Flannel Shirt

The Five Enemies of Beer

My daughter and her boyfriend Jon came up to Portland for the weekend, and the biggest event was a brew pub tour run by a guy named Jim, who calls his tour the "College of Brew Knowledge".

After he collected our money and everyone was strapped into his vehicle he gave us our first bit of knowledge: There are five enemies of beer. One is light, which is why most beer sold in bottles are sold in tinted bottles. Another enemy is oxygen, which is why beer goes flat. That's my daughter Robin studying hard at the Beer College.

After that the enemies list of beer started getting blurry over the course of the afternoon. I think heat was another enemy. But people need light, heat and oxygen.

The first place we went to was the Hopworks Urban Brewery. A brew master named Walker gave us lots of information about hops and grains. Hops are citrusy, and a two other varieties. I forgot.

As we went through the different beers we were supposed to write down our impressions of each beer. For example, I found Hopworks' Crosstown Pale Ale "sweet and piney". Oh yeah, "piney" is another category of hops. We had six different beers at Hopsworks. Each one tasted better than the last one.

The beers are rated on the IBU scale which is either the International Bitterness Unit or the International Brewers Unit. Above is the tote board where Hopworks rates its various beers by the IBU.

 Above is where they make the beer. The put it in one big container and do something, move it to another big container and do something. Then they move it to another big container and it sits around until it's ready. They have pipes that run from the basement where the beer is made upstairs to the pub where the beer is drunk. They had a great men's room with great lights hanging over the urinals.

Then we went to Amnesia Brewery. On my way out of the van I landed funny on my bad knee. It hurt some, but luckily the beer seemed to help the pain. We had their ESB (English bitter using British hops), which was good. Their Copacetic IPA was good too. And their Desolation IPA was good too. Jim stopped asking me for my opinion because I seemed to like every beer he brought.

Between breweries we drove past Potato Champion, where I got my first taste of poutine. That was cool. I still don't know my way around Portland very well, so when I see something I recognize I get excited.

I don't know about enemies of beer, but one enemy of beer drinkers is bladder capacity.

Next we went to McTarnahan's which either does or doesn't have a relationship with Pyramid Breweries. I didn't get that straight.

Here's a picture of Jon waiting for beer. The guy sitting in the background ordering the garlic fries is the tour guide Jim. Their Apricot Ale was "A-OK!!" The Hefeweizen was light. They had a Smoked Lager which I found "weird", and a Goose Bump Bourbon Stout which I didn't like. It tasted like bourbon. But we'd been drinking all afternoon and it was getting dark and their garlic fries were fantastic.

Here is a huge copper kettle that the McTarnahanistas use for making beer:

It was dark by the time we got to our last brewery. I thought it was the Hair of the Dog Brewery, but it was actually the Lucky Labrador Brewery. Forget the enemies of beer, I didn't know where we were. This painting was hanging on the wall there:

 We had something called "Crazy Ludwig" which I described as "good, bitter, light bite". I have no idea what I meant. Then we had something else.

After the tour Jim dropped the three of us down at the kids' hotel. We staggered around and had pizza and then they poured me into a cab to go to Joan's house. The smartest thing I did on Saturday was rely on others to drive me.

Joan missed the day because she's a doula and a baby arrived two weeks early, so while she was toiling over a new mom and a new baby we were toiling over pitchers of beer.

+++

It had been a beautiful day on Saturday but Sunday returned to normal Portland weather. Lots of rain. Joan and I had breakfast at The Cameo Cafe (I think its name is). Great breakfasts. The serving of hash browns is so big and so hot that they glow. When you squirt catsup on them it bubbles. And they're nice and creamy too, like the center of the sun.

We met up with the kids and went over to my place in Beaverton, because Robin wanted to see what it looked like with stuff in it (she'd seen it when I first rented it). After playing with the cat we drove out along the Columbia River Gorge.

The above is Multnomah Falls. It was raining and there was lots of water in the waterfall. There was lots of water everywhere. I got a coffee mug in the gift shop, and I put a penny in one of those machines that mash it and make it a trinket.

We came back to Joanie's, where Robin played with Gilly and Sully for awhile. Then we went over to the brew pub across the street (they're all over the place) and had dinner and took them to the airport. A fine weekend. Lots of fun.

