That is actually valuable information. While traveling I’ve several times skipped buying books because they were too heavy.

Reminds me of the Bjørneboe essay where he talks about how book collectors only care about the physical book, not the content, then segues into other ways of valuing books, e.g as projectiles for throwing, or sources of cigarette paper. He adds that he's smoked several pages of the Bible himself.

Screenshot of a five-star Amazon review titled "Fast delivery and quality product". The complete review is: "Prompt delivery, well packaged. Mint book!"

I'm fascinated by the Amazon reviewers (there are many), who seem incapable of comprehending the concept of reviewing a book. What are they thinking?

It's not too much to say that contemporaries were stunned by this book. The world has never been the same, really.

English physics was crippled by it for a long time, though, as it turned into Newton-worship instead of actual research.

That last point, showing how tides are caused by the moon, he does by taking actual moon observations and tide tables, then computing the force the moon (according to Newton) exerts on the ocean and shows that this will cause the tide to behave exactly like the tide tables show. QED.

Just to give a small sense: the book presents the concepts and 3 laws that govern all motion, then adds the formula for gravity. Newton shows Kepler's and Gallilei's formulas can be derived from his own. Then uses his new framework to show, mathematically, that tides are caused by the moon.

The impact of the Principia Mathematica is difficult to overstate. Before that, physics was basically Keplers trivial planetary orbit formulas, Gallilei's pendulum formula, and a lot of wrong ideas. Then, boom, out of nothing classical mechanics is born with that book, fully formed.

So, let me get this straight. When Isaac Newton wrote Principia Mathematica, literally the foundation of all modern science, he used ink based on beer? Seriously?

Trying to picture the beer world anno 1981.

Budweiser & co are 10-12 IBU.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale launches at 37-38 IBU, blows minds.

Stella Artois in 1973, though, had 33 IBU.

Makes you wonder what the European beer scene was like back then. The macro beer must have been very different from now.

No. DNS is an extremely light-weight service, with very extensive distributed caching. When you refresh in your browser your computer will usually not do the DNS request again.

Duffy, P., Cobain, S. and Kavanagh, H. 2014 From Skill to Skill – evidence for medieval brewing at Balbriggan, Co. Dublin. The Journal of Irish Archaeology 22, 59–76. Recent studies and experiments in Irish archaeology have greatly increased the available knowledge on the features generally described as grain drying kilns. Based on these studies, a typological fram...

Duffy, P., Cobain, S. and Kavanagh, H. 2014 From Skill to Skill – evidence for medieval brewing at Balbriggan, Co. Dublin. The Journal of Irish Archaeology 22, 59–76 www.academia.edu/6642899/Duff...

Grain can germinate before being harvested, so I guess it's possible they used late-harvested wheat, and that may have had enough enzymes to slowly saccharify. The difficulty will have been avoiding it becoming massively infected -- perhaps by keeping it warm?

This is all speculation, though.

"Drunk Pianist" - Geirr Tveitt - Hardingøl (Home Brew) - Grzegorz (Greg) Niemczuk live in Norway. YouTube video by Grzegorz (Greg) Niemczuk

Another rendition of the same tune, this time starting _very_ restrained, and ending much less so.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr8d...

Geirr Tveitt - Hardingøl (Hardanger Home Brew) from 50 folktunes from Hardanger YouTube video by Knut Erik Jensen - Official

Here's a concert performance of another of his beery tunes, called "Hardingøl", meaning "beer from Hardanger." You'll note that the tune gets wilder as it goes.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb7V...

Black and white photo of a neatly dressed middle-aged man.

The tunes were composed by Geir Tveitt, who had a background from the Hardanger area, and he fell in love with the local folk music.

Hardanger is also a farmhouse brewing area, so obviously Tveitt also discovered that side of the local culture.

