Label: In 1987, when we arrived in Bamberg, Germany for the first time, St. Otto was not there to greet two thirsty travelers in a rented Fiat. He’d been dead for 848 years but we were alive, and our recent visit to the Belgian brewery of Orval only fanned the flames of our desire for fermented pleasures. The smoked malt (‘rauch’) beers of this lovely town where St. Otto was once Bishop were our siren song, luring us into deep, exotic flavors that we never before imagined in beer. Three decades later we wondered what smoked malt might add to a Belgian-style dubbel ale. Here is it, an Otto revival of sorts. We hope it helps rejuvenate some of our brain cells that were martyred in Bamberg so long ago. – The Brewmasters of Victory
If anybody in PA would be kind enough to send me some, I’ll gladly give you my mailing address.
Seriously? Look, don’t get me wrong, I love living in the south, and I love Memphis, but I mean, FFS, seriously?
Christ Community has flat-out-stated that they cannot actually fulfill the requirements of the law, and these idiots still voted for them to get the contract?
Open message to commissioners Brent Taylor, Wyatt Bunker, Justin Ford, James Harvey, Steve Mulroy, Mike Ritz, Terry Roland, Chris Thomas, and Heidi Shafer: You have completely failed at doing your god damn job.
Sometimes I think we should have a religious test for public office. It should be this: if you’re religious, then you cannot hold a public office. But then I remember that we live in a free society and people are free to be idiots if they want to be and sometimes the rest of us just have to put up with that. Sigh…
Got a call from a blocked number while I was writing the last post. I get a lot of these, but this one left a weird voicemail. Could be an issue with the digital recording or something at the beginning, but still… weird.
Any clues? Feel free to listen online or to download the MP3.
Also, if you remix it into a song, I at least want a mention in the credits. 🙂
Ninja Edit: On the plus side, this is another reason why I love Google Voice. It took me under a minute from getting this weirdness to posting it on the blog. Seriously, Google Voice is awesome.
Hint, one of them is complaining about the debt, while the other one is using the free and open-source software package, WordPress, to create their website.
Guess which is which. No points if it takes more than one guess.
The Republican website seems to be running on ColdFusion, a software package that kinda went out of style in 2002-2003, but for which Adobe nevertheless keeps releasing version after version, hoping somebody will notice. Well, at least now I know they have one client, I suppose.
On the other hand, the Democrats site is clearly running on WordPress 3.1.3 (not the latest version, but they’re only half a day behind, and probably not even that by tomorrow), which is a free software package that runs roughly 14.3% of the sites on the internet, including all the major websites that the people who read my blogs read every single day.
Hmm… I wonder who’s more in tune with the times.
Disclaimer: I work on WordPress, but would be heavily biased against the Republican party regardless of who my employer was. #justsaying
Ever read one of those news pieces that says something obviously stupid, like “acupuncture proven effective”, or “new study proves HFCS makes you fatter than sugar”? (Hint, both of those are false. HFCS may be worse than sugar in other ways, but you’ll get just as fat with sugar as with HFCS.)
Well, here’s why you see those news articles making claims that are provably false: Sometimes, people lie in science journals.
Chart of their resultsFor the acupuncture one, take the recent case of “Acupuncture for ‘frequent attenders’ with medically unexplained symptoms: a randomised controlled trial (CACTUS study)” that was published in the June issue of the British Journal of General Practice. This was covered pretty well on DC’s Improbable Science blog. The chart is here on the right hand side of this post.
Despite this chart clearly showing that acupuncture had no noticeable effect on the results whatsoever, the paper’s conclusion was in fact “The addition of 12 sessions of five-element acupuncture to usual care resulted in improved health status and wellbeing that was sustained for 12 months.”
Or take the study Princeton did on the effects of HFCS on rats. This is often cited as proving that HFCS will make you fatter than sugar will, and indeed, the title of the paper is “High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: Increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels.”
