What I’m doing on my summer vacation

I’m on vacation this week, so I may not be able to post as much as I’d like to. Some friends and I went on a road trip over the weekend, and I figured I’d share some of it with you.

Saturday was a beer tour double-header. On Saturday afternoon we went and did the Sam Adams brewery tour at the facilities in Jamaica Plain in Boston, and then afterwards went to the Harpoon Brewery Summer Session on the waterfront. It was a good time. That night we drove to southern CT to stay with the brother of one of my friends

Sunday we didn’t do much, having worn ourselves out the night before. We did go see “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan”. It was amusing in parts, but not really my find of movie. It ended up being an hour-long facepalm from my point of view.

Monday we got up early to go to the Bronx Zoo in New York. We had intended to visit another brewery (the Brooklyn Beer Company), but thanks to my lousy attention to detail we’d failed to note that they only gave tours on Saturdays. Being in New Haven already we decided to make a day trip to the zoo. It was a boiling 102 degrees Fahrenheit that day, but we made it through the day with the help of copious amounts of water and Gatorade.

I didn’t use my camera for most of the trip. I had intended to take pictures of where we’d been, but photos of animals sleeping their way through an incredibly hot day didn’t seem exciting. Likewise the Harpoon Summer session was informative, but not filled with much in the way of photo opportunities.

I did get some photos while on the Sam Adams tour, however. I thought I would share some of them here.

The cooker and mash tun at Sam Adams used to make test brews

The lauter tun and cooking kettle used at Sam Adams for test brewing

Krausen, fermentation, and storage tanks at Sam Adams

I’ve been getting into homebrewing lately, and finding out more about Sam Adams’ brewing process was interesting to me. The use of a krausen tank to promote carbonation is interesting. Many other brewers (including myself) use refined sugars to promote carbonation from yeast.

The Sam Adams brewing process

Probably my favorite visual from the whole trip. A lineup of Sam Adams brews, including the winners of the Longshot contest.

The Harpoon tour was also interesting. There are some major differences in how Harpoon handles their brews. For one, there are fewer vessels involved. Harpoon uses a pressurized cooker on the wort to lessen the cooking time. They do not use a yeast-based carbonation process, instead using a pressurized tank to infuse the fermented beer with CO2. Their filtration method was also different.

All told, both tours were interesting. The Sam Adams tour was more entertaining, and potentially more useful to me as a homebrewer. The Harpoon tour had the added benefit of good food, more freebies, and an outdoor concert. It was a good weekend.

We intend to do some more beer trips this week. In particular we want to check out a small brewery over on the seacoast, and one down in Western Mass. I’m learning more and more about the brewing process, leading up to my next homebrew. Before I brew again though I have to move. More on that later.

Some useful links:

The brewing process
Krausening

The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop it)

Boing boing features a link to a CC copy of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it). I heard Zittrain do a panel about this (via a uChannel podcast) a few weeks back. I found it interesting, and informative.

Basically ZIttrain puts forward the argument that the future of the Internet is in a number of non-pc devices that are easily controllable by the companies that sell them and the services that they run on. Items such as the iPhone and TiVO are giving companies unprecedented control over how we communicate and are communicated to.

I agree, to a point. It’s a disturbing trend. I do still hold out hope that market forces will ultimately make such “walled garden” ideas a thing of the past, just as services like Compuserve and AOL gave way to the rise of what we know now as ISPs. I can’t see the market sustaining a service that requires such control by the carriers if an alternative exists that is both widespread and more open. I think content providers will want as little restriction on their ability to provide content as possible.

I could be wrong, of course. The case of Echostar and TiVO cited in the book is particularly troublesome. In addition to the content control issues it also raises some issues regarding United States patent law. I choose to see that as an aberration, however. Echostar’s lack of foresight and TiVO’s outright capriciousness are the exception to my mind, as opposed to the rule.

I haven’t yet gotten the chance to read the whole book, but I’ll be working my way through it the next few days, My exposure to the issue via the podcast has me interested enough to continue further. I highly recommend the podcast, and I suspect the book will be a good read as well.

Direct link to book’s website

Little Fuzzy

I was going to talk about ACTA today, but enough has been said about it already. You can read more about ACTA and why it’s bad in many other places.

Instead I’d like to go with something a little more positive today. Yesterday I found out that H.B. Piper’s Little Fuzzy has become public domain. A lot of you may not have read this book, and I encourage you to do so.

Little Fuzzy is primarily the story of the Zarathustra company, and their reaction to the discovery of a new species of sapient creatures on the world on which their fortune was built. It is fundamentally a story that explores corporate responsibility, the legal definition of sapience, and the relationship between primitive and advanced cultures.

Piper had great mind for detail, even when it comes to something as mundane as the legal definition of sapience. Take for example this passage:

“Who’s going to define sapience? And how?” Rainsford asked. “Why, between them, Coombes and O’Brien can even agree to accept the talk-and-build-a-fire rule.”

“Huh-uh!” Brannhard was positive. “Court ruling on that, about forty years ago, on Vishnu. Infanticide case, woman charged with murder in the death of her infant child. Her lawyer moved for dismissal on the grounds that murder is defined as the killing of a sapient being, a sapient being is defined as one that can talk and build a fire, and a newborn infant can do neither. Motion denied; the court ruled that while ability to speak and produce fire is positive proof of sapience, inability to do either or both does not constitute legal proof of nonsapience. If O’Brien doesn’t know that, and I doubt if he does, Coombes will.”