Fest og vemod i samme glass - Andsnes spiller Tveitts “Noko té øl” | Sounds Like Gold Leif Ove Andsnes løfter frem en av de mest livlige og karakterfulle satsene fra Geirr Tveitts Femti folkatonar fråo Hardanger med “Noko té øl” - en energisk og humørfylt musikalsk skildring av fest, f...

New classical piano record out, by Norway's most famous classical pianist. The record is titled "What beer!" after one of the tunes, which is about farmhouse ale.

kommunikasjon.ntb.no/pressemeldin...

@velonoir.bsky.social (Replying here because I don't want to reply on X.) I'd say there are many conclusions you could draw, but I guess a straightforward one would be that these yeast cultures are crazily complex. A multistrain culture just isn't the same as a single culture.

The Mixed Mysteries of Nordic Grog There’s much we don’t know, but the archaeological finds of ancient Nordic beverages point to beer, mead, and wine—and to hybrids of all three—as the status beverages of the rich and powerful.

Lars discloses the secrets of Grog

www.beerandbrewing.com/nordic-grog?...

Sure. All farms and so on, but nobody could describe it as remote, isolated, and backward. Stone brewing areas usually are, like the east end of Vologda oblast, or the upper end of Gudbrandsdalen valley.

Map of the Baltic sea with a marker in Skåne, southern Sweden.

Well, that's a surprise. Just found a second account of stone brewing in Sweden. Nine years after the previous one. I really did not expect to see another one. It's not like it's in the sticks, either. 60km from the city of Malmö.

How Many Strains in a Farmhouse Yeast? | Larsblog Personal blog of Lars Marius Garshol.

We dig deeper into the new Verstrepen lab paper on farmhouse yeast: how many strains are there really in these cultures? Like, really? And what's the best way to preserve a farmhouse yeast?

www.garshol.priv.no/blog/441.html

I think if you have to move the mash anyway, because mash and lauter tuns are separate, it makes little difference.

Lautering is also an area where people have tended to be extremely conservative. And the Georgian highlands are about as remote as anywhere on earth. Pagan into the 20th century.

I never learned how girls’ names worked.

I was surprised when a co-worker from Ethiopia complained that his name didn’t fit into Norwegian bureaucratic forms.

Turns out the Oromo have three names: your given name, your father’s, and grandpa’s, in that order.

When you have a son, pick a name, add to front, and grandpa gets dropped.

The problem is that for Anglosaxons the concept of a double name is just foreign and unexpected. It doesn't feel right to keep correcting everyone all the time.

I try not to, but I'm sure I get African, Asian, etc name conventions wrong. I'm not perfect, either.

But I appreciate it when people ask

Indeed, yes, straw is traditional, widely available, and was widely used, as the table shows.

But when I say Georgians do not seem to use lauter tuns and seem to use other methods that's because I have several concrete descriptions of what the Georgians actually did. So far zero mention of straw.

Consensus so far seems to be that there's nothing there snabelen.no/@timbray@cos...

A report from the Danish National Museum, by Peter Steen Henriksen, Adam Cordes & Martin N. Mortensen, titled "Naturvidenskabelige undersøgelser af ildskørnede sten fra ÅHM 7982 - Hammer." Yeah, it's all in Danish.

Front page of the Danish report.

Screenshot of a paper from Journal of Archaeological Science titled "Identification of prehistoric malting and partial grain germination from starch granules in charred barley grains"

So currently the scoreboard for confirmed uses of burnt stones in Europe looks like this:
- Cooking meat: 1
- Brewing beer: 1

However, the PhD thesis that this paper is an offshoot from should be coming out soon, and it should provide us with masses of new data. I hope.

Screenshot of a page from the report showing, top, a photo from an SEM, gray-and-white matter in layers looking vaguely like a brain. Below a photo of a brown rock with black burned matter sticking to it.

However, last year, Danish researchers analyzed four stones from a pit-like structure with burnt black stuff on the surface. They did a test brew with hot stones in the mash, and compared the surface both by eye with electron microscopes. They matched!