Beer Taste Tests - Intro

So I'm trying out beers, and starting today doing it somewhat methodically.

I bought 6 different 24oz single servings of beer from the store. The candidates are:

1. Busch ($1.69) - Since it's claiming association with mountains and stuff, I figured it must be the Coors competitor; I've not tried it in known memory.
2. Corona Extra ($3.19) - I've found Coronas to be passable in recent experience, but most likely this can't win because of its price.
3. Miller High Life ($1.69) - I had an MGD in recent memory, and it was passable, so why not try the classic?
4. Coors ($1.99) - The Coors Light I'd had most recently got me thinking that maybe beer was a passable way to ease consciousness after all, so the theory is this might be the better flavored cousin.
5. Coors Light ($1.99) - One of the better tasting beers I've had in modern times, it made me consider beer as a reasonable alternative to wine or hard stuff.
6. Sapporo ($2.49) - Japanese and completely unknown, but with no claims of lagerhood.

These were selected because

• They were available as singles in this particular store.
• They were NOT lagers (which I've slowly learned are not what I like).
• They were reasonably inexpensive.

Over the coming week I'll have tried each of these and perhaps a few more and I'll put my notes out as a blog.

Other thoughts from the day

Meg and I discovered today that we both have had serial "flying dreams" through our growing up days. Very similar aspects in that:

• We flew naturally and on the wind in realistic settings
• People didn't take notice that we were flying and didn't care
• We interpret our flying dreams as a recognition that we could transcend on our own without help from others, and expressly free of others.
• We believe our flying dreams indicated a persistence of the belief that our lives could still be good and successful (ie. via flying) even without social success. That is, we both had a hard time feeling socially connected in our adolescent years, but this did not get our internal spirits down. Our spirits just decided to fly on their own instead.

Where our dreams and their meanings may have differed were that mine seemed to be more:

• Developing and applying the method of flying, highlighting practicing and discovery, demonstrating courage mixed with caution. In natural flight I never went very far, but rather just enjoyed to local sensation and power of it.
• Set in the context of a social gathering whereat this development of flying ability was what I went off to do, not separating from the gathering, but just getting enough space to test the wind and have room to go. 
• About engaging with people especially near me to show them what I was doing, explain it, and encourage them to try. The result of this was always polite decline and only mild interest turning eventually to a lack of any interest.
• With variations, including some examples of flight in airplanes. These were common with the idea of being much about method and there were more technical aspects to these (short field landings, IFR navigation, etc.)

I enjoyed remembering those dreams. They were positive ones for me, pleasant and hopeful. And it's neat to feel similar to Meg in them as well.

I feel motivated and optimistic today, though it's that moderated type which tries to stay focused enough to not get ahead of my actual making progress. This is despite still being a bit sick, having this cold rainy weather, heading back to work tomorrow morning, and generally still feeling pretty frustrated about the usual complications such as a lack of in-house places for often-used things and the impractical bathroom, and the like. I feel like it's very difficult to get focused time, and then there's always so much to do with it when I do get it! I'm going to try to make a point of writing these journal-like blogs more, for several reasons:

1. Good writing practice and exercise.
2. It provides something for others to read and feel connected to me about.
3. People who care about me or the topics I'm facing will be interested in the content.
4. I'll find the content interesting in the future. For example, I'd like to be able to look back and see what life was like in these hectic days as a parent of young kids.
5. I really do get a lot done in a day, but it's easy to forget just how much. Reflecting on it should help me retain motivation and encouragement.

Today was Easter, and Meg did a very nice job of giving each of the boys little baskets of goodies, nothing over the top, but a few nice and appropriate toys for them. She also prepared eggs for hunting, and I deployed them for Skylar to hunt. It worked out pretty well, but again, see cold weather. I hope she blogs it because that's a topic for the family blog.

There's so much good I observe in my life in a day like this one. I see our trees and lawn doing well; our boys so super cute and fantastic with great accomplishments and discoveries every single day; a truly amazing married relationship, better than any I've ever observed; a location with lots of opportunities at hand; friends and potential friends. I see these things and cherish the thoughts throughout these days. I'm not missing their flashes of brilliance, and I am glad I am not missing them. There's much to be done, and always a certain amount of pressure from that, but isn't that just how it should be? My efforts to produce gains, and what more could I ask for?