The idea that someone might try to use a technicality like a lack of “sapience” to free someone of a murder charge is unthinkable to most of us, but it is exactly the kind of maneuver that a desperate lawyer might use if they are inventive and all other hope for acquittal is lost. That Piper uses it to set precedence is even better, since court rulings tend to have far-reaching consequences well beyond directly related cases.

I first read Little Fuzzy as a freshman in High School, when I found a battered paperback in my high school library. It became one of my favorite science fiction books. I recommend anyone who likes science fiction (or even just a good story) give it a try. If you’d like to get it in audiobook format you can get it here. A commercial copy of the audiobook can be found here, and of course there’s the actual harcopy of the book.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the heads up

Freedom and security

This Is getting pretty ridiculous. There’s something sort of odd how we’ve welcomed more and more police surveillance into our lives. We’ve already allowed CCTV cameras, drunk driving checkpoints, and random security screenings at airports, so I guess something like this isn’t too surprising.

I can’t really blame the police for this. Their job, after all, is ostensibly to uphold the law and through upholding the law to keep us safe. It is only natural that they see anything that makes their job easier as a good thing. If you are a police officer things like Real ID and video surveillance make catching those who commit crimes easier. Handgun bans look like they could save your life. No-knock warrants make it difficult for someone to dispose of evidence or prepare a physical defense against you.

I am not a police officer. I don’t really bear any ill will against them. That does not mean that I trust them. I have more reason to trust them than most, since I am white, middle class, and keep a fairly low profile. They have helped me in the past, and for that I am grateful. In the event I require their services in the future I want them to be able to do their jobs.

I don’t trust them because in my opinion we’ve reached a point of excess when it comes to safety. I won’t delve into hyperbole by claiming that we’re descending in to the same territory as the cold-war KGB or Stasi, but we are reaching the point where law enforcement is bumping up against our rights on a daily basis.

I believe that the 2nd Amendment was intended to guarantee the individuals right to defend himself. I believe that the right to privacy is being infringed upon by Real ID requirements. I believe that police should require probable cause to stop someone on the road, and that that probably cause has to have a more stringent requirement than “he was driving on the road”. I believe that sealing off whole neighborhoods in the name of “safety” is likely to cause irreparable damage to those neighborhoods.

Government has one main responsibility: Its primary purpose is to defend the people. It is only natural that it would want to be zealous about this duty. Most of these measures I object to were born not of some cynical grab for power, but out of a sincere desire to promote safety. What I would really like to see is a national dialogue on how much safety is too much.

My political philosophy and current dilemma

This link presents me with something of a dilemma. My normal political philosophy can best be described as “obstructionist”. I would generally much prefer to have a government at odds with itself. I will generally vote for one political party for the executive branch and a different party for the legislative branch under the theory that a government divided against itself is less likely to meddle, and therefore it will be lass damaging.

Unfortunately there are some things that are totally unacceptable. This is one of them. Warrantless wiretapping is the kind of thing I would expect to need to deal with in Cuba, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, or any number of other dictatorships. I realize that this is something of a cliche, but it’s bears repeating. This is important.

So, I will not vote for McCain come November. His stance on the “wartime powers” of the president is too extreme for me to consider voting for him, even though I would normally be inclined to do so due to the predominantly Democrat-controlled House and Senate. I do not relish the idea of any political party controlling two of the three branches of government (as the Republicans did from 2001-2007) but it looks like that’s where we’re headed.

Walking around town

I wandered around town yesterday. I had some time before I had to be anywhere, so I decided to walk around on main street. It had been a while, and I wanted to see how much had changed since I had looked last.

I came across something cool. On the side of a building on main street there is a mural. It had been there for years, but last fall or so someone chose to deface it by spraying a great big ugly black graffiti tag over it. I don’t mind graffiti for the most part, but doing it on top of something like a mural is just douchebaggery at it’s finest. Anyhow I came across this:

I don’t know this guy. I don’t know if he volunteered to fix the mural. I don’t know if he’s being paid the fix the mural. I don’t know if he’s the one who defaced it to begin with and as community service he’s required to fix the mural. None of that really matters to me. What does is that someone thought something as simple as the mural on the side of a building in a town in New Hampshire was worth repairing, rather than doing the easy thing and  just painting over it. Whether it was this guy, or the guy who owns the building, or a judge, or someone else entirely someone seems to think that this mural is a public resource worthy of repair. That’s cool.

(Lack of) mission statement

There are a lot of changes happening in my life right now. I’m losing my job, I’m moving, I’m going back to school. I’m going from wearing a shirt and tie every day to being able to get away with my favorite T-shirt and shorts. I have NO clue what I’m going to be doing for money in another month.

And I’ve decided to start a blog. I’ve had one before; an abortive attempt at Xanga.com that I decided to abandon because I like the feature set here better. I don’t read many people’s peronal blogs (mainly Bruce Schneier and sometimes Wil Wheaton), and I don’t expect many to read mine. Mostly this blog is intended to be an exercise.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I’d love to be a novelist, but even the idea of writing reviews and commentary articles appeals to me. I feel I have sufficient command of the English language to be one. I think I can be interesting enough. I think I have interest enough. What I lack is the discipline to write every day.

That’s what this blog is for. I intend to use it to get into the habit of writing every day. What you will see here (if you see it at all) will be a mostly random collection. Maybe I’ll post commentary. Maybe I’ll post news. Maybe I’ll post short stories. Maybe I’ll get distracted and not post anything. Here’s hoping I can hammer the habit into my head.