Extreme brews and better ones that stay within more-reasonable limits
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on October 26, 2014
While in Antwerp last week I sampled many good beers but none as good as the Trappist-brewed Orval pictured.
The locals love it so much that demand far exceeds supply from the ever-shrinking ranks of monks who brew it at the monks at the centuries-old Abbey of Notre Dame d’Orval. It is lip-smacking good, or as the Belgians in this Dutch-speaking region say—smakelijke.
On the flight home I watched several episodes of Brew Dogs, which features a pair of zany Scots who go for extreme craft beers. For example they took a blond Belgian ale and freeze distilled it many times to a level of 55 percent alcohol by volume (ABV)—a new record for beer. However even with it being infused with nettles from the Scottish Highlands and fresh juniper berries, this over-the-top brew must go well beyond the bounds of good taste.and … then put in a bottle created by a taxidermist.
A few years ago I headed over the border to Hudson, Wisconsin* to pick up a bottle of the then record-holder for ABV at a now-paltry 22 percent**—Dogfish Head’s World Wide Stout. With some coaching from my number one son, I poured it into a brandy-glass and sedately sipped it. I rate it zeer smakelijke. However, I am happy to go for far more reasonably high ABVs of 8 percent or so that come with tripel Belgian abbey ales. A few mugs of that provide a very good buzz. Proost!
*Many great beers do not achieve distribution in Minnesota due to liquor not being allowed for sale on Sundays and especially not growlers of craft-brews—all this being defeated again in May by State Senate. It seems that hell will freeze over and the Vikings will win the Superbowl before we can drink on Sundays. Until then it’s on Wisconsin.
**See this beer well down the BeerTutor.com list of strongest beers in the world.
Laws of nature lead to rare events that really ought not surprise anyone
Posted by mark in Consumer behavior on October 18, 2014
Years ago I traveled to Sweden intending to dig up some Anderson family roots. Although I had little luck tracing back the tree (too many sons of Anders!) it was great fun touring this Scandinavian country that seemed so much like home in Minnesota. One thing they had that we did not was a complete wooden warship—the Vasa —which sank on her maiden voyage due to some engineering issues (since then the Swedes have rebuilt their reputation!). After a dramatic movie-reenactment of this ship’s history, the lights came up and I discovered a dear friend of our family sitting right behind me. Unbeknownst to me they’d also gone for a holiday in Sweden, decided to go to the same museum, etc. Miraculous!
It turns out that from a strictly statistical view, coincidences like this really are not so unexpected. As physicist Freeman Dyson put it, “the paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often.” A Cambridge mathematician laid this out in his eponymous Littlewood’s Law of Miracles, which states that in the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. Dyson provided a simple proof of this law as follows. “During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month…The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month.”*
I wrote all this about Dyson and Littlewood over ten years ago in my May 2004 DOE FAQ Alert ezine. What reminded me of it was this Science magazine review of a new book titled “The Improbability Principle, Why Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events Happen Every Day” by Professor David Hand, former Chair in Statistics at Imperial College, London. It lays out these five laws that explain why seemingly rare events are really not that unusual.
None of this surprises me. In regards to the time I ran into a friend from Minnesota in Sweden, such encounters must be common that with so many of our inhabitants being of Scandinavian descent, most all of whom vacation in the summer, and go to the same popular attractions. How many of you have unexpectedly met someone you know while traveling far from home? I’d venture to say it’s the majority. That’s what these statisticians are trying to tell us. They really know how to take the excitement out of life. 😉
Japanese tribologists confirm that banana peels are slippery
We all know that banana peels are slippery, but who suspected this would be worthy of study. I suppose that given there’s a field of study (tribology) that focuses exclusively on the rubbing of surfaces, it stands to reason that the friction of fruits would come under scrutiny. The Japanese researchers who studied banana peels were singled out for an IgNobel prize for an achievement that made people “LAUGH, and then THINK.” It turns out that learning what makes these fruit coverings (aka “epicarps”) so slippery might lead to better lubrication of artificial joints.
It really is amazing how much a banana peel does to reduce friction. Check out the data shown in this report by Business Insider. As noted here in a Science News blog a floor littered with peels is not good for monkeying around, being nearly as slippery as ice, which us Minnesotans can readily appreciate. It would be funny, though, to see someone try this. Ha ha—someone already did as you can see in this Mythbuster’s clip of slips.
Online courses attracting cheaters?