Journal: Some homestead progress

After a week of being sick and helping the sick, especially Niko, who was in the hospital for 3.5 days beginning last Saturday, today I finally starting making some progress again on homestead development.

Meaghann got the first (prototype) planter box seated down in the garden. It still lacks irrigation and benchtops, but it could take fill at this point. Despite a few retries and missteps, I'd call it a successful design and implementation. While she was working on that I did all the cutting for planter box #2. This process took about 1:45 project time including setup and cleanup, about 2:10 on the clock. I got a worthy system down for it from all of the work figuring out how to do the prototype. It goes like this:

1. I had already sectioned the 16' wall boards into 3 sections of about 64" each when working on the prototype. This was done to make working with these very long and heavy boards possible with 1 person and without a lot of props. 24 pieces of this are needed for each planter box, 3 for each side, and you can get 2 of them from each of these 64" chunks.
2. I cut 45 degree angles on each end of these 5' boards, good face short. I used the rotation from vertical and laid the boards flat on the saw table. No measuring needed for this step. I staged the boards for efficient processing.
3. From the pile of 12 64" boards with beveled ends, each one was laid good face down on the saw table and 31" measurements taken from each end's long edge. Then with the saw set square I cut each chunk twice to obtain my 2 wall boards and set them aside.
4. Next I shortened and cut points on the 8 corner stakes. In order to do what I could to help make them easier to drive into the ground, I made them a bit shorter overall, cut angles on all 4 sides of the point (instead of just 2), and used 50 degrees instead of 45 degrees. I used a pair of bricks on the work table to eliminate measuring: just set against brick and saw guide, cut, flip, cut, flip, cut, flip, cut... x 8.
5. Next I used the extra wall board material to cut the 4 bench supports. All simple square cuts at 16.5 inches.
6. I deferred cutting the bench tops because I only had material for 2 anyway, and I figured it still wouldn't hurt to see the prototype completed before committing to the bench design, although the prototypes design looks pretty good.

I cleaned up the project at this point leaving only the cut materials, saw horses, and work surface out there. Then we went for an errand run to get lunch, return some items, look for a tool, deposit some checks, and hopefully get the boys to sleep along the way. Easter complicated things a bit, making laundry drop off impossible and forcing Wendy's to replace In-n-Out. The boys didn't really nap and Meg couldn't find a suitable tool. But we did come home with a full suite of tomato and cucumber plants to get the garden started. The rain started during this trip and never stopped for the rest of the day. It's been cold and rainy a lot lately, and I'm impatient for the summer to begin.

Last night I had stayed up studying electrical stuff, and I made a reference sheet of the key points I'd learned. I finally got clear on grounding, service vs sub panels, multi-switch circuits, and other details that I'd always had a slight haze about. That work inspired me to get back to some electrical improvements around dinner time especially after the boys went to bed. Meg helped me identify which circuit every single fixture in the house was associated with except 2: The dishwasher and garbage disposer. I was able to use this information to create a detailed drawing of the west end of the house which each switch, cep, and fixture properly labeled with its circuit.

The circuits are a bit zany in this house, as we'd expected, and I may be able to clarify some of that in time. However, my primary mission is to replace the 2-blade ceps with grounded style ceps in order to remove the need to use those clumsy converters all the while. Like getting the back door properly sealed when shut (something I only completed yesterday), this is a project I'd envisioned to be completed a long time ago, and I've had the replacement receptacles downstairs for months. But I'd always wondered about how safe it would be to make a simple swap of the receptacles, and so I wasn't so enthusiastic about diving in until I'd studied up. Now that I've studied, I realize that the three-prong ceps are no less safe than the 2, only mildly deceptive because they appear grounded but the ground is only the box and cep itself. But even better, I learned that in these situations with ungrounded wiring, a single GFCI cep can provide good similar protection for the entire circuit if it's properly placed. Thus, getting the circuit map figured out is important to being able to find the right place to put the GFCI ceps since they need to be first from the panel on the circuit. With this plan in mind, and with my map made, all that remained was to discover the actual circuit pathways, i.e. where each cep, switch, or fixture appeared in the order of wiring.

