Why do people always take beer related criticism personally. I mean seriously, it's like a religion. I love beer, in fact I'm about to tuck into a few cans of Guinness right now and watch The Name of the Rose, but that doesn't mean I'm going to buy into bullshit in support of the beverage.
I accept that medieval farmers had a beer in the afternoon to make the time pass more quickly and dull the physical stress of their work. I also accept this was fairly widespread, even in towns and cities. What I don't accept is that beer was in any way a replacement for water, that you can rehydrate using beer (and 3% is plenty strong in that regard), and I find it hard to believe that a significant portion of the nutrients medieval persons received were derived from beer.
Now, you've gone ahead and ignored the link I originally provided showing step by step in clear scientific terms exactly what effect alcohol has on the human body when it comes to hydration. Why are you shilling for beer? Do you have investments in beer companies? Own a microbrewery? What?
Actually, you can if the alcohol concentration is low.
Facts, links, support, etc. The closest thing I could find was a dubious Spanish study saying that if you drank lots of water as well as a small amount of beer it could help rehydration. And that was pretty hard to find amid the avalanche of studies about alcohol as a diuretic.
As for boiling it, that seems ever so easy when you have a nice stove and a teakettle. But they didn't.
Luckily according to the article I linked below apparently they didn't need to, without even addressing the dubious claim that people in medieval times routinely hadn't the means to boil water.
Anything that doesn't cause eyestrain would be fine. The eyes try to focus on the blurry image, can't, and suffer as a result. Congratulations google, you've actually managed to contribute to vision problems with your image search innovations.
Can't argue with that. Even as someone who considers themselves to be very technically literate, I find many of Google's services to be barely useable, and who thought it was a good idea to make images blurry while they're loading up in GIS? Eyestrain and migraine inducing stuff.
Then we have those sites where the layout hops around while various plugins come down the wire, I mean I saw something interesting, tried to click on it and now its somewhere else. I just want to view the information, not play a game of chase the link. And that's if they load at all, there's nothing as irritating as a permanent "loading" spiral.
Contrary to what is found all over the Internet on the subject, the most common drink was water, for the obvious reason: It's free. Medieval villages and towns were built around sources of fresh water. This could be fresh running water, a spring or, in many cases, wells. All of these could easily provide fresh, disease- and impurity-free water; the idea that water from these sources would be the causes of disease and so had to be made into ale or beer is fanciful.
Where water was more likely to be contaminated, largely by tanning, slaughtering, or dying facilities, was in larger towns. But since medieval people were not idiots, they dealt with this in several ways. There were ordinances on where tanners and dyers could operate so that water for domestic use could be drawn from rivers and streams in the town to ensure the water was clean. And there were fines for contaminating areas of streams used for household consumption.
In larger cities, water-supply infrastructure was built to ensure public access to clean water. In medieval London, for example, the City Council began construction on what was called "the Great Conduit" in 1236. This was a complex of pipes that brought water from a large fresh spring at Tyburn to a pumping house with cisterns at Cheapside. This fed local cisterns all over London.
Wealthy Londoners could apply to have a private pipe or "quill" run from the conduit system to their house, giving them running water. This was expensive, and citizens who illegally tapped into the conduits were severely punished. Most people either drew their water from the nearest conduit cistern or paid a "cob" or water-carrier to bring them their day's water supply in three-gallon tubs, which they carried through the streets on a yoke. Public celebrations, such as the return of Edward I from Palestine or the coronation of Richard II, saw the city stop the water flow and fill the conduits with wine for the day, with people able to drink as much as they wanted.
People did drink a lot of ale and beer, but not because their water was so bad. The brews in question were much weaker than their modern equivalents but had the effect of providing much-needed calories to laborers and farmers, as well as being thirst-quenching and re-hydrating in hot weather or when working hard and losing sweat. Given the long days medieval workers put in, ale and beer were a major and necessary part of a laborer's daily energy intake. This should be seen as something like the medieval equivalent of drinking Gatorade.