According to the authors of the recently published statistical study “No More Excuses-Personality Traits and Academic Dishonesty in Online Courses” (Journal of Statistical Science and Application, V2 (2014) 111-118) cheaters now run rampant across most college campuses. With the number of undergrads taking classes online—4.3 million and growing fast, opportunities for academic dishonesty are expanding. Surprisingly, this experiment showed less cheating in the virtual than in the traditional classroom settings; indicative, perhaps, of those going online being more motivated to learn, rather than just achieving credits. This is good to see. Also, I was happy to learn that this and other similar studies found Americans being less accepting of cheaters and applying higher standards for honesty than most other nationalities. Along those lines, US News and World Reports in this June posting advises students to “Think Twice Before Cheating in Online Courses,” particularly when being proctored by webcam. The lady pictured with a cheat-sheet written on her arm might never get the chance to roll up a sleeve. That’s just too bad.
The most useless sports stat I’ve seen yet
When Minnesota Twin Trevor Plouffe came up to bat last night at Target Field they flashed this totally irrelevant stat up on the scoreboard: “Through July Plouffe is the only Major Leaguer to have at least 35 at bats vs 1 team.” I wondered how anyone can come up with such obscure information. This XKCD cartoon explains it.
Shocking research—young men prefer a jolt of electricity over doing nothing
Two-thirds of University of Virginia male students preferred a shock to doing nothing, whereas only one-quarter of the women did. This finding by psychologist Tim Wilson, which I read about in the Wall Street Journal,* does not surprise me in the least—young fellows always seek excitement that causes immediate pain or potential catastrophe for their life and limb. The more micromorts, equal to a one-in-a-million chance of death, the better, at least so far as men are concerned.
According to WSJ’s 7/18/14 article “Risk Is Never a Numbers Game,” micromorts (MM) were devised in the 1970’s by Stanford’s Ronald A. Howard to quantify the chances of death for any particular activity. Each day on average the typical American faces a 1.3 MM probability of a sudden end from external causes, that is, not a natural demise. The authors, Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter, bring up all sorts of morbid statistics. What interested me was not the murders and other deathly events brought on through little or no fault of the individual, but rather the discretionary doings such as horseback riding (~1 MM) and mountain climbing (12,000 MMs!). If you like heights but the latter sport exceeds your tolerance for risk, consider parachuting at a far safer level of 7 MMs or be really conservative by simply going on a roller coaster at 0.0015 MMs.
Whenever I see statistics like this, I wonder if one shouldn’t just strap on a helmet, grab a mattress, blanket and pillow, go down into the basement with the supplies left over from the millennium Armageddon and curl into the fetal position over in the southwest corner where tornadoes do the least damage. That being very boring, I’d first set up a battery with leads for giving myself a shock now and then.
How to weigh risks of medical tests and treatments
After suffering a heart attack in 2004, I was directed by my first cardiologist to go in annually for nuclear imaging. Test after test showed near normal function despite the noticeable but relatively minor muscle damage. My last scan in 2009 came back with a twist, though. The heart looked good but a white spot showed up in my chest that looked like a cancer. This necessitated me going in for a CT scan. It came back negative (no cancer). Nevertheless I spent a couple of weeks in a state of high suspense.
Now I’m undergoing underwriting for a key-man insurance policy for my company. Maybe I will need to go back in for another nuclear imaging. Although it will be useless to push back on this, my current cardiologist says there’s no need to spend the money and expose me to the radiation so long as I’m not exhibiting any changes in my heart health (I am not).
My point is that one should not assume that it’s always good to get testing, both because of its inherent dangers and because of the chance of false positive results—mistakes that can be very costly for the patients psyche. Also, the outright costs of over-testing cannot be overlooked. In this case I got irradiated two-fold by the nuclear imaging and then by the CT’s x-ray bombardment. (Is it irony that a test for cancer increases ones chance of cancer?)
My friend Rich put me on to this very-informative podcast by Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) featuring a talk, aired on June 30, by Dr. Jerome Goodman and his wife, Dr. Pamela Goodman on how to make medical decisions. Not only are both partners in this couple outstandingly qualified to speak on these matters, they bring quite different perspectives on how to weigh the risks of tests and treatments versus the potential benefits.
For example, a middle-aged woman is told that her cholesterol being above 200 exceeds the level considered safe for her heart-health. She is advised to go on statins to reduce the risk of heart attack by 30 percent. However, some research by this patient uncovers the statistic that women of this age only face a 1% risk of such a catastrophic event whereas 1 to 10% of those going on statins suffer the side-effect of myopathy—a painful and debilitating muscular disease. As a result of this woman doing her homework, she decides not to take the doctor’s advice. Does that make sense?
There really is no right answer for any of these medical decisions, but it surely is worth pressing your physician for data on risks versus benefits, doing your own research and, if it’s important enough, getting a second opinion.
