Category Archives: quickies

Brassage saisonnier

Deux nouvelles bières que j’ai l’intention de brasser aujourd’hui, grâce à une culture de levure de saison et de Brettanomyces bruxellensis, généreusement fournie par un ami. L’aspect «bière de type saison» ne sera probablement pas très fidèle aux modèles connus. L’idée, c’est d’expérimenter.

D’abord, une bière rouge, inspirée par le thé d’hibiscus:

Dablini

16-C Saison
Auteur: Alexandre Enkerli
Date: 2009-01-03

BeerTools Pro Color Graphic

Grosseur: 5,0 gal

Efficience: 75,0%

Atténuation: 75,0%

Calories: 178,84 kcal per 12,0 fl oz

Densité Initiale: 1,054 (1,048 – 1,065)

|=============#==================|

Densité finale: 1,013 (1,002 – 1,012)

|==========================#=====|

Couleur: 18,94 (5,0 – 14,0)

|================================|

Alcool: 5,28% (5,0% – 7,0%)

|==========#=====================|

Amertume: 12,2 (20,0 – 35,0)

|================================|

Ingrédients:

3000 g American 6-row Pale
500 g Munich TYPE I
500 g Vienna Malt
500 g Caramalt 15
500 g Special B – Caramel malt
1,0 L Pomegrenate juice – Ajouté à l’ébullition bouilli 15 min
25 g Hibiscus flower (dried) – Ajouté à l’ébullition bouilli 15 min
15 g Coffee Berries (dried) – Ajouté à l’ébullition bouilli 3 min
1 oz Crystal (3,3%) – Ajouté à l’ébullition bouilli 60 min

200 mL White Labs WLP565 Belgian Saison I

Résultats générés par BeerTools Pro 1.5.2

 

Puis une bière très pale, orientée épices (presque comme une wit):

Bretteuse

16-C Saison

Auteur: Alexandre Enkerli

Date: 2009-01-03

BeerTools Pro Color Graphic

Grosseur: 5,0 gal

Efficience: 75,0%

Atténuation: 75,0%

Calories: 196,4 kcal per 12,0 fl oz

Densité Initiale: 1,059 (1,048 – 1,065)

|==================#=============|

Densité finale: 1,015 (1,002 – 1,012)

|============================#===|

Couleur: 3,87 (5,0 – 14,0)

|=====#==========================|

Alcool: 5,8% (5,0% – 7,0%)

|==============#=================|

Amertume: 12,2 (20,0 – 35,0)

|================================|

Ingrédients:

1500 g American 6-row Pale

400 g Rye Flakes

570 g Oats Flaked

28,35 g Crystal (3,3%) – Ajouté à l’ébullition bouilli 60 min

200 g Honey

13,0 tsp Corriander seeds – Ajouté à l’ébullition bouilli 5 min

20,0 tsp Clementine peel (dried) – Ajouté à l’ébullition bouilli 5 min

4,0 tsp Black Peppercorns – Ajouté à l’ébullition bouilli 5 min

4,0 tsp Grains of Paradise – Ajouté à l’ébullition bouilli 5 min

6,76 fl oz White Labs WLP565 Belgian Saison I

2500 g German 2-row Pils

Horaire:

Air ambiant: 70,0 °F

Eau de source: 60,0 °F

00:03:00 Mash-InEau d’empâtage: 3,94 gal; Amorçage: 166,34 °F; Cible: 155 °F

Résultats générés par BeerTools Pro 1.5.2

Le meilleur de la blogosphère anthropologique francophone: appel aux candidatures

Le blogue Neuroanthropology recueille présentement des candidatures pour réaliser une anthologie de la blogosphère anthropologique pour l’année 2008. Si vous tenez un blogue à caractère anthropologique ou si vous connaissez quelqu’un d’autre qui tient un tel blogue, veuillez nous envoyer un message par l’entremise du billet Anthropology Blogging 2008: Call for Submissions sur ce même blogue. Neuroanthropology cherche des anthropologues blogueurs de diverses communautés linguistiques pour qu’ils puissent soumettre leurs meilleurs billets selon deux critères: popularité et auto-sélection. Dans la catégorie «popularité», chaque blogue peut soumettre un lien sur billet celui qui a reçu le plus de visites au cours de l’année, accompagné par une courte description (une ligne ou deux) de ce qui, selon l’auteur, a permis à ce billet d’attirer autant de visites. Dans la catégorie «auto-sélection», il s’agit de soumette le meilleur billet de l’année, selon l’auteur. Les blogues collectifs (écrits par plusieurs auteurs) peuvent sélectionner deux billets du même blogue, pour cette anthologie.
Toutes les soumissions sont acceptées. Nous désirons construire une liste aussi exhaustive que possible des blogues anthropologiques, peu importe la langue.
Prière de soumettre vos candidatures d’ici au 29 décembre. L’anthologie sera mise en ligne le 31 décembre.

