The Reticulator

It looks like The Reticular has made its moved successfully, and is now back in operation on a faster host.

Chemists Find What Makes Coffee Bitter says this Yahoo article about a LiveScience article, never mind that I can’t seem to find the original at livescience.com.

“Roasting is the key factor driving bitter taste in coffee beans. So the stronger you roast the coffee, the more harsh it tends to get,” Hofmann said. He added that prolonged roasting leads to the formation of the most intense bitter compounds found in dark roasts.

Oh, yeah?  These people seem to be confusing harsh with bitter.ÂThey are not the same thing, at least not in coffee. I found an actual livescience article from two years ago that gets that part right:

Bitterness comes from skimping on grounds when you brew, brewing for too long, and brewing in a pot or machine with residual grounds left from hours, days or weeks ago.

The person who wrote that knew what he was talking about.  Those are exactly the factors that make coffee bitter.  And bitter is bad.
But harshness is something else entirely. Starbucks coffee tends to be harsh.   Their school of coffee-thought has been labeled the “Burnt is better” school.  Some people like that kind of harshness.   I don’t myself, but I can understand, sort of.

The yahoo article has it partly right.  You get harshness from roasting too much.  But that’s not the same as bitter.

I wonder if that research was done by a non-coffee drinker.  I say never trust a non-coffee drinker to make your coffee.  And maybe you shouldn’t let a non-coffee drinker do coffee-taste research, either.

From Daniel Henninger at the WSJ:

…Now comes word that diversity as an ideology may be dead, or not worth saving. Robert Putnam, the Harvard don who in the controversial bestseller “Bowling Alone” announced the decline of communal-mindedness amid the rise of home-alone couch potatoes, has completed a mammoth study of the effects of ethnic diversity on communities. His researchers did 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities. Short version: People in ethnically diverse settings don’t want to have much of anything to do with each other. “Social capital” erodes. Diversity has a downside….

Give me a break! you scream. What about New York City or L.A.? From the time of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” through “Peyton Place” and beyond, people have fled the flat-lined, gossip-driven homogeneity of small American “communities” for the welcome anonymity of big-city apartment building–so long as your name wasn’t Kitty Genovese, the famous New York woman who bled to death crying for help….

The diversity ideologues deserve whatever ill tidings they get. They’re the ones who weren’t willing to persuade the public of diversity’s merits, preferring to turn “diversity” into a political and legal hammer to compel compliance. The conversions were forced conversions. As always, with politics comes pushback. And it never stops.

The harvest of bitter fruit from the diversity wars begun three decades ago across campuses, corporations and newsrooms has made the immigration debate significantly worse. Diversity’s advocates gave short shrift to assimilation, indeed arguing that assimilation into the American mainstream was oppressive and coercive. So they demoted assimilation and elevated “differences.” Then they took the nation to court. Little wonder the immigration debate is riven with distrust….

Like he said, there’s lots here to argue about. But I think I’ll want to find that original article and see if I can stand to read it.

It seems that a lot of folks are so full of hate for George Bush and hate for tax cuts that they’ve abandoned a lot of their values in the wake of the I35-W bridge collapse — just for a chance to do some Bush-bashing and tax-raising. For partisan political gain, they’re allying themselves with the forces of modern development that are turning the earth into a monotonous, bland place and which disconnect us from the environment and from each other.

I’ve blogged about bridges in my bicycle blog: Bridges to Planet Earth where I breathed a sigh of relief that an old bridge in Tennessee is not currently threatened by the safety-efficiency people.

Personal recollection: When we lived in St. Cloud, MN in the mid 70s it was on the opposite side of the Mississippi from the University where I was going to grad school. We lived close enough that I often walked across the bridge to get there — the 10th Street Bridge. It was a rickety old thing that rattled as cars went across, and it couldn’t handle the volume of traffic that some planners thought should be directed through our neighborhood.

In the winter time it was a COLD walk across that bridge. It could be quite a painful ordeal. The river runs north and south there, and the valley acts as a wind channel for the cold north winds. There was nothing on those trusses to shelter you. Brrr. It makes for quite the memories now.

I found somebody else’s blog entry about that bridge: Deep Blade Journal It has photos of the old bridge and of the new one that replaced it. Replacement was always a controversial topic while we lived there. Planners wanted to replace it; those of us who lived in the community didn’t want it replaced, and it was held off for many years. It couldn’t last forever, though, and eventually the safety-efficiency people had their way. There is now a new bridge, a lot of traffic, and the world is a more boring place for it. I’ve been back to drive across the new bridge a few times, always with a sense of loss.

But it’s not all loss. Not until I saw the above blog entry did I see the underside of that bridge. It’s not your ordinary boring Interstate bridge. The designers and engineers could have done a lot worse. Maybe someday people will be just as protective and fond of that one as we were of the old 10th Street bridge.

Main point, though: There’s more to life than safety and efficiency.