a long time.

Ocean.

Just turn the lights off, & watch this.

Fancy Fly-ing!

Mosquito Haltere (from wikipedia)

Fantastic talk today, by Itai Cohen, from Cornell's Physics department. He's studied the flight of bugs to distraction, and perfection. This ties into a favorite site of mine, sodaplay, which opines that biological movements can be made, can emerge from simple parts.

The fruit fly wing, it turns out, operates with nothing but the main oscillatory flight muscles, a lightly damped (stable) pitching moment coefficient and an adjustable bias for the unloaded incidence angle. Those characteristics make it sweep like a fish's fin: the wing inverts on every back stroke. For me it was reminiscent of helicopter cyclic control.

Even more fun, the prof was able to demonstrate basic lift, propulsion and orientation with his very own home-made man sized fruitfly wings, which he was able (with the studied focus of his enTIRE cerebral cortex) to articulate just as does the bug, thereby spinning himself around on a lazy susan. Here's the fly doing it. I find it interesting that I had a hard time visualizing the motions, too.  There's another way I can do it though, and easily:  think of reorienting yourself while treading water!  If you've spent some time on that, you'll realize you use the same technique, except sculling, meaning you exchange the leading and trailing edges of your hands on the alternate  forward and back-beats of your arms.  Once I realized that difference, it clicked.  I was almost ready to be a fruit fly!  But wait, there's more!

It gets better: vestigial hind wings (called halteres) wobble and somehow are gyros! "And how does the insect use them in the control loop," you ask?  Why, by driving the GYRO with lead integral loop, of course. Then the attitude control, being servoed to null the gyro, just follows along. Why am I the last person to find this out? It is SO old school: AMRAAM, anyone? I remember Dan and Dick Olerich 'splainin this stuff to me back in the day. (Ok, not Dick, this was way below the sort of problem I dared take to the master.) That's still not even the coolest thing!

The coolest thing was that they glued a tiny piece of iron wire to the back of the bug and then zapped it with a magnetic field to knock it off course. It's a form of insect spectrometer.  Way too much fun.

* Wizard of Earthsea *

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is certainly good. As usual I'll begin this review when I'm halfway through, and that's now so here goes.

I've read this before, some years ago, but could not remember any of it. It's funny how things come flooding back, like the next bar in a song, you can't imagine it until it's time and then there it is. The islands, the invaders, fog, getting sent off to wizard's school, friends met there and trouble gotten into, it is all as familiar as an old song.

The second time around, like a bike ride, it seems shorter!

This time though, I notice what a rip off the Harry Potter concept is! Or maybe there are only so many thoughts in the world so you're necessarily gonna reuse some if you try to produce anything. You can at least say the UKLeG has foreshadowed much of what we commonly think of as modern culture surrounding wizards and such. She in turn borrowed heavily from the Hobbit of course. And you thought it all came from JK Rowling! (No, of course you didn't. I know.)

Yet Le Guin's vision is much scarier than the cartoons they serve us up now days in kidlit and movies. The tone of the writing somehow takes itself more seriously, allowing you to empathize with, and fear for, the people in this book. Fantasy should take itself seriously. All fiction is fantastical after all: the events described didn't really happen, those places aren't like that, these people are imaginary. Sticking a dragon in it doesn't make that any different, it just represents the tiger stalking the village, taken to its logical extremity. As such it's a cop out to make it too playful and silly: "just joshing: remember it's all fake" these books seem to say, as when for instance the key protagonists are teens. I think I've found my dividing line between serious fantasy fiction and inane (even irritating) pablum. It's when the author dares to say, "I want you to take this seriously."

Le Guin is not kidding.



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Economics of Tariffs?

...a link to a g+ post.  Meanwhile, the graphs show how we used to make more substantial use of tariffs, and below that, the impact, in consumer cost.