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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Friday, January 09, 2009
The other day, I wrote about technological compression (see kilobyte, mb, gb, tb, pb...); I was talking with someone about barley and alcohol, and thought some more about how our tech tools have given us so much of what would seem to be power…
Being the youngest of four children (in five years! My mother was pregnant nearly the entire time…), I absorbed all that I could from my siblings - including learning how to read, which I did when I was three (my only claim to precocity).
Once I learned how to read, I never stopped. I read everything I could get my hands on, and lived in a bibliophilic house, so there were lots of books around.
Librarians have always, apparently, recognized my passion for books and reading, and one of them frustrated the hell out of my step-mother: she never charged me overdue fines, since she didn't want to discourage my devotion to reading. My step-mother, on the other hand, wanted me to learn responsibility. Sorry - looks like the dreamers win again!
I read all kinds of stuff, but acquired an early interest in science-fiction; fostered, likely, by watching Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon when I was six years old, so I grew up in the space age.
An early favorite was John Christopher's excellent Tripods Trilogy, in which humans have been enslaved by aliens, The Masters, who traveled in little vehicles with three, long, tall legs - when I was a boy, we used to pass a water tower standing among the firs by the highway, and it would f*r*e*a*k m*e o*u*t.
Three boys evade being "capped," a rite-of-passage in which the young submit to The Masters' mind control, becoming like all the adults. They meet up, learn of the Resistance, hook up with them, and volunteer to endeavor to infiltrate the alien city, hoping to discover a weakness.
Which they do - don't let me spoil it for you -
The Resistance learns that the Masters are extremely susceptible to alcohol, and manage to communicate this to the lads, who are enduring heavy servitude in the alien city, the gravity being artificially enhanced, and the atmosphere poisoned, to duplicate the home planet of the aliens.
All they need to do is introduce alcohol into the Masters' water supply - but how to smuggle in the alcohol?
Impossible. They'll have to manufacture it.
How?
By making a mash of the starchy biscuits they are given to eat, and then fermenting it.
They do, and the plan succeeds.
So there I was, six years old, and wondered: what's a mash?
I was completely intrigued - a "mash" must really be something, if one is able to make it out of crackers and ferment it.
Books in the library were no help - I remember asking an uncle, but he had no idea.
I grew up with this quest, occasionally and profoundly curious.
Finally, I don't remember how, I learned that a mash was a means of heating crushed grain in water until enzymes had converted all the starch to sugar - which you can ferment.
I suppose it took me about twelve years to answer that question (and once I had the information, I began brewing beer, and never looked back - in fact, perhaps tomorrow I'll write about how one starts with a field of barley and ends up with pale ale, or lager).
Not long ago, I was curious - how long would it take to answer that question with today's tools?
Twenty seconds - I used a stopwatch, even.
That's about 19,000,000 times faster.
It took more time to open Firefox and type in the Google search than it did for the browser to return the links.
Never take access to information for granted.
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