Obligatory 2.7 Post

When new features are added to a blogging platform, I figure I should try them. In this case, the QuickPress box in WordPress 2.7 is fairly neat.
But I’m mostly excited about the Batch Editing feature.
One thing I notice which is a bit off is that the French version of the Dashboard drop-down menu takes two lines, which looks a bit off. But that’s a minor point.
A bigger one, though, is that this QuickPress feature doesn’t auto-complete tags. That’s a bit counterproductive. Auto-completing tags is one of those very convenient features which makes special sense in quick blogging.
Not to mention that QuickPress doesn’t support categories.
Ah, well…

Ethnographic Disciplines

Just because this might be useful in the future…
I perceive a number of academic disciplines to be “ethnographic” in the sense that they use the conceptual and epistemic apparatus of “ethnography.” (“Ethnography” taken here as an epistemological position in human research, not as “the description of a people” in either literary or methodological uses.)

I don’t mean by this that practitioners are all expected to undertake ethnographic field research or that their methods are exclusively ethnographic. I specifically wish to point out that ethnography is not an “exclusive prerogative” of anthropology. And I perceive important connections between these disciplines.

In no particular order:

  • Ethnohistory
  • Ethnolinguistics (partly associated with Linguistic Anthropology)
  • Folkloristics
  • Ethnomusicology
  • Ethnocinematography (partly associated with Visual Anthropology)
  • Ethnology (Cultural Anthropology)

The following disciplines (the “micros”), while not ethnographic per se, often have ethnographic components at the present time.

  • Microhistory
  • Microsociology
  • Microeconomics

Health research and market research also make frequent use of ethnographic methods, these days (especially through “qualitative data analysis” software). But I’m not clear on how dedicated these researchers are to the epistemological bases for ethnography.

It may all sound very idiosyncratic. But I still think it works, as a way to provide working definitions for disciplines and approaches.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, questions?

The Nearest Book

Rules:

  • Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
  • Turn to page 56.
  • Find the fifth sentence.
  • Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall or on your blog. Please post your quote in a comment to this post as well.

It is thus clear that, except for the rulers and the literate, language could hardly be a criterion of nationhood, and even for these it was first necessary to choose a national vernacular (in a standardized literary form) over the more prestigious languages, holy or classical or both, which were, for small elites, perfectly practicable means of administrative or intellectual communication, public debate, or even — one thinks of classical Persian in the Mughal Empire, classical Chinese in Heian Japan — of literary composition.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 

Bilingual Ottawa bilingue

Too bad I don’t have a camera. This sign, seen in front of a building at 240 Catherine St. in Ottawa, would have been a good target for the Flickr treatment. (Emphasis mine: it should be «citoyenneté», not “citozennete.”)

Dommage que j’aie pas d’appareil photo parce que cette affiche, vue au 240 rue Catherine à Ottawa, aurait mérité le traitement Flickr. (Italiques ajoutées.)

LINC/CLIC
Citizenship and Immigration Canada
Citozennete et Immigration Canada
Infocentre du Nouvel Arrivant
Newcomer Information Centre
YMCA – YWCA

Logging Language Attitudes

Language Log is one of my favourite blogs. Often thought-provoking, always thoughtful. It’s both academic and informal, diverse and unified.

Some recent posts caught my interest and they all have to do with attitudes toward language. Or, at least, I collect them all under the same heading (“What can I say? I was a linguistic anthropology major.”).

Now, I do have a number of things to say about each of these. But I guess I’ll use this as a placeholder for posts about language pedantry and other topics related to language ideology.

Sometimes, I wish Yaguello’s Catalogue were available in English. Luckily, Bauer and Trudgill’s Language Myths is.

