larsga

This article is right, but also misleading. Yes, people did drink water. But they preferred to drink beer, and basically they drank beer for thirst if they could. And they did this not just in the Middle Ages, but into the 20th century.

I wrote [a blog post](https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html) that goes into this in more detail.

From the page:

> any help writing the RFC would be greatly appreciated (see issue).

I guess you can sign up if you want an RFC.

> MIME type may be application/jsonl

Don't do this. Don't encourage people to use a value that's not registered yet. Say "x-jsonl", and you're OK.

That's the point. It finishes the last bit of fermentation in the cask in the pub, so what you get served is at absolute top condition. At least initially. That, with the low CO2 and the relative warmth, makes for an experience that's completely superior to cold, carbonated beer. But you have to get used to it.

It's still much warmer than craft beer.

> The US has one of the most well developed craft beer industries on the planet.

It absolutely does. And those beer styles you mention are also very good. But cask ale is still better.

Lambic and Flanders red ale are not central European, btw.

You left out a couple of things here. One is that ale can also be served from keg, and commonly is, so the cask version is often known as "real ale". Guinness, for example, is a keg ale that uses nitrogen to mimic the mouthfeel of real ale.

The main thing, though, is that cask ale is easily the best form of beer that there is, when it's not off. Something about the sparkling freshness of beer that just finished fermenting in the cask, the cellar-cool temperature, and the low CO2 just makes for an incredible taste experience. Most beer goes downhill from the moment it leaves the brewery, but cask ale is at the very height of perfection the moment the cellarman puts it on. Well-kept cask ale is simply the best thing there is.

Interestingly, the best way to drink lager is in Bavaria, from wooden barrels, with low CO2 and relatively warm. It's not quite as sophisticated as real ale, because there's no life in the barrels, but it's still great.

A bit strange that they write that timing is essential, yet don't actually allow the GA to experiment with timing. They could have added to their representation a symbol for "no change". Surprised they didn't.

It's extremely unlikely to be air residue, since what they're finding is grain and yeast protein. That stuff won't be flying around in the air, particularly as the Danes did their brewing indoors.

But, yes, the Danes did brew a lot, into the 20th century, since beer was the daily drink for Danish farmers.

This is why a graph of a quantity over time is much superior to just seeing the realtime number. Had they had a graph of fuel remaining they would have been able to see that fuel level had started dropping faster.

In monitoring IT systems seeing metrics like this over time is super valuable.

Possibly medieval. As the first sentence says, it might be from 1850.

Possibly medieval. It might be from 1850.

These illustrations were used in the first edition in 1937. My edition is from 1992. I don't think frequency of use has changed at all.

Little-known? My edition of The Hobbit is illustrated with these. In fact, quite a lot of editions are.

I guess what this means is that the book is little-known.

If you want to hear some modern examples of oud-based jazz:

Anouar Brahem - Bom dia Rio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noYCkiPrqS8

Dhafer Youssef - Les Ondes Orientales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9INsERNFUo

What is baffling about it? There's huge numbers of reports in western media about the extremely severe lockdown in Wuhan. In addition they did testing and tracing to a quite frankly unbelievable extent.

They had both the will and the ability. The west only had the ability unless you want to count Australia and NZ.

They weren't honest about the death toll, and came close to fucking things up because of that, but once Beijing decided to be serious about stopping it they did stop it.

We know from outside reporting that they handled it, so there's nothing to guess about there.

Human action is the key. The US was very well prepared, but when the federal government and many state governments weren't interested in stopping the virus of course being prepared doesn't help.

Same with the UK: the response from their scientific community has been absolutely fantastic. But when Boris Johnson simply didn't want to lock down and couldn't make up his mind until too late that didn't count for much. Also he fucked up the test-trace-isolate system for ideological reasons.

Sweden + Denmark were rated as more prepared than Norway, which could well be true, but Sweden chose the UK approach (for no sane reason) and has paid the price.

In all of these cases the problem is not lack of ability to handle the pandemic, but a political lack of will to do it.

What the hell kind of bullshit is this? Everyone knows they did not let it explode and had things under control until the last few weeks. Compared to most of the world China has seen almost no covid. That's what the official numbers say and it's been borne out by independent western journalists over and over again.

