November 21, 2009
Category: Biology • Food
Dear Reader, usually the deal here on Aard is that I tell you what to think and you reply, zombielike, "Yes... Master... Kill... Kill...". But today, let's turn the tables. I'm going to ask a question about a simple scientific-culinary matter that has baffled me for decades. And I hope someone out there knows enough about yeast to enlighten me.
- When starved of oxygen, yeast turns sugar into alcohol.
- When germinated, barley grains, by means of the enzyme amylase, turn some of their constituent starch into sugar. This process is called malting.
- In order to make beer, you must malt the barley. This suggests that yeast cannot make alcohol out of starch.
- But Swedish vodka is made from potatoes, which are very high in starch but cannot be malted. This suggests that yeast can make alcohol out of starch.
So here's my question: if yeast can make alcohol directly out of starch, why bother malting the barley before making beer? Couldn't you just mix barley flour with water and yeast and put a lid on the slop?
Update same evening: Dale P and other Dear Readers solved the conundrum för me. Yeast cannot in fact ferment starch. To ferment potato mash, you add enzyme-containing barley malt to it!
[More blog entries about yeast, beer, brewing, alcohol; jäst, öl, bryggerier, alkohol.]
Posted by Martin R at 8:21 AM • 12 Comments
November 18, 2009
Category: Children • Humour
My 6-y-o daughter usually sleeps really solidly over in her room and is not easily woken by sounds she's accustomed to. But this morning she told me over breakfast, "Dad, you and Mom made the weirdest noises last night and woke me. First Mom kind of whined and sounded as if she was gonna sneeze. Then nothing for a while. And then you started sounding like an elephant! You made one heck of a racket -- Det var ett jäkla liv."
Posted by Martin R at 4:00 PM • 8 Comments
November 17, 2009
Category: NOIBN • Tech
I'm enjoying one of my infrequent laptop days, that is, days during which it actually makes sense for me to tote such a device around. I type these words from the Konradsberg campus of the University of Stockholm. Konradsberg is a name that resonates in my city's history, because it used to be one of the main mental hospitals, known colloquially as the "Castle of Madmen". I haven't been committed (yet). I'm here for the second day of the Wikipedia Academy 2009 conference, representing my employer, the Royal Academy of Letters.
In order to get on-line I had to solve a decidedly analog problem. The scrape cards the organisers hand out with login info for the wifi here are poorly made: the stuff you need to scrape off is tougher than the underlying plastic film on which the information is printed. So my first attempt ended with me scraping the print off. This reminds me of the techno-optimism of the 60s where archaeologists on Gotland produced extremely detailed photographic excavation reports but forgot to check if the glue they used was archive-safe. In the 90s those reports were all falling apart.
After lunch I'm taking a wifi-enabled fast train to Gothenburg to give an information security talk at the IT University there. Then back home to Stockholm. All with a lovely dinky netbook in my backpack, one whose Ubuntu installation is sadly dead but whose Windows installation still works. Better than nothing.
[More blog entries about laptop, netbook, wikipediaacademy2009, technooptimism; laptop, netbook, wikipediaacademy2009, teknikoptimism.]
Posted by Martin R at 5:42 AM • 2 Comments
November 16, 2009
Category: Archaeology
A few months ago I finished a book manuscript on elite settlement and political geography in Östergötland, one of Sweden's core provinces, in the period AD 375-1000. In countries that have experienced an infestation of Romans, this era is known as the Early Middle Ages. In Scandyland we call it the Late Iron Age. Researching and writing the book has been my main project for over four years, as reflected in many blog entries here about sites such as Skamby in Kuddby and Sättuna in Kaga.
On Thursday 26 November at 15:00 I will give a talk about these matters at the Dept of Archaeology at the University of Lund, Sandgatan 1. I'm sure there will be room for some interested members of the public. Do show up if you're into things like this -- I promise it won't be dry and academic. And if you're an Aard reader, please come over and say hi!
Posted by Martin R at 9:58 AM • 8 Comments
Category: Biology • Books • Environment
Dan Simmons published a wonderful, galaxy-spanning, mind-blowing sf novel in 1989: Hyperion.
Then he followed it up with three more novels of which I have read two. They're OK, but not as good as the first book.
Science fiction is of course stories where fabulous things happen and are explained by science and technology rather than magic. There are two ways to do this: either you offer an explanation that is actually in line with what we know now and sort of makes sense, or you use technobabble to cover the fact that you, the writer, do not actually have any idea of how for instance space ships move instantaneously from one star to another. Both ways are in my opinion fine. And Simmons uses the technobabble technique with poetic flair: "torch ship", "lance the ground troops from orbit", "spin down into the system", "hyper-entropic field".
But in the third of the Hyperion novels, Endymion (1996), he does something that jarred me awake to the fact that Simmons apparently does not know basic science at all. He tells us that a couple of fabulous things happen and offers neither technobabble nor believable scientific explanations.
We're on the planet Sol Draconi Septem. Having once been terraformed, thus receiving a breathable atmosphere, it has now relapsed (over a few centuries) into a chilly state where its atmosphere has frozen solid, collapsed onto the surface and formed glaciers. There is hardly any gaseous matter there any more. Those glaciers seem to consist largely of solid nitrogen. Yet Simmons tells us that there is breathable air and liquid salty water in tunnels dug through the ice by a species of large animal, the ice wraiths. And on top of the glaciers, where it is impossible to breathe, intense blizzards blow. So there is wind in a vacuum, and there is precipitation without an atmosphere. Ouch.
