Tag: culture
A Brief History of Beer Gardens
A Brief History of Beer Gardens
Unlike the ales that constituted all the world’s beer before the middle of the nineteenth century, the lager yeasts discovered in Bavaria at that time required a different type of fermentation. Ales — produced through the addition of top-fermenting yeast — ferment rapidly, at warm temperatures. Lagers, contrarily, depend on a slow, cool fermentation, ideally at temperatures between 45–56 degrees Fahrenheit. And after fermentation is complete, they need to be stored and aged for several months, at even cooler temperatures.
This was an era before refrigeration, however, so Bavarian brewers dug out large underground cellars for stashing the barrels while the beer “lagered.” To ensure fuller protection from the sun, they then scattered gravel over the ground and planted leafy chestnut and linden trees, which, as they grew, would provide ample shade from the sun.
Someone did the math. Shade, gravel, beer — all just off the banks of Munich’s Isar River, which provided an additional source of cooling for the beer. Put some tables and chairs outside, and start the taps. Beer garden culture was born.
One way to make sense of the change in the way we …
One way to make sense of the change in the way we live online is to consider how the language we use to talk about our digital selves has evolved. Take terms like cybercitizen and netizen, which each play on the metaphor that the Internet is a structured city or community. According to Google Ngrams, these words found their greatest use in the heydey of Geocities and have been in decline ever since. This happened as we began clicking friend buttons instead of writing in the guestbooks of neighborly strangers. It happened as we traded in our HTML editors for the sleek blue layouts and pre-set photo sizes of Facebook. In other words, we stopped being frontiersmen and started being consumers, conceding the role of maker in our Wild West to corporations. And build they did.
In short, we gave up our netizenship.
The death and life of great Internet cities
What’s the dark side of Silicon Valley?
I’ve been keeping an eye on this Quora question for a while now. Indeed, we mostly hear about all the greatness of the Silicon Valley, but there are much be a few downsides to living and working there. What are they? There are many great answers in the thread. Some are more insightful than others. One particular bit that I liked is this one:
Sh!tty technology. This one might surprise people. Aren’t we in the center of technology? Well, here’s the truth. 95 percent of these so-called startups are marketing experiments that (a) don’t need great technology and (b) have to execute fast, which means they pile on the technical debt.