Historical Tidbits: Beer. The Kegmaster Saves Draft Beer, 1954

From 1954: Kegmaster, Inc. launched a new device designed to help bar owners prevent waste and earn profits. According to the company, its new Kegmaster dispenser "automatically measures every glassful, down to a fraction of an ounce," and is designed to extract "all the beer in a keg, letting none of it get flat." Bar owners no longer needed to rely "on the skill of the bartender."

Instead, the Kegmaster dispenser "hydraulically draws each portion into a measuring chamber" designed to hold the precise size of a serving. "When the bartender draws a glass, the beer in the chamber flows out" into the glass, and "fills up again automatically." No waste, no fuss, no muss.

Hmmmmm. Question is: Did the Kegmaster "machine" pull an "honest pint"?

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Source: "Beer From the Machine," Business Week, April 3, 1954, p. 102.

Tip o' the mug -- and a wink -- to Jeff Alworth of Beervana and his Honest Pint Project.

Interview With Ken Elzinga; Or, Another Reason to Love the Internet and Web

This is cool: One of the guys over at Monday Night Brewery apparently knows Ken Elzinga, an economist who studies the brewing industry. He persuaded Elzinga to do an interview and the results are here. Great stuff! Give it a read.

Why We Drink, Take Two (or Three?)

A few weeks back, the "Proof" column in the New York Times contained a truly-worth-reading take on alcohol. I commented on it here. I mention it again, because Jacob Grier just posted a short, but cogent, comment about that "Proof" column, also worth reading because Jacob "does" alcohol for a living. He makes a point I tried to make here, although he's considerably more articulate than I was.

The Never-Ending Battle Between Professors and Students

Last week, there was an unintentionally hilarious article in the New York Times about the on-going debate over grading, students, and expectations. No surprise, among the denizens of academia -- and the escapees like me -- this provoked a fair amount of commentary. I

f you're interested, there's this at Scholars & Rogues. (The comments will provide considerable entertainment because the back-and-forth between and among commentators turned into a kids versus oldsters battle.)

Then there's this from the always-worth-reading Alan Jacobs, who also has a link to an equally hilarious response from a writer for The New Republic.

Free Information, Not-Free Information, and the Tension Between Them

This morning I read an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (no, you liberals! That's not an oxymoron.) The piece is titled "Information Wants to Be Expensive," and concerned the whole newspapers-are-dying problem. (As always, there's no way to know if the WSJ provides free access or not.)

Anyway, the author mentioned Stewart Brand's now-legendary comment about information wanting to be free -- and then noted that the "free" statement was only part of a longer comment.

So naturally, the historian in me wanted whole story. You can read Brand's original comments (which he made at the now-famous, in some circles, 1984 "hackers" conference) here. (The link will take you to an e-version of the May 1985 issue of Whole Earth Review. Brand's comments -- and Steven Wozniak's reply -- begin on p. 49.)

Then he expounded on the idea in a 1987 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT:

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

The book itself has not been digitized (at least not as near as I can tell), but I found the full quote here. More here. Two useful books on the history of all this: Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture, and John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said. (Full disclosure: I've read Markoff's book, and I read Fred Turner's dissertation, on which he based his book, but not the book itself. It's on my list.)

Oldsters, Unite! (Via Twitter, Please)

I KNEW there was something "off" about this whole Twitter thing! I knew it! The something that's "off" is, er, um, me. I'm old. Twitter users are not. According to the report:

Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults. Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter.

The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

So, what to do? What to do? Back out gracefully before I further embarrass myself? Or --- dive in full force and be one of those few who transform a technology into something for all of us? Decisions, decisions. Time's up. Made up my mind. I'm staying out there on the (leading) edge. (*1) Oldsters, embrace your inner digi-selves!

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*1: If only because, once I signed up for Twitter, and started playing around with it, I suddenly "got" how useful and, well, fun, it could be. And I'm all for fun.