Beware of the enemies of beer.

 

Election$ as Hor$e Race$?

Article here about how the Citizens United case will turn our elections into horse races. Of course, the media has been reporting elections like horse races for years.

Down in Florida

For awhile now I send my mother amaryllises for Christmas. When she was living in New Jersey and the weather was cold and all the trees outside were bare and lifeless, it was something to give her cheer in her house.

Well, they work well down in Florida, where she lives now. The shady figure is my mom, Dorothy, and one of those amaryllis plants was sent by my daughter. Family thing, I guess.

Music Friday: This is fear country. I've gotta tell on you.

Last night Professor Barry Glassner, president of Lewis & Clark College here in Portland, gave a talk about "The Culture of Fear" in America. That's also the title of a book he wrote, about how people misplace their fear and worry about things that don't need to be feared. I remember what my life was like as a child versus what my life was like as a parent and yes, fear has multiplied. And it's only gotten worse since then. Everybody's afraid of everything.

Glassner, formerly the executive vice provost at the University of Southern California, has earned a reputation as a rational critic of dire news -- whether it arises in media, political or popular circles. He says three out of four Americans report that they're more afraid now than they were 20 years ago, and he's kept track of how those fears have ebbed and flowed...

Glassner offered this:

 "It's really in schools, from kindergarten through graduate schools, where people have the best opportunity to understand how to sort out realistic claims from exaggerated ones and learn how to think critically."

It reminds me of T-Bone Burnett's song of paranoia, "Fear Country".

Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite.

More on the Archaeopteryx feather

Here.

And a story about this tattoo:

Why you should smile for mugshots

Charged with suffocating her boyfriend.

Death of a comet

You figure it happens a lot, but it's something you never see. Until now.

"Comets are usually too dim to be seen in the glare of the sun's light," says Dean Pesnell at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who is the project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO), which snapped images of the comet. "We've been telling people we'd never see one in SDO data."

But an ultra bright comet, from a group known as the Kreutz comets, overturned all preconceived notions. The comet can clearly be viewed moving in over the right side of the sun, disappearing 20 minutes later as it evaporates in the searing heat. The movie is more than just a novelty. As detailed in a paper in Science magazine appearing January 20, 2012, watching the comet's death provides a new way to estimate the comet's size and mass. The comet turns out to be somewhere between 150 to 300 feet long and have about as much mass as an aircraft carrier.

"Of course, it's doing something very different than what aircraft carriers do," says Karel Schrijver, a solar scientist at Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, Calif., who is the first author on the Science paper and is the principal investigator of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument on SDO, which recorded the movie. "It was moving along at almost 400 miles per second through the intense heat of the sun -- and was literally being evaporated away."

Typically, comet-watchers see the Kreutz-group comets only through images taken by coronagraphs, a specialized telescope that views the Sun's fainter out atmosphere, or corona, by blocking the direct blinding sunlight with a solid occulting disk. On average a new member of the Kreutz family is discovered every three days, with some of the larger members being observed for some 48 hours or more before disappearing behind the occulting disk, never to be seen again. Such "sun-grazer" comets obviously destruct when they get close to the sun, but the event had never been witnessed.

Which reminds me of the Pink Floyd song, "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun". From their "Ummagumma" album.

I have been reminded

I have been reminded by Joan that Beer Week in Portland is fifty-two weeks long. And when my daughter and her boyfriend come up here this weekend we'll be going on an organized brewpub crawl on Saturday.

Dinosaur news

A couple of dinosaur news stories:

First, scientists have found the remains of a dinosaur nursery that goes back a hundred million years earlier than the past oldest dinosaur nursery. And the hatchings stayed around long enough to double in size.

At least 10 nests have been discovered at several levels at this site, each with up to 34 round eggs in tightly clustered clutches. The distribution of the nests in the sediments indicate that these early dinosaurs returned repeatedly to this site, a behaviour known as nesting fidelity, and likely assembled in groups to lay their eggs, (colonial nesting), the oldest known evidence of such behaviour in the fossil record. The large size of the mother, at six metres in length, the small size of the eggs, about six to seven centimetres in diameter, and the highly organized nature of the nest suggest that the mother may have arranged them carefully after she laid them.