Wine was the drink of choice for the upper classes and anyone who could afford it. It was produced all over medieval Europe and, due to the Medieval Warm Period that prevailed over western Europe until the 14th century, the climate meant it could be produced as far north as northern England. Wine was expensive and buying a small barrel was beyond the means of most people. But taverners bought it in bulk and sold it by the cup, so for a penny or even a halfpenny, an English peasant could enjoy a Bordeaux red.
In medieval England, the wine drunk most was red wine from Bordeaux and Gascony. Rhenish white from the Rhineland was twice as expensive and favored by the upper classes. Spanish white wines such as Lepe and Osey were cheaper and sweet wines from Greece, Crete, and Cyprus such as Romonye and Malmsey were popular after dinner.
Early beer wasn't intended for getting drunk and wasn't as strong as the beer of today is. It was intended as a day in, day out workaday drink for the masses.
I don't think that especially matters, even if it was the case that beer was weaker. As far as I'm aware any amount of alcohol beyond miniscule causes a net loss of water, going by that article I linked to.
You've also got to remember that people back then didn't understand basic hygiene (Queen Elizabeth likely only bathed a couple times in her life) or why things like boiling water would be beneficial. Principals that today are widely understood simply weren't known back then. Even things as simple as washing your hands before surgery are very recent developments (more soldiers died from infections from wounds in the Civil war than were killed on the field).
What people did know was that people that drank beer didn't get sick like the people that drank water. They also knew that it tasted better than water and they were raised up on it as generations prior had been. It was likely cheaper to buy beer than the firewood to boil your own water if you lived in a city, it was also certainly less hassle when you consider that many households didn't have kitchens. In short there was simply no reason to go through the effort of boiling water.
I'd need to see some evidence that a) beer drinking reduced sickness instead of increasing things like sclerosis, b) the facilities and logistics networks actually existed to produce and distribute the near endless quantities of beer you'd need to replace drinking water for a city, and c) that beer was cheaper than firewood which you'd have to get your hands on anyway. It just seems inconsistent with what I know of history.
This whole people using beer to replace water en masse is a bit fishy anyway. I mean why not just boil it rather than going through the elaborate, expensive and time consuming process of making beer. Not to mention that early waterways were almost certainly far less polluted than some would believe.
If we’re going to experiment with totalitarianism, why don’t we try putting some women in control? Oh, sure, they’ll screw it up too. Humans in power always do. But at least it won’t be a bloodbath.
Are you completely out of your gourd? Women are at least as violent as men, and physically so when they think thewy can get away with it. Past European female monarchs have presided over some of the bloodiest periods in human history. No pun intended.
Yeah this is fairly old news. As far as I'm aware he's been in and out of prison for most of his life since proposing the idea in a fit of extreme libertarianism. Did someone actually go through with it?
You might want to check in with Smedley Butler and say, the Philippines, China, Central America and others on that one. The "pre WW2 non interventionist US" is a myth.
I was born in 1976, so I remember having a "phone line" to the house, and all phones in the house were devices that were there in order to use that one line. This means that if the phone rang, one person of the household answered it, and then routed the call to whoever it was for. The context behind leaving someone alone to talk on the phone to their boyfriend/girlfriend/boss/whatever, not allowing others to use the phone as you wait for an important call, not having call-waiting, or caller-ID, can be totally lost to today's kids of today. 'How we spend time in today's world' has a contextual change to it from generation to generation. This context is embedded into the fabric of the language of the day, and so it's hard to "convert" into a context that is 100 years older or younger.
By that logic people wouldn't understand anything written from 1913. The society of your parents and grandparents (and great great great grandparents) wasn't nearly as alien as you seem to think. Seriously, go read some HP Lovecraft, it's perfectly clear.
However, on the other hand, in Ireland a lot of their history is preserved in songs. Since songs have a way of leaving you with a feeling, they also have a way of preserving some relevant context from the writer of the song, from the time of writing - see how music changes over time.