Not the usual boring statistics conference—attendees called to duty for developing an optimal blend of beers
Earlier this month I attended the 5th European Design-of-Experiment User Meeting in Cambridge, England, which, considering the topic being statistical design of experiments, turned out not to be as dull as one might think. All the credit for the pizzazz goes to our colleagues across the Atlantic—PRISMTC; in particular Paul Nelson and Andrew Macpherson. They conjured up an in-conference experiment that developed an optimal blend of three local beers (all made by Milton Brewery and sold in bulk by Polypins (36 pints) from £56, Firkins (2 polypins) from £84), a pale ale called Cyclops (30-80%), a bitter under the label Justinian (20-70%) and a dark mild named Medusa (0-50%). Prior testing by these two boffins of stats and zymurgy (that is, the study of yeasty concoctions) led them to constrain the ranges of the three brews to the ranges shown in parentheses.
Paul and Andrew laid out a clever design that, via balanced incomplete blocking, restricted any one taster to only 4 blends, while testing enough combinations often enough to provide adequate power for discerning just the right formula. The fun bit was them asking us conference-goers to provide the necessary data prior to an atmospheric dinner at Magdalene (for some reason pronounced in English as “maudlin”) College.
This limitation on beer was one departure from a similar mixture experiment on beers that I ran* with my two sons and son-in-law as the tasters (little chance them going along with such a sensible restriction). The other wrinkle was them requiring all of us to taste a strip of paper that ferreted out about a third of the tasters being “super tasters”—those who immediately recoiled from the bitter taste (many thought it just tasted like paper).**
It turned out that the bitterest blend, in contrast to the mildest of the beer mixtures, was not greatly liked. I think this must be an acquired taste! You can see this on the triangular, 3D response surface graph of the predicted response—the lowest corner being the B:Bitter. Surprisingly, mixing in some A:Ale makes a relatively tasty brew—these two beers synergize, that is, provide much better results than either one alone. But the tastiest blend of all is the peak at the C:Mild corner, with 30% of Cyclops, 20% of Justinian and 50% of the Medusa, some blends on a ridge through the middle of the triangular mixture space look promising.
Three cheers for three beers and hats off to the brilliance of Paul and Andrew of PRISMTC for pulling off this fun, clever and informative taste test. See their full, illustrative report here.
*See Mixture Design Brews Up New Beer Cocktail—Black & Blue Moon
**Check out this BBC report and short video on testing for super tasters
Odd statistics from the United Kingdom
I’m enjoying a weekend in London prior to a conference in Cambridge next week. I was happy to see in the news that the Prime Minister David Cameron is under investigation by the UK Statistics Authority for biasing figures on in his party’s favor. Evidently the British are more vigilant than the USA on out-and-out self-promoting misstatements.
On a more frivolous note, here are some stats on people in these parts that I found in this recent news on the weird by UK’s tabloid the Express gleaned from the soon-to-be-published book Numberland by Mitchell Symons–a principal writer of early editions of Trivial Pursuit and author of That Book of Perfectly Useless Information, The Book of More Perfectly Useless Information, and Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies?:
- A girl reportedly called Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor (spelling TUBE) was born in 1924 on a Bakerloo line train at Elephant and Castle. (I took the Bakerloo line today while bopping around London.)
- The average British adult moves home every seven years. (That seems a bit inconvenient for the parents.)
- One of ten British adults admit to wearing the same item of underwear three days in a row. (I thought it smelled somewhat musty while jammed into the steamy-hot Bakerloo.)
- In 1705 John Smith was hanged for burglary at the Tyburn Tree. After he had been hanging for 15 minutes, a reprieve arrived and he was cut down. Amazingly, he was revived and managed to recover. As a result, he became known as John ‘Half-Hanged” Smith. (This just chokes me up.)
Conqueror paper dominates in flight test
After seeing this record-breaking airplane flight I bought a ream of the Conqueror® CX22 paper used for the construction of the amazing flying machine. Would it produce the same outstanding results from weekend warriors?
I put this to the test on Sunday with my son-in-law Ryan, my son Ben and his friend Josh. Of course none of them could throw like the champion “pilot” and Arena Football League quarterback, Joe Ayoob, who vaulted the hand-folded paper aircraft 226 feet, 10 inches on Feb. 26, 2012 at McClellan Air Force Base in California. Also, the simple dart template used for making the airplanes could not compete with the design of “the paper airplane guy” John Collins. However, after blocking out the difference between throwers (Ryan being the standout), I found a significant advantage to the heavier (26.6 pound) and stiffer Conqueror paper over a standard 24-pound stock we use at Stat-Ease made by Navigator).
The picture tells the story (click it for a close-up view)–the Conqueror shown in red far exceeding the standard stock (black points), with one exception highlighted at the upper left. It turns out that Ben ‘accidentally’ spilled beer on his buddy Josh’s airplane. That’s the way things go on the weekend competitions—whatever it takes to win.