"The eggs, embryos, and nests come from the rocks of a nearly vertical road cut only 25 metres long," said Reisz, a professor of biology at U of T Mississauga. "Even so, we found ten nests, suggesting that there are a lot more in the cliff, still covered by tons of rock. We predict that many more nests will be eroded out in time as natural weathering processes continue."

The fossils were found in sedimentary rocks from the Early Jurassic Period in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park in South Africa. This site has previously yielded the oldest known embryos belonging to Massospondylus, a relative of the giant, long-necked sauropods of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

"Even though the fossil record of dinosaurs is extensive, we actually have very little fossil information about their reproductive biology, particularly for early dinosaurs," said Evans (pictured left, bottom, with Reisz, above), associate curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum. "This amazing series of 190 million year old nests gives us the first detailed look at dinosaur reproduction early in their evolutionary history, and documents the antiquity of nesting strategies that are only known much later in the dinosaur record."

Then, scientists have figured out the color of Archaeopteryx' feathers.

Black.

Some secrets have been revealed by an international team of researchers led by Brown University. Through a novel analytic approach, the researchers have determined that a well-preserved feather on the raven-sized dinosaur's wing was black. The color and parts of cells that would have supplied pigment are evidence the wing feathers were rigid and durable, traits that would have helped Archaeopteryx to fly.

The team also learned from its examination that Archaeopteryx's feather structure is identical to that of living birds, a discovery that shows modern wing feathers had evolved as early as 150 million years ago in the Jurassic period. The study, which appears in Nature Communications, was funded by the National Geographic Society and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

"If Archaeopteryx was flapping or gliding, the presence of melanosomes [pigment-producing parts of a cell] would have given the feathers additional structural support," said Ryan Carney, an evolutionary biologist at Brown and the paper's lead author. "This would have been advantageous during this early evolutionary stage of dinosaur flight."

The Archaeopteryx feather was discovered in a limestone deposit in Germany in 1861, a few years after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Paleontologists have long been excited about the fossil and other Archaeopteryx specimens, thinking they place the dinosaur at the base of the bird evolutionary tree. The traits that make Archaeopteryx an evolutionary intermediate between dinosaurs and birds, scientists say, are the combination of reptilian features (teeth, clawed fingers, and a bony tail) and avian features (feathered wings and a wishbone).

The lack of knowledge of Archaeopteryx's feather structure and color bedeviled scientists. Carney, with researchers from Yale University, the University of Akron, and the Carl Zeiss laboratory in Germany, analyzed the feather and discovered that it is a covert, so named because these feathers cover the primary and secondary wing feathers birds use in flight. After two unsuccessful attempts to image the melanosomes, the group tried a more powerful type of scanning electron microscope at Zeiss, where the group located patches of hundreds of the structures still encased in the fossilized feather.

"The third time was the charm, and we finally found the keys to unlocking the feather's original color, hidden in the rock for the past 150 million years," said Carney, a graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, studying with Stephen Gatesy.

Melanosomes had long been known to be present in other fossil feathers, but had been misidentified as bacteria. In 2006, coauthor Jakob Vinther, then a graduate student at Yale, discovered melanin preserved in the ink sac of a fossilized squid. "This made me think that melanin could be fossilized in many other fossils such as feathers," said Vinther, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas-Austin. "I realized that I had opened a whole new chapter of what we can do to understand the nature of extinct feathered dinosaurs and birds."

The team measured the length and width of the sausage-shaped melanosomes, roughly 1 micron long and 250 nanometers wide. To determine the melanosomes' color, Akron researchers Matthew Shawkey and Liliana D'Alba statistically compared Archaeopteryx's melanosomes with those found in 87 species of living birds, representing four classes: black, gray, brown, and a type found in penguins. "What we found was that the feather was predicted to be black with 95 percent certainty," Carney said.

Before Facebook

Humans had networking. Long before Facebook.

The study's findings describe elements of social network structures that may have been present early in human history, suggesting how our ancestors may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin based on shared attributes, including the tendency to cooperate. According to the paper, social networks likely contributed to the evolution of cooperation.

"The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today," said Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology and medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and senior author on the study. "From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we've made networks of basically the same kind."

"We found that what modern people are doing with online social networks is what we've always done -- not just before Facebook, but before agriculture," said study co-author James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego, who, with Christakis, has authored a number of seminal studies of human social networks.