Enthused Tech

Yesterday, I held a WiZiQ session on the use of online tech in higher education:

Enthusing Higher Education: Getting Universities and Colleges to Play with Online Tools and Services

Slideshare

[slideshare id=528283&doc=enthusinghighered-1217010739916970-8&w=425]

(Full multimedia recording available here)

During the session, Nellie Deutsch shared the following link:

Diffusion of Innovations, by Everett Rogers (1995)

Haven’t read Rogers’s book but it sounds like a contextually easy to understand version of ideas which have been quite clear in Boasian disciplines (cultural anthropology, folkloristics, cultural ecology…) for a while. But, in this sometimes obsessive quest for innovation, it might in fact be useful to go back to basic ideas about the social mechanisms which can be observed in the adoption of new tools and techniques. It’s in fact the thinking behind this relatively recent blogpost of mine:

Technology Adoption and Active Reading

My emphasis during the WiZiQ session was on enthusiasm. I tend to think a lot about occasions in which, thinking about possibilities afforded technology relates to people getting “psyched up.” In a way, this is exactly how I can define myself as a tech enthusiast: I get easy psyched up in the context of discussions about technology.

What’s funny is that I’m no gadget freak. I don’t care about the tool. I just love to dream up possibilities. And I sincerely think that I’m not alone. We might even guess that a similar dream-induced excitement animates true gadget freaks, who must have the latest tool. Early adopters are a big part of geek culture and, though still small, geek culture is still a niche.

Because I know I’ll keep on talking about these things on other occasions, I can “leave it at that,” for now.

RERO‘s my battle cry.

TBC

Chilling Effect and Consensus

This write-up may sound a bit strong but the issue should, in fact, be discussed.

Making Light: The Associated Press wants to charge you $12.50 to quote five words from them

There are different ways to look at these, whether or not people are taking sides. My personal perspective is that these rules The AP is trying to set may contribute to a very important chilling effect and that, in the long run, AP publications will suffer. I also think that we should strive to reach some form of agreement as to rules involving copyright. Laws don’t come in a vacuum.

The Geek Niche (Draft)

As explained before, I am not a “visual” thinker. Unlike some other people, I don’t draw witty charts all the time. However, I do occasionally think visually. In this case, I do “see” Venn diagrams and other cutesy graphics. What I’m seeing is the proportion of “geeks” in the world. And, to be honest, it’s relatively clear for me. I may be completely off, but I still see it clearly.

Of course, much of it is about specifying what we mean by “geek.” Which isn’t easy for someone used to looking at culture’s near-chaotic intricacy and intricacies. At this point, I’m reluctant to define too clearly what I mean by “geek” because some people (self-professed geeks, especially) are such quick nitpickers that anything I say about the term is countered by more authorized definitions. I even expect comments to this blog entry to focus on how inaccurate my perception of geeks is, regardless of any other point I make.

Ah, well…

My intention isn’t to stereotype a group of people. And I don’t want to generalize. I just try to describe a specific situation which I find very interesting. In and of itself, the term “geek” carries a lot of baggage, much of which is problematic for anyone who is trying to understand an important part of the world in which we all live. But the term is remarkably useful as a way to package an ethos, a style, a perspective, an approach, a worldview, a personality type. Among those who could be called “geeks” are very diverse people. There might not even a single set of criteria to define who should legitimately be called a “geek.” But “geekness” is now a reference for some actions, behaviors, markets, and even language varieties. Describing “geeks” as a group makes some sense, even if some people get very sensitive about the ways geeks are described.

For the record, I don’t really consider myself a geek. At the same time, I do enjoy geekness and I consider myself geek-friendly. It’s just that I’m not an actual insider to the geek coterie.

Thinking demographically has some advantages in terms of simplification. Simple is reassuring, especially in geek culture. So, looking at geek demographics on a broad scale…

First, the upper demographic limit for geekery. At the extreme, the Whole Wide World. What’s geeky about The World?

