Category: General

I Have A New Home

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It’s been one month since I started this blog, and I’ve had a great time with it so far. I expected to write primarily about beer, but the content has taken some unexpected turns. And I think that’s ok. It’s been humbling to see that I have quite a few regular readers. So thanks for stopping by. I’ve really appreciated all the comments and feedback, and I think I’ll keep the blogging up. With that said, I’ve decided to move. A few readers suggested I pick up somethingsbrewing.com. So I did. And if I succeeded in moving my content, you should be on the new site now. The process to move everything was a bit messy, and I’m still working

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Date A Sea Captain

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Via Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution, here’s a dating site for sea captains: seacaptaindate.com. At first it looks like a joke, but, no. It’s real. There’s even a Time Magazine posting on it: Ladies, do you find yourselves home alone on a Friday night, staring wistfully out to sea? Do you enjoy assembling tiny ships inside bottles or making sculptures out of driftwood that you find on the beach? Is your widow’s walk more like a single’s walk? Then NewsFeed has the dating website for you. And then there’s this brilliant promotion: Favorite line: “So when  got back to dry land, I logged onto one of them computer terminals, and I, I Googled the internet.” Don’t miss the Captain’s surprised

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Quite Literally Nothing To Do

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Later this week I’ll be visiting some rural villages with a local development organization to learn about effective agricultural, sanitation, and water purification technology dissemination strategies. The trip is likely to include a number of stops at some pig farms, and one of the places I might visit is a town called Svay Rieng. Here’s what my guide book had to say: “Svay Rieng is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it provincial capital that many travelers whistle past when making the journey between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City. There is quite literally nothing to do here.” Well, uh, Lonely Planet must not know about the pig farms!

Worlds Smallest Home

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“Ever imagined what it would be like to live inside a giant egg?” From China Daily: “Dai Haifei, 24, a newly graduated architect, decided to make his own egg-style home after being unable to afford Beijing’s sky-high rental prices. The two-meter high house with two wheels underneath is made from sack bags on the outside wall, bamboo splints on the inside and wood chippings and grass seeds in between. ‘The seeds will grow in the natural environment and it’s cold-proof,’ Dai explained.” “He moved the house steps away from his office where he would stay until midnight before going to sleep inside the ‘egg’.” Well, at least the commute sounds great.

Kurt Vonnegut Knew Best

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Sifting through an old journal, I came across one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes from Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” He was talking about Nazi’s. But I think it’s good advice regardless.

Gone Fishing.

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I’m en route to Cambodia to work on a technology dissemination project as part of MIT’s International Development Initiative. I’m anticipating that my access to the internet will be a bit patchy over the next few weeks, but am planning to keep blogging when I can, hopefully with a few new or interesting things to share. I can confirm that the TSA’s controversial new screening systems are up and running at Logan. Which brings me to this:

Polygamy and Alcohol?

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Who said academic papers can’t be off-beat and interesting? Here’s the abstract from a new paper titled “Women or Wine, Monogamy and Alcohol”: “Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. We provide a series of possible explanations to explain the positive correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption over time and across societies.” Via Marginal Revolution. Read the full paper here.

Let’s Get This Started.

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Welcome to my blog. I’ve decided to start writing about things I see, think, and do, and thought I’d share my thoughts with anyone interested in reading them. I’m excited to see where this goes, but expect it will be heavily influenced by beer, music, markets, photography, and traveling. Thanks for dropping by, I hope you enjoy.