Again, what? History in Ireland is preserved in books, just like anywhere else. Or do you mean people randomly burst into song to convey the historical context of their comments?
You can go ask your grandparent(s) things about the past, but the vocabulary that they use more than likely won't fit your vocabulary and therefor you will not be able to get the understanding that they're trying for
Yeah the only reason anyone comes here is for the comments. If I have to work harder to read them, I have less reason to come here. Seriously, widen the comments section and make sure I don't have to click TWICE to get to something I previously had to click ONCE to get to. Especially if its the only reason I visit. This design will kill slashdot.
Truth be told, these days I find less and less use for my cell. When I'm bringing the dog out for a walk or going shopping, I leave it at home. When I'm driving and it happens to be in the car, I let it ring out. When I sleep I leave the phone in another room. Every service has an answering machine anyway, I'll get back to you. The majority of my communication is done online through a laptop or desktop where I don't get charged real money per email. Yes some people have data plans, good for them, but even then I'd rather not peck at a miniature keyboardless monitor when I can do the same thing much more easily on an actual keyboard.
If I ever become a doctor or take on some other role where people are paying hard cash for my 24 hour attention, or possibly if I had a very sick relative, sure I'll change my habits. Until such time there really isn't much that has a right to interfere with my life whenever it wants to.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people always take beer related criticism personally. I mean seriously, it's like a religion. I love beer, in fact I'm about to tuck into a few cans of Guinness right now and watch The Name of the Rose, but that doesn't mean I'm going to buy into bullshit in support of the beverage.
I accept that medieval farmers had a beer in the afternoon to make the time pass more quickly and dull the physical stress of their work. I also accept this was fairly widespread, even in towns and cities. What I don't accept is that beer was in any way a replacement for water, that you can rehydrate using beer (and 3% is plenty strong in that regard), and I find it hard to believe that a significant portion of the nutrients medieval persons received were derived from beer.
Now, you've gone ahead and ignored the link I originally provided showing step by step in clear scientific terms exactly what effect alcohol has on the human body when it comes to hydration. Why are you shilling for beer? Do you have investments in beer companies? Own a microbrewery? What?
So, when you don't have any water to pee, you pee less.
Interesting conclusion.
Single column, menu on top, show and hide divs based on screen width. Done. Multicolumn on a phone is just silly.
Actually, you can if the alcohol concentration is low.
Facts, links, support, etc. The closest thing I could find was a dubious Spanish study saying that if you drank lots of water as well as a small amount of beer it could help rehydration. And that was pretty hard to find amid the avalanche of studies about alcohol as a diuretic.
As for boiling it, that seems ever so easy when you have a nice stove and a teakettle. But they didn't.
Luckily according to the article I linked below apparently they didn't need to, without even addressing the dubious claim that people in medieval times routinely hadn't the means to boil water.
Anything that doesn't cause eyestrain would be fine. The eyes try to focus on the blurry image, can't, and suffer as a result. Congratulations google, you've actually managed to contribute to vision problems with your image search innovations.
Oh yes and for pity's sake splash screens and popups are making a major comeback.
Or maybe buying these macs then breaking them up and selling the parts for a profit.
Can't argue with that. Even as someone who considers themselves to be very technically literate, I find many of Google's services to be barely useable, and who thought it was a good idea to make images blurry while they're loading up in GIS? Eyestrain and migraine inducing stuff.
Then we have those sites where the layout hops around while various plugins come down the wire, I mean I saw something interesting, tried to click on it and now its somewhere else. I just want to view the information, not play a game of chase the link. And that's if they load at all, there's nothing as irritating as a permanent "loading" spiral.
A quick bit of Googling brings up this:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2013/05/21/medieval_europe_why_was_water_the_most_popular_drink.html
Contrary to what is found all over the Internet on the subject, the most common drink was water, for the obvious reason: It's free. Medieval villages and towns were built around sources of fresh water. This could be fresh running water, a spring or, in many cases, wells. All of these could easily provide fresh, disease- and impurity-free water; the idea that water from these sources would be the causes of disease and so had to be made into ale or beer is fanciful.