The ecology of Sol Draconi Septem is also magical. It consists only of two species of carnivore that hunt each other: ice wraiths and humans. No plants and no herbivores. Simmons does mention that the human population is shrinking, which suggests that he understands that a system without energy input will dwindle and eventually stop running. But as far as I can see he's vastly overestimated the longevity of such a system. It is after all the equivalent of fencing a desert in, removing all animals and filling it with lions and tigers. And it's not just a matter of energy efficiency, but also one of materials: if a tiger eats a lion, far from all of the lion's building blocks become incorporated into the tiger.
[More blog entries about books, sf, sciencefiction, dansimmons, hyperion; böcker, sciencefiction, sf, dansimmons, hyperion.]
Posted by Martin R at 8:21 AM • 15 Comments
Category: Archaeology • History • Tech
On Tuesday 17 November 17:30 I'm giving a talk as part of Mathias Klang's information security course at the University of Gothenburg. The theme is "Årtusendenas glömska: arkivsäkring i det riktigt långa perspektivet", which may hint to the intelligent reader that I'll be speaking in Swedish. I'll cover ways that information has survived from the distant past, and aspects of how data from archaeological sites and museum collections can be safeguarded for a long future.
The lecture is free and open to the public. The venue is at Forskningsgången 6, square 2, floor 2, on the premises of IT-Universitetet on Lindholmen. Hope to see blog readers there!
[More blog entries about informationsecurity; informationssäkerhet.]
Posted by Martin R at 8:00 AM • 4 Comments
November 14, 2009
Category: Tech
Hear me, Ubuntu-using brothers and sisters! Never use the on-line upgrade option to switch to a newer version of the operating system! In little more than two years, it has trashed my setup twice, once killing the machine outright, and the last time (yesterday) making it impossible to boot from the linux partition.
When the time comes to upgrade, copy all your files to somewhere else, re-format the linux partition and install the new Ubuntu version from scratch. Then copy all your stuff back onto the partition. There is no safe way to upgrade an existing installation.
A corollary of this is that you should either use an on-line e-mail service that stores your mail off-site, or local e-mail software that makes it really easy to export all your mail to another disk and then re-import it into the software after the upgrade (if any such e-mail software does in fact exist). In other words, do not run Mozilla Thunderbird like I did.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 41 Comments
November 13, 2009
Category: Archaeology • Denmark
So you're a metal detectorist and you find a silver figurine at storied Lejre in Denmark. It depicts a person sitting in a high seat whose posts end in two wolves' heads. And on either arm rest sits a raven. The style is typical for about AD 900. So when you hand the thing over to the site manager, he of course exclaims, "Holy shit! It's Odin!". And that's what he tells the press.
Until somebody like me comes along and points out that it's a woman.
She's wearing a floor-length dress. And a shawl. And four finely sculpted bead strings. This is a standard depiction of an aristocratic lady of the later 1st Millennium. The Lejre figurine is a direct counterpart to the Aska pendant (below), which is universally understood as the effigy of a goddess. The high seat is Odin's, allright. But the occupant is most likely Frigga or Freya. Or maybe, just maybe, Thor in drag during the hammer reclamation mission. That is so cool! This find will mess with everybody's mind!
Congratulations to detectorist Tommy Olesen who found the piece two months ago! And thanks to Tobias Bondesson for the heads-up.
[More blog entries about odin, paganism, aesir, religion, denmark, vikings, freya, goddess, silver, figurine; oden, freja, hedendom, religion, vikingar, danmark, silver, figurin.]
Posted by Martin R at 3:34 PM • 32 Comments
November 12, 2009
Category: Archaeology
Aard enjoys complimentary subscriptions to a number of popular archaeology magazines from which I learn a lot before passing them on to the Fisksätra public library. Here are my favourite stories from three recent issues that have crossed my current-reading shelf.
Current Archaeology 234, Sept.
Current Archaeology 236, Nov.
- A huge 7th century gold and silver hoard found recently in Staffordshire. Excellent pix! I haven't blogged about this since it's been all over the mainstream news and I had little to add. (10 pp.)
- A London tide mill, sturdily built in the 1190s and well preserved in the river sediments, its great wheel partly still in place (6 pp.).
Archaeology Nov/Dec.
[More blog entries about archaeology; arkeologi.]
Posted by Martin R at 2:35 PM • 4 Comments
November 11, 2009
Category: Humour • Poetry
One of the best friends I made during my decade in the Tolkien Society is Florence Vilén; poet, novelist, connoisseuse of art and letters. She recently published a volume of poetry, Purpurpränt. Dikter med rim och reson. And earlier tonight when she visited us she threw out one of the aristocratic one-liners she delights in.
Florence once told me off the cuff, "The educated layman became extinct about 1940". Tonight she happily proclaimed, "I have learned my entire vocabulary of obscene English words from the Times Literary Supplement".
Posted by Martin R at 3:26 PM • 0 Comments
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