Accomplishing this can be done by tracing the wires, but this is not always practical due to wiring being completely hidden in many places, and it's somewhat inconvenient in that it requires running around in the crawl spaces or attic. So I figured that a lot of information can be deduced from testing the wires in the boxes when in the process of replacing the ceps. So I started with the ceps in west wall of the living room and found the following interesting result: One of the ceps is terminal (the end of the line), while the other's removal fails to disable the terminal one! This means that this circuit includes at least 1 branch point, and is not just a simple loop. Turns out the nonterminal cep seems to have split the circuit pretty nearly in half. So, with this information, I may be able to learn the rest by tracing wires in the west crawl space and have a complete map in a matter of 15 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, the two ceps in the living room have been replaced and are working fine. As expected, the wiring is 12-gauge and done old-school. This means my cheap little 15A ceps can't accept the push-in connections, and it means there's a lot of cloth and paper in those metal boxes, which I remove as much as I can when I'm in there. The nonterminal cep was bridged, not by using the screws on the cep, but by doing a soldered, shrink-taped Y-style splice. The ends of the load side meet a bared section of the feed side. My modern view is that this method is at least as tough and risky as wire nuts, and so I avoid both approaches and use the device itself to do the bridging I need whenever possible. And it's quite often possible, thanks to the extra connections modern ceps have.

People by degrees

Calculus has the concept of derivatives and algebra has the concept of "powers" and geometry has the concept of dimensions, while we all have a sense of different levels of depth or complexity. In some sense all these concepts can be thought of as "degrees". If you take that analogy to the way people operate in the world, you can see different "degrees" of awareness or behavior or engagement from the different kinds of people.

0th degree people are primarily aware of or care about the way things are now. They don't care about how things got this way, or how things might change. They're neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but very accepting. 0 derivative people don't tend to be very empowered in their behavior and approach. But they might be great artists or observers of things, or very diligent workers. They might tend to be very complacent, able to be content under any circumstances, and they might even be seen as morally lacking because they might tend to have little opinion about whether their actions mean something good or evil in the world. They generally don't see change as something that's under their control. These people are most likely apolitical or antipolitical.

1st degree people are aware of things changing. They're aware that the current state of things came about from states immediately prior, and they are aware that things are headed somewhere in particular as a direct result of the way things are today. These people might experience change at any rate, ie. they sense things changing continually, but they're not so aware that there are in fact different speeds. People like this might be pessimistic or optimistic as a readily apparent attitude trait, but they might also swing between these two extremes depending on the situation. As such they might tend to be sentimentally nostalgic or persistently dissatisfied. Their level of empowerment is greater than the 0 derivative folks because they have a sense that they can contribute in the flow of change or resist it. These people do have a strong sense of good and bad, and might tend to be almost overly moralistic. These people tend to be on the far wings of political ideology, ie. far right or far left. They feel empowered, but are likely to overestimate their actual impact and typically lack the finesse and longer term vision required to carry through agendas. These people will probably view death as a surprising and sudden interruption of the way things go. In general they are likely to be surprised by things.

2nd degree people are aware that things change as a general rule, but that the flow of change is not a constant. These people have a sense of when things are gearing up or going into decline. They would tend to be empathic about the lives of living things from trees, to people, to cities, to the solar system. For example, they might find it important to consider that the sun will one day burn out taking out the earth with it, and would therefore take the time to research whether mankind is quickly enough developing the ability to avoid the potential catastrophe the sun's life cycle represents. These people are likely to be sensitive to the effect they or others have on a situation, such as "that person is a downer" or "that person inspires people". Similarly they are aware of the forces that are present in the world, energy sources, motivators, inhibitors. These people know that some moments are better than others for addressing a particular situation or pursuing a particular goal, so this means they also tend to develop a habit of keeping several different goals active or latent in their consideration at all times, working on the goals that will yield the most results at any given time.  2nd degree people are aware of cycles, but tend to think within each individual cycle, not over the span of multiple cycles. These people have a rich intuitive sense of experience. They feel the ebb of inspiration or the growing restlessness that will incite creative action. These people are politically pragmatic, but clearly opinionated, with the finesse to build bridges of understanding based on mutual experience. They are empowered to the extent of having agendas to pursue and can usually achieve objectives they set for themselves by exercising persistence, determination, and self-pacing as well as directed energy toward the goal.