Where water was more likely to be contaminated, largely by tanning, slaughtering, or dying facilities, was in larger towns. But since medieval people were not idiots, they dealt with this in several ways. There were ordinances on where tanners and dyers could operate so that water for domestic use could be drawn from rivers and streams in the town to ensure the water was clean. And there were fines for contaminating areas of streams used for household consumption.
In larger cities, water-supply infrastructure was built to ensure public access to clean water. In medieval London, for example, the City Council began construction on what was called "the Great Conduit" in 1236. This was a complex of pipes that brought water from a large fresh spring at Tyburn to a pumping house with cisterns at Cheapside. This fed local cisterns all over London.
Wealthy Londoners could apply to have a private pipe or "quill" run from the conduit system to their house, giving them running water. This was expensive, and citizens who illegally tapped into the conduits were severely punished. Most people either drew their water from the nearest conduit cistern or paid a "cob" or water-carrier to bring them their day's water supply in three-gallon tubs, which they carried through the streets on a yoke. Public celebrations, such as the return of Edward I from Palestine or the coronation of Richard II, saw the city stop the water flow and fill the conduits with wine for the day, with people able to drink as much as they wanted.
People did drink a lot of ale and beer, but not because their water was so bad. The brews in question were much weaker than their modern equivalents but had the effect of providing much-needed calories to laborers and farmers, as well as being thirst-quenching and re-hydrating in hot weather or when working hard and losing sweat. Given the long days medieval workers put in, ale and beer were a major and necessary part of a laborer's daily energy intake. This should be seen as something like the medieval equivalent of drinking Gatorade.
Wine was the drink of choice for the upper classes and anyone who could afford it. It was produced all over medieval Europe and, due to the Medieval Warm Period that prevailed over western Europe until the 14th century, the climate meant it could be produced as far north as northern England. Wine was expensive and buying a small barrel was beyond the means of most people. But taverners bought it in bulk and sold it by the cup, so for a penny or even a halfpenny, an English peasant could enjoy a Bordeaux red.
In medieval England, the wine drunk most was red wine from Bordeaux and Gascony. Rhenish white from the Rhineland was twice as expensive and favored by the upper classes. Spanish white wines such as Lepe and Osey were cheaper and sweet wines from Greece, Crete, and Cyprus such as Romonye and Malmsey were popular after dinner.
Early beer wasn't intended for getting drunk and wasn't as strong as the beer of today is. It was intended as a day in, day out workaday drink for the masses.
I don't think that especially matters, even if it was the case that beer was weaker. As far as I'm aware any amount of alcohol beyond miniscule causes a net loss of water, going by that article I linked to.
You've also got to remember that people back then didn't understand basic hygiene (Queen Elizabeth likely only bathed a couple times in her life) or why things like boiling water would be beneficial. Principals that today are widely understood simply weren't known back then. Even things as simple as washing your hands before surgery are very recent developments (more soldiers died from infections from wounds in the Civil war than were killed on the field).
What people did know was that people that drank beer didn't get sick like the people that drank water. They also knew that it tasted better than water and they were raised up on it as generations prior had been. It was likely cheaper to buy beer than the firewood to boil your own water if you lived in a city, it was also certainly less hassle when you consider that many households didn't have kitchens. In short there was simply no reason to go through the effort of boiling water.
I'd need to see some evidence that a) beer drinking reduced sickness instead of increasing things like sclerosis, b) the facilities and logistics networks actually existed to produce and distribute the near endless quantities of beer you'd need to replace drinking water for a city, and c) that beer was cheaper than firewood which you'd have to get your hands on anyway. It just seems inconsistent with what I know of history.
You cannot rehydrate using alcohol, and you'll probably kill yourself if you try.