However, the charts themselves in that PDF file say otherwise. On page 3, for the male charts (fig 1 and 3), they don’t show 12-h sucrose at all. For the female ones (fig 2 and 4), sucrose is higher than HFCS for both of the 12 hour results. The fact that the ad libitum charts are higher is expected results, because those are the controls on the high end (ad libitum = “at will”, meaning the rats could eat all the HFCS they wanted, so you’d expect them to get fatter, even though they don’t always). It does show that the males at 8 weeks did have a higher average weight than with sucrose (Table 1 on page 2), however it also shows that males with access to 24-hour HFCS (which is the high-end control) had similar weight gain to males with access to 12-h sucrose, which pretty much negates those results as significant.
Now, that paper isn’t all bad, but when the results actually disagree with the title of the paper, you have to question it a bit. It does show that triglycerides will be higher with HFCS, but that’s not unexpected, as fructose is what turns into triglycerides and the HFCS they’re using has more fructose than sugar does. But the actual weight and increased body fat results all show up as higher on sugar there instead of HFCS. Reading the text, they sometimes appear to be confusing one of the control groups (ad libitum HFCS) with the actual groups being studied against one another (12-h HFCS vs 12-h sucrose). Sure, if you give a rat all the HFCS they want, they get fat. That falls under a “duh” category. What matters is the comparison between similar groups, and you can’t draw the conclusions they drew from the results they got. Even their low end control groups (ad libitum chow) had weight gain similar to the high end control in some cases.
Their results as given in section 3 of the paper are correct, BTW, but these draw rather limited conclusions. Not enough to justify the title of the paper, much less the resulting press and conclusions drawn from those results. HFCS may indeed make you fatter, but this study simply doesn’t prove that.
It’s just that I see this paper cited over and over again, and it bugs me. News organizations need to learn to evaluate the results themselves before making the titles of their misleading articles. People being misinformed and then citing incorrect news articles to back it up, which themselves rely on accidentally or intentionally misleading “research”.. well, that’s kinda annoying.
All I’m saying is that to be informed, never trust the news articles themselves. Go to the source. Read the results. Evaluate the data yourself and draw your own conclusions. Use your brain instead of parroting the things you read in news articles. The world would be a better place if people could just think for themselves sometimes.
I took a trip to canoe in the Buffalo river last weekend, and then followed it up with a week in Kansas City. Didn’t get any river pictures due to a foul up in which the party got separated and the camera got left with the other party, but I snapped a shot from the cabin. Also got some shots from the Boulevard Brewery and a few shots in St. Louis. iPhone pics, the lot of them. I need to get a decent quick shot camera, or a nice Android phone. Either way.
This tweet got me to thinking about the myriad uses of technology used for rather simple things.
Weather Station Example
For example, the weather. The National Weather Service has set up climate observation stations throughout the US, at places like airports, on top of tall buildings, alongside freeways, random places in the countryside, even on ships and buoys in the ocean. These monitor the temperature, humidity, and a bunch of other things of that nature. Sometimes they’re integrated into the overall system, like at an airport tower, sometimes they’re just self contained boxes mounted somewhere with power, like on a freeway sign or beside the road. Anyway, these boxes record this information and generally use radio transmitters to send updates back to some centralized location in each region. Usually a local university, TV station, NWS local offices, etc.
This information is then sent on to the next stop via various methods. As the technology evolved, old methods like phone lines got replaced with the internet, or on other more secure lines. They call this overall system The Gateway, and it has its own special protocols and methodologies along with it as well. Anyway, the data is sent back to the NWS’s central server center somewhere. Probably in DC, although they likely have multiple redundancy in various other locations. This information is naturally combined with all the other information from all over the world, so that a complete up-to-date system of meteorlogical data of the entire world can be maintained.
Thousands of other organizations read from this data via various protocols of their own. For example, The Weather Channel gets a lot of their information from this large, distributed, database via some kind of real time feed. They even re-serve the data themselves using various formats, such as the XOAP system.
That XOAP system is interesting because it’s a pretty good feed of weather related data for various regions. I use it myself, indirectly. On my iPhone, for example, I have the Typophone Weather application, which uses the 3G network (which is itself a highly connected system of radio towers using multi-spectrum packet switching technologies), to connect to the internet (this big system of pipes which is in reality not all that well put together but nevertheless works because of incredible fault tolerance in its various protocols), in order to query that XOAP system (which uses XML and SOAP standards for its interface).
All this happens in order to display the current temperature on my iPhone’s lock screen, while I sit here on a couch, not four feet from a friggin’ window.
