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What Beer Can Teach Us About Emerging Technologies
cold fjord writes that Assistant Professor and lecturer Dave Conz has an interesting article at Slate, from which: "I believe beer is the perfect lens through which to examine innovation, which is why I teach a senior capstone course at Arizona State University called the Cultural and Chemical History of Beer. ... Home brewing is part of a broad spectrum of DIY activities including amateur astronomy, backyard biodiesel brewing, experimental architecture, open-source 3-D printing, even urban farming. ... Many of these pastimes can lead to new ideas, processes, and apparatus that might not otherwise exist. Depending on your hobby and your town, these activities can be officially encouraged, discouraged, unregulated, or illegal. For example, it's illegal to make biodiesel fuel at home in the city of Phoenix ... but not regulated in the bordering towns of Scottsdale, Chandler, or Tempe."
"Beer brewing a source of innovation. Send me on a training, ASAP plz".
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I believe beer is the perfect lens through which to examine innovation
The last time I used beer as a lens, I woke up surrounded by 15 naked people with spotty memories of sleeping with the babysitter.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I sell home beer and wine making supplies and ingredients in my hardware store. We've carried products since the mid-1990's and after a decline in activity there has been a big increase in the business in the last five years. I attributed the decline in home brew to the wide availability of micro-brews, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the hobby become popular again even with the large selection of craft beers in supermarkets. More and more of the brewers and wine makers are husband and wife, brewing as much to make drinkable beer/wine as they are trying to learn about the process. It's a small sample and our store is in an affluent suburb, but I'm encouraged by the number of people diving into this hobby which really touches on so many areas (cooking, science, and engineering/design to name a few). It's a natural product line for a hardware store because so much of the gear is just home-built gadgetry requiring plumbing, hardware, and housewares goods.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Hence the phrase, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I know a person that needs a drink!
Yeah, in our community kids are always spending $100+ to buy homebrew gear, cooking and then fermenting, and two to three weeks later getting s**t-faced on their homebrew. Or more likely they head to the local Kwikee Mart with a fake ID buy a cheap case of light beer in cans and get s**t-faced immediately. The article is not about consuming alcohol, it's about the brewing process and technology.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
When there is such an egregious error in the first couple of paragraphs, I almost stopped reading - because it's unlikely that someone that clueless could produce something interesting.
In the first place, "Germany", as a singular place that could enforce it's laws across it's entire territory didn't exist until 1871. In the second place, the Reinheitsgebot only applied to Bavaria - in the remainder of Germany, there were many innovative beers. In the third place, the Reinheitsgebot only applied to lager beers... In the fourth place, it's long since been repealed (I.E. it's not still in effect as he claims in his very first sentence.) etc... etc...
The balance of the article is much the same, a fanciful mixture of fact, fancy, and unsupported speculation disguised as something authoritative because the author is a professor.
For example - he talks about biodiesel production being illegal, but it never occurs to him to question why... Though I bet if he were the neighbor of the guy on the other side of town who had a 300 gallon tank of it collapse and flood two houses and salmon stream he might have other ideas. (Thank $DIETY it never found an ignition source.) The same goes for the Reinheitsgebot, which was created to prevent brewers from cheating their customers.
When one wonders why modern education produces substandard products - one need look no further than this article for evidence.
I believe beer is the perfect lens through which to examine innovation,
Here's the most important lesson which I bet is either not covered accidentally or maybe intentionally.
I live in a greater-city which used to be the center of American beer brewing. A century or so ago, German immigrants built dozens of medium sized breweries and exported all over the country. Big big names, still around in marketing even today.
All of those jobs, and I mean all, are gone, inside the city. Every last one. Mergers inside the country and international, centralization, downsizing, blah blah, and now we've gone from dozens of breweries to a handful of microbrews, depending on how you want to count Sprecher (in a nearby city) and this brewpub by the local engineering college. A century ago there were dozens of people in my city with the job title "brewmaster" now there is debate but the number seems to hover right around "one" or "zero" depending how picky you want to be.
Similar thing happened in the automotive business, from hundreds of companies a bit over a century ago to just a handful now. Same deal multiple times with computing.
The lesson is that in a Emerging Technology there might be thousands of management and engineering jobs, but eventually its no longer an Emerging Technology then almost ALL of those jobs go away, permanently. If you're a 1 in a 100, maybe you can be a survivor making a long term career out of emerging tech, or if you enjoy perma-unemployment after a real fun 10 year run that'll work, but otherwise, if you see emerging tech, run like hell away, if you care about your family being able to eat and have a roof over their head. Run!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well SOMEbody didn't have a successful day at rehab...
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
Moderation is the key. Kids in school need a beer now and then. They don't need a case or six each night. A kid who consumes a sixpack per week or two, and not all at one sitting, is well on his way to success.
You, on the other hand, who can't see any benefit from alcohol, or are unable to control your binge drinking, should never drink a beer. Please, stay away from the kids, and their beer.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
There is a great documentary available on Netflix called How Beer Saved the World. It's a pretty good watch, basically attributing most of the agricultural revolution to accidental beer discovery.
Perhaps we'll get to line NASA's budget if we discover a boozin' alien race. It worked for the Romulans...
This article, while superficially about making beer, is really about the DIY movement in general, and seeing it as essential for Middle America as it moves ever more in the direction of "knowledge work". I think it is key that we encourage people to be "makers" again, for both the therapeutic value, and the innovation that results from backyard experimentation.
I'll definitely be sharing this article with everyone I know.
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." -- Benjamin Franklin