This whole people using beer to replace water en masse is a bit fishy anyway. I mean why not just boil it rather than going through the elaborate, expensive and time consuming process of making beer. Not to mention that early waterways were almost certainly far less polluted than some would believe.
If we’re going to experiment with totalitarianism, why don’t we try putting some women in control? Oh, sure, they’ll screw it up too. Humans in power always do. But at least it won’t be a bloodbath.
Are you completely out of your gourd? Women are at least as violent as men, and physically so when they think thewy can get away with it. Past European female monarchs have presided over some of the bloodiest periods in human history. No pun intended.
Yeah this is fairly old news. As far as I'm aware he's been in and out of prison for most of his life since proposing the idea in a fit of extreme libertarianism. Did someone actually go through with it?
You might want to check in with Smedley Butler and say, the Philippines, China, Central America and others on that one. The "pre WW2 non interventionist US" is a myth.
I was born in 1976, so I remember having a "phone line" to the house, and all phones in the house were devices that were there in order to use that one line. This means that if the phone rang, one person of the household answered it, and then routed the call to whoever it was for. The context behind leaving someone alone to talk on the phone to their boyfriend/girlfriend/boss/whatever, not allowing others to use the phone as you wait for an important call, not having call-waiting, or caller-ID, can be totally lost to today's kids of today. 'How we spend time in today's world' has a contextual change to it from generation to generation. This context is embedded into the fabric of the language of the day, and so it's hard to "convert" into a context that is 100 years older or younger.
By that logic people wouldn't understand anything written from 1913. The society of your parents and grandparents (and great great great grandparents) wasn't nearly as alien as you seem to think. Seriously, go read some HP Lovecraft, it's perfectly clear.
However, on the other hand, in Ireland a lot of their history is preserved in songs. Since songs have a way of leaving you with a feeling, they also have a way of preserving some relevant context from the writer of the song, from the time of writing - see how music changes over time.
Again, what? History in Ireland is preserved in books, just like anywhere else. Or do you mean people randomly burst into song to convey the historical context of their comments?
You can go ask your grandparent(s) things about the past, but the vocabulary that they use more than likely won't fit your vocabulary and therefor you will not be able to get the understanding that they're trying for
What?
Google only stored cached pages for a few days, as far as I recall.
Don't they have a law in Germany whereby all else being equal, women are given jobs first?
Why, were they dispensing dietary advice along with the torrents?
Yeah the only reason anyone comes here is for the comments. If I have to work harder to read them, I have less reason to come here. Seriously, widen the comments section and make sure I don't have to click TWICE to get to something I previously had to click ONCE to get to. Especially if its the only reason I visit. This design will kill slashdot.
I Who do you think has been putting the majority of politicians in power for the last 100 or so years? I'll give you a hint, it's not you and me.
Gosh I must have missed the part where all those unelected politicians got into power.
Thus solving the problem once and for all.
But...
Once and for all!
Investments are long-term. Investments are saying 'here's some money, you go build X and give me Y% of your profits'. That's an investment.
Ahah, nobody actually does that anymore. You have your pump and dump venture capitalists, and loans from the bank.
We've forgotten those lessons
No, we haven't, some politicians just got paid enough to ignore them.
Truth be told, these days I find less and less use for my cell. When I'm bringing the dog out for a walk or going shopping, I leave it at home. When I'm driving and it happens to be in the car, I let it ring out. When I sleep I leave the phone in another room. Every service has an answering machine anyway, I'll get back to you. The majority of my communication is done online through a laptop or desktop where I don't get charged real money per email. Yes some people have data plans, good for them, but even then I'd rather not peck at a miniature keyboardless monitor when I can do the same thing much more easily on an actual keyboard.
If I ever become a doctor or take on some other role where people are paying hard cash for my 24 hour attention, or possibly if I had a very sick relative, sure I'll change my habits. Until such time there really isn't much that has a right to interfere with my life whenever it wants to.