3rd degree people see the repeating and complete cycles of change and expect cycles to be reliable and predictable within certain parameters. They are also aware of chaos and how it impacts those cycles. These people can tend to develop a "nothing new under the sun" syndrome if they're not careful, but they also will tend to see through the cycles and engage with the nature of things. These people build very complete internal models of the world, and can intuitively predict both long and short term occurrences in a general sense. They have a strong sense of strategy and how it differs from tactics. These people tend to come across as morally relativistic, and it may be unclear to most observers just what they believe in or what they are pursuing. But usually they are pursuing goals on many different levels simultaneously. For them achieving long term or large gains can be instigated with small carefully considered actions, which they are likely choosing on a conscious level at almost all times. These people definitely tend to be centrists politically, and will pursue ideals like harmony and liberty through relatively subtle means. These people sense their empowerment as a natural and emergent property of themselves. They are resilient but probably come across as less than passionate. Part of this is because they have a tendency to remain steadfast in the presence of the ups and downs of the cycles they are very aware of. They trust that things will come around and move on to develop further.

4th degree people are at one with the Tao. They experience life in progress in its (agnostically) incomprehensible complexity and yet clarity, and move as an integral part of it. They sense that everything they do affects the whole, and all of the whole is accessible to them, even through examining with sufficient care the smallest part of it. These people can summon passion when the time calls for it, but they can also proceed with what seems like no effort at all and still influence the outcomes they desire to see. They are either completely moral or completely amoral, which are almost the same thing in that duality becomes irrelevant and "it's all good".

I think this is really more of a continuum than a group of quantum states, but there may be a stepwise statelike aspect to it. Or in some areas a person might be one degree, and in other areas they might operate with a different degree. I'd say generally that higher degree folks can access lower degree levels of thought, but the reverse is less likely the case. Though to some extent greater complexity and organization of thought (intelligence) is required to operate at the higher degrees, it makes sense that some people by choice or by circumstance might operate at lower degrees than they might have capacity for. Simple example: if I'm super tired today, it's probably better I don't think too much about where things are headed, and instead try to focus strictly on the now, ie. operate primarily in  the 0th degree as a matter of good practice. In many ways the 0th degree looks and feels like the 4th in the holism, nonduality and stillness which becomes evident. I do think that given the capacity, exploring into higher degrees is a positive thing for a person.

And this is the subject of my "Russian Doll" story which only has the first half of the first phase written thus far....

The Queen takes a King

Some time ago I wrote about the Queen and King in the game of chess and how the type of thinking about those pieces mirrors an important concept in life.

This morning I have a vision of a very wise and courageous general, who when facing a seemingly hopeless battle, pulled out the stops and won a great victory by seeming to disregard his own King's safety in the interest of victory. By making an all out play against the adverse conditions, he maximized the application of the Queen's power as the centerpiece of a holistic campaign utilizing all his forces. As a result, he completely surprised his opponents and actually ended up capturing the opposing forces' own capital, completely displacing and even destroying the opponent from the inside out. In effect, he abandoned his own King in an all-or-nothing attempt to capture and employ the King of his adversary. Having done so, the loss of his enemy actually enabled him to resecure his own capital, thereby effecting a complete victory.

In more concrete terms, imagine two generals in adjacent cities. By nature of economics or ideology, the enemy general must continually grow and conquer, taking the offensive, and putting his neighboring city on the defensive. Each general fields an army of professional soldiers, the enemy to attack, and the local general to defend the city of his original sustenance. In this situation, the defending general sallies forth to meet the foe, not just with his soldiers, but with his full population, with a considered strategy to overwhelm his attacker's forces and to counterattack

There are some clear examples of this sort of victory in some of my favorite art. One example is Buffy the Vampire Slayer in her final battle against evil, wiping out the very source of evil by finding a way to promote those she would defend into warriors, and taking that unforeseen new strength into the battle. In doing so she and her compatriots abandon their former lives en masse, and accepting the inevitable casualties, succeed in eliminating the very source and power center of the enemy. The result is nothing less than the creation of a new world for the victors, one where the enemy has not just been defeated, but has effectively been eliminated. The difference between winning the battle and eliminating the enemy lies in capturing or eliminating the enemy's capital. As a side effect, the empowerment of her forces remains in effect as they face a new more open world, where they can create their lives anew in any way they'd wish.