Number of things, actually. Especially in terms of some key technologies. Those technologies some people call “the tech world.” Consumer electronics, digital gadgets, computers…

An obvious tech factor for the upper limit of geekness is the ‘Net. The Internet is now mainstream. Not that everyone, everywhere truly lives online but the ‘Net is having a tremendous impact on the world as a whole. And Internet penetration is shaping up, in diverse parts of the world. This type of effect goes well with a certain type of “low-level geekness.” Along with widespread online communication, a certain approach to the world has become more prominent. A techno-enthusiastic and troubleshooting approach I often associate with engineering. Not that all engineers uses this type of approach or that everyone who uses this type of approach is an engineer. But, in my mind, it’s an “engineering worldview” similar to an updated set of mechanistic metaphors.

Another obvious example of widespread geek-friendly technology is the cellphone. Obvious because extremely widespread (apparently, close to half of the human population of the planet is cellphoned). Yet, cellphones are the geekiest technology item available. What makes them geeky, in my eyes, is the way they’re embedded in a specific social dynamic emphasizing efficiency, mobility, and “always-on connectivity” along with work/life, group/individual, and public/private dichotomies.

The world’s geekiness can also be observed through other lenses, more concerned with the politic and the social drive of human behavior. Meritocracies, relatively non-judgemental ethics, post-national democracies, neo-liberal libertarianism, neo-Darwinian progress-mindedness, networked identities… Figures on populations “affected” by these geeky dimensions of socio-political life are hard to come by and it’s difficult to tell apart these elements from simple “Westernization.” But it’s easy to conceive of a geeky version of the world in which all of these elements are linked. In a way, it’s as if the world were dominated by geekdom.

Which brings me to the lower demographic limit for geekiness: How many “true geeks” are there? What’ are the figures for the “alpha geek” population?

My honest guesstimate? Five to ten million worldwide, concentrated in a relatively small number of urban areas in North America and Eurasia. I base this range on a number of hunches I got throughout the years. In fact, my impression is that there are about two million people in (or “oriented toward”) the United States who come close enough to the geek stereotype to qualify as “alpha geeks.” Haven’t looked at academic literature on the subject but judging from numbers of early adopters in “geeky tech,” looking at FLOSS movements, thinking about desktop Linux, listening to the “tech news” I don’t think this figure is so far off. On top of these U.S. geeks are “worldwide geeks” who are much harder to count. Especially since geekness itself is a culture-specific concept. But, for some reason, I get the impression that those outside the United States who would be prototypical geeks number something like five million people, plus or minus two million.

All this surely sounds specious. In fact, I’m so not a quant dude, I really don’t care about the exact figure. But my feeling, here, is that this ultra-geeky population is probably comparable to a large metropolitan area.

Of course, geeks are dispersed throughout the world. Though there are “geek meccas” like Bangalore and the San Francisco Bay Area, geeks are often modern cosmopolitans. They are typically not “of a place” and they navigate through technology institutions rather than through native locales. Thanks to telecommuting, some geeks adopt a glocal lifestyle making connections outside of their local spheres yet constructing local realities, at least in their minds. In some cases, übergeeks are resolute loners who consciously try to avoid being tied to local circles.

Thanks in part to the “tech industry” connections of geek society, geek-friendly regions compete with one another on the world stage.

Scattered geeks have an impact on local communities and this impact can be disproportionately large in comparison to the size of the geek population.

Started this post last week, after listening to Leo Laporte’s  TWiT “netcast.” 

The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte

 …

I wanted to finish this post but never got a round tuit. I wanted to connect this post with a few things about the connection between “geek culture” in the computer/tech industry and the “craft beer” and “coffee geek” movements. There was also the obvious personal connection to the subject. I’m now a decent ethnographic insider-outsider to geek culture. Despite (thanks to) the fact that, as a comment-spammer was just saying, I’m such a n00b.

Not to mention that I wanted to expand upon JoCo‘s career, attitude, and character (discussed during the TWiT podcast). And that was before I learned that JoCo himself was coming to Austin during but not through the expensive South by Southwest film/music/interactive festivals.

If I don’t stop myself, I even get the urge to talk about the politics of geek groups, especially in terms of idealism

This thoughtful blogpost questioning the usefulness of the TED conference makes me want to push the “publish” button, even though this post isn’t ready. My comments about TED aren’t too dissimilar to many of the things which have appeared in the past couple of days. But I was going to focus on the groupthink, post-Weberian neo-liberalism, Well/Wired/GBN links, techy humanitarianism, etc.

 

Ah, well… 

Guess I should just RERO it and hope for the best. Maybe I’ll be able to leave those topics behind. RSN

TBC