Covid is the disease. The virus, SARS-CoV-2, has never been found in the wild. The closest known relative, RaTG13, was found in Yunnan. But SARS, a very similar disease (caused by SARS-CoV-1) broke out in Guangzhou, which is 1000km from Yunnan. So there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why SARS-CoV-2 couldn't originate in animals and break out in Wuhan.

> Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome

You have a reliable source for this, of course. Would you be so kind as to share it?

SARS was a random outbreak of a very similar disease that was just barely stopped. It was really close to becoming a pandemic.

It's no mystery where it came from.

A very similar virus (SARS-CoV-1) came very close to sparking a global pandemic in 2004. In late 2017 that virus was found in bats in a cave in Yunnan, China.

The closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 has no name, just the code RaTG13. In 2013 three miners cleaned out bat shit from a mine in China and all three died of viral pneumonia caused by RaTG13. Why that didn't spark a pandemic is not known, but basically we got lucky for the second time.

Then, in 2019, we had the third incident, but this time we didn't get lucky.

In theory this virus could have come from a lab, but it's far, far more likely it came from wild bats. And its cousin SARS-CoV-1 is still out there in bats. It could be let loose for the second time at any moment.

That lab doesn't worry me. Bats do.

The elements defined in HTML have meanings. That's the semantics. If you use the elements according to the meanings defined in the standard, then your markup is semantic. Whether you use lots of classes is neither here nor there, although how you use the classes matters.

The point is that the marketing is false. This CSS framework forces to you to abuse HTML semantics if you want to use it, which is exactly what it claims it doesn't do.

What's extra frustrating is that it would be so easy to fix, by just adding a few classes. But they wanted to be "semantic", so they forced their users to be unsemantic.

"In total covid has killed under 6,000 people in a country of ten million. A country with an annual death rate of around 100,000 people."

This is basically deliberate disinformation. In April and early May Sweden had 30-50% excess mortality. And this was despite actually stopping the virus through soft lockdown. What the full count would have been had they let the virus rage unchecked is hard to say, but he's comparing the numbers from a virus that was stopped relatively early with the normal numbers of deaths for a whole year. Do the same exercise for April and it doesn't look good at all.

The reality is that more than 5000 people died unnecessarily in Sweden through failed government policy. And that's before we start counting the adverse health effects on the people who survived.

I'm not discussing whether their safety outcomes were changed.

My point is that management deliberately set out to create a completely different company culture that would no longer be engineering-driven. I don't see how anyone can seriously dispute that.

> Whatever killed Boeing's engineering culture is irrelevant. Arguing over that is a distraction from the fact that Boeing's current engineering culture pushed this product to market.

You know what? The insanity of this argument is going to be so obvious to any reader that rather than argue against it I'm just going to emphasize it by quoting it.

> This great culture was all lost as a result of the merger with McDonnell Douglas

Not because of the merger, but because management deliberately set out to change the entire company culture from being engineering-driven to being business-driven. Business-driven as in: cut corners to save money.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...

I've tried using Soundex in practice, and I found it to be too coarse-grained to be really useful. Metaphone is much better, even if it's more complex.

The main culprit is the FAA. Private companies should be expected to take shortcuts for short-term gain. That's why there is government regulation and oversight. It's the oversight part that failed here. Yes, Boeing also failed, but that's less worrying.

Clay Shirky unfortunately has no idea what he's talking about. You can interpret a CSV file as a set of syllogisms, too, if you want. RDF is data, just like CSV, except the shape is different. CSV is good for some things. RDF is good for other things.

RDF is a fantastic way to aggregate data from many different sources, for example. CSV sucks at that.

The problem is that RDF has been marketed so poorly, which has totally confused people like Shirky.

These mappings is exactly what I'm talking about. I advised the OMG on one of the mappings in the ODM and I don't think they understood what they were mapping. To model OWL with UML gives you very little. To then map Topic Maps into the same level as OWL is ... just misguided.

Semantics means something very different to the OMG from what it does to the RDF/OWL community. That's the root of the problem. To the RDF/OWL folks it means "mathematically based logical inference of new statements", whereas to the OMG it seems to mean "human-readable text".

Yes, you can map a property graph into RDF, but to make it work well you usually have to add a lot of information that's not in the original data.

Thanks, I know how RDF and SPARQL work.