A similar strategy is employed by another of my favorite generals, Ender Wiggin, as he wins his final victory over the buggers. The approach he takes in the that final and real battle is a replay of the one he used to win his last battle at the battle school. Having assessed the situation as one sufficiently desperate that only an all-or-nothing tactic could achieve victory, he surprises the enemy by abandoning his starting point on a one-way mission to win at all costs, including the cost of losing the former source of one's power.

This vision comes to me at a time when I'm considering how in my life to "complete the long pass". I have a sort of impatience about how I'm living my life these days as I lead my family in engaging the world. I feel that my true and most powerful skills are relatively unemployed in playing for victory, and my less powerful and less interesting qualities are what I employ on a daily basis. In short, I feel that I am playing in defense of the King rather than using my full advantage to play for victory. I feel that I am making slow and steady progress in growing my life, but that form of struggle will never end. Instead I want to change the game completely, to eliminate my opposition, and engage life under completely new terms.

In this way of thinking of my everyday life, what exactly is the opposition I need to eliminate? The Buffy story perhaps suggests the right answer: Disregard fear until it can be eliminated through the empowerment and application of all my forces to the fight.

My form of employment is what most strikes me as the defining indicator of my defensive, King-protecting mode of engagement. Working as an employee of someone else keeps me on life support, but doesn't allow me to be fully awake and active in life. Yet the question I must continually wrestle with is whether a job like I have now is necessary to accumulate the tools to go into the battle with. Am I lacking the equivalent of Buffy's scythe? If so, how do I get about the process of getting that weapon, the source of empowerment?

A View of Economics

Today I heard an interesting radio program about the privacy of health information and it made me recall a concept for what I might actually have an interest to get involved with:

Many of my earlier thoughts about what a "lifetoward community" meant were principles that could be developed in the world one step at a time.

1. Economic systems that maximized trust through personal knowledge of partners.
2. More shared resources, including services and products (a corollary of A).

Consider the effect or feasibility of sharing:

1. Land and homesteads including roads, perimeters, and other facilities
2. Sparsely-used infrastructural equipment like lawnmowers, trucks, trailers, manufacturing space and tools, and even cars
3. Sparsely-used recreational and social resources like common gathering spaces, barbecues, grounds, sports courts
4. Data or connectivity services, like shared information technology infrastructure be it broadband net access, servers, applications, etc.
5. Medical assistance (Kaiser is an example)
6. Legal representation
7. Accounting
8. Greater personal control of information by clearer, simplified, audited paths of information sharing. (Corollary of B3 and A.)
9. Corporate engagement with the outside world (bargaining as a corporation instead of as separate individuals)
10. Political clout (ability to discuss and develop stances and lobbying power on political issues)
11. Education (private schooling which has a set of values associated with it)
12. Economic efficiency and sustainability - bulk food buying, waste management, power-generation
13. Explicit debate of policy whereby members understand the foundations of their own lives; the ability to enforce group policy through economic leverage
14. Social network

In reality these are policy-based functional groups, most likely implemented in the American legal system as corporations. There may be several corporations, for and not for profit, or they may be consolidatable.

Perhaps the business to be in is being the administrator of corporations, a corporation providing incorporation services to facilitate people building their own functional groups. Here are some specific ideas:

1. Carpenters' workshop - the non-profit corporation buys a workshop and equips and maintains it with the tools necessary to provide members with state of the art and top notch carpentry opportunities. They have bulk lumber buying power and marketing channels for carpenters to sell their work. Members can get together to collaborate or just
2. Ferrari lovers' group - the trust buys and maintains Ferarris which are shared among the members - works just like a Flying club
3. Housing project - the trust buys land and master-plans it with the participation of shareholders and develops the community including a company store, maybe a school, etc. These of course would be effectively "towns" but the goal is to keep the size of the membership limited to a "tribal" size, and that they can be chartered with different rules than would otherwise be handed down. Entry and exit is not "free" in that you can simply decide to move to the town. Instead you have to sign in to what effectively is a super-HOA. The town has a sustainable waste management system, its own electricity generating capabilities, a shared information downlink, etc.
4. Medical group - limited liability company is a diverse set of doctors who provide their services on retainer rather than on per-visit or per-condition terms. This really starts at the patient level. A group of people gets together to hire these doctors on retainer for their exclusive access. The doctors are charged with education, and the decision making around a common healthcare facility. (Kaiser is effectively this.)
5. People's bank - A non-profit bank (like a credit union) with active engagement of shareholders to maximize shareholder finances.
6. Craigslist is a classic example of a functional networking/IT application. They are a profit corporation which acts in nonprofit ways.

The thing that always occurs to me when I get thinking this way is, how is this any different from the institutions that make up our lives in our various levels of community today? Here are the answers that support the idea anyway:

• Groups are kept smaller with the advantage of being able to actually know your fellow members and service providers personally. This increases trust and accountability and may make for more satisfying transactions. Business is carried out by policy-based choice rather than under threat of litigation for breach of contract.
• Policies are explicitly signed on and under the control of shareholders rather than accepted extrinsically. Transparency to members is the rule, not the exception.
• Profits are always automatically returned to the "consumers" of the services or products. That is, for any given group, the paid administrators of that group have compensation amounts published to the group and open books such that all consumers are also the owners. It's like a Co-op.
• Information technology allows for the simplification of the administration of such groups. Facebook and meetup can do it, but they're just selling networking. The same technology combined with the legal entities like corporations and trusts can be powerful because real goods and services can be legally held in addition to the connections.
• Simply by observing that too many people own too many swimming pools, lawnmowers, cars, trailers, etc. it seems that there must be economic advantage to "sharing".
• A truly democratic (by/for the people) economic system would be a myriad of economic groups like those described here which members sign on to based on the rules of competition of such groups, and each sign-on would be by choice, and the groups themselves would all be non-profit. A person's personality and lifestyle could then be characterized by the aggregate of all functional groups to which he is subscribed.
• These would effectively be known as "consumer groups", non-profit collective-consumption or service entities which leverage combined buying-power to create lower cost customized ways to procure and administer resources for final use.

But then there are arguments that go against that idea:

• Many people don't want to do business with personal acquaintances. We prefer to do business anonymously for cultural reasons.
• People who aren't sharing now will consistently choose not to share. No group they would join would raise their trust level enough to not require their own special tools, cars, lawnmower, etc.
• The "family" is the currently existing equivalent of such a non-profit group. That families in today's world tend to separate rather than consolidate indicates that people in this culture do not need the services suggested here. Of course the problem with families is that members are required to sign on to more than they would choose....
• People are not aware of the negative sides or full profit view of the existing institutions. They vaguely know that they are big and making lots of money off them, but it's not alarming enough to take the extra effort to learn and engage the more complex topics which underpin their own existence. They are buying a right to ignorance (not meant to be a bad thing) and this is a fair trade in many cases.
• It could be argued that all these things are already in place to the extent that the culture would support it. For example, flying clubs and food co-ops exist. Stadiums provide venues for shows at costs which are appropriate to the costs of operation of the venue and the rarity of attendance. In other words, the market is enforcing all these rules already.

Looking at the arguments for and against, one could simply observe this:

Wherever one sees that such a consumer group is needed, that is the place to go into business. Simply provide the service and you're in business. And that's the American way. In other words, to assume a different paradigm will be more successful is probably naive at least until the existing paradigm is mastered. So what are the barriers that keep more people from going into business? Unwillingness to compete? Administrative overhead? Inability to organize (employees, skills)? Lack of access to suppliers and customers? What kinds of people do go into business and which don't or shouldn't?

So, some current challenges for consumers right now include:

• Health care
• Control of information
• Practical education (where public schools are missing the mark)

Guy