Passing fancies #28

Strap yourself in and prepare to be inundated with evidence of my weird interests, much of which I found thanks to my RSS feeds.

Beer

Each year I start anticipating a few favorite beers which are only available when cooler temperatures arrive.  Here's a few I look forward to buying each Fall/Winter.

Troegs Mad Elf has been my favorite holiday beer for a long time.  The combination of cherries, local honey, and the base of a really fine Belgian strong ale makes this one of my favorite beers ever.  I love most Troegs beers and I'm grateful that their brewery is only about 2 hours away from us.   Mad Elf is typically available from November to January each year.

Commonwealth Marveloso is a barrel-aged imperial stout which I've sought out ever since I heard about I first heard about it around 2017.  I wasn't able to find it until two years later but I have managed to buy some every year since then.  Each year they release two "variants" which is a base beer with a few "adjunct" ingredients (typically non-traditional beer ingredients) added.  Unfortunately Commonwealth Brewing's main location is about 4 hours away which is a bit far for a day trip so I have to be satisfied with the few bottles I manage to track down each year.  It's typically available in the December to January timeframe each year.

Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout (aka BCBS) is the original Bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout, having first been brewed in 1992.  It's very flavorful and quite potent.  Goose Island offers a few variants each year, some of which are really tasty.  It's released Black Friday each year which gives me something interesting to buy instead of fighting the crowds at the traditional start of holiday shopping.

Books

Last week I finished reading Drown by Junot Diaz.  It's a collection of short stories which I enjoyed nearly as much as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, an award winning novel of his which I last re-read a few years ago.  I'd be hard pressed to describe why I like Junot's books so much.  They provide a peek into the lives of characters who are quite different from me and yet suffer from similar insecurities and problems.  Here's a link to a Google Talk given by Junot about his most celebrated work which I found fascinating.

https://youtu.be/I-tD45oj1ro?si=uwMftEqRogKQbyic

Television/Movies

This week we enjoyed seeing a movie called Mayday on Apple TV.  It featured a nice blend of action, suspense, and humor (which you might expect from a movie starring Ryan Reynolds).  Recommended if you have an Apple TV account.

We also watched episodes of Silo based on the excellent books by Hugh Howey and Ted Lasso which we were happy to see return for a 4th season.  We enjoy both series a lot.

Music

Last weekend we had the chance to see a favorite local band, Bad Press Band (pictured above), at Harvest Gap Brewery which is close enough to be very convenient.  The band is quite talented and they played a great mix of music which kept us smiling for their 3 hour set.  Harvest Gap is a nice venue for enjoying live music as well.  There's a view of the mountains, an interesting selection of beers and ciders on tap, and some tasty food available, making it a nice place to hang out on weekends.

Links

This author's tribute to his mother struck a chord with me.  I was fortunate to have a very supportive mother.  I'm even more fortunate that she's still around at 88 which lets me continue to enjoy her company.  She has been obsessed with books for as long as I can remember and passed that interest along to me.  She took me to libraries and bookstores whenever I asked.  Her relationship with my stepfather showed me what marriage at its best could be.  My wife and I have been married for 34 years as a result of their example.

https://experimentalliving.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-from-my-mom-1941-2026

At work I develop firmware for small SDRs (software defined radios) which are used to provide PNT (positioning, navigation, and timing) in areas which don't have GPS (aka GNSS) access for some reason which can be due to jamming or spoofing.  My company attends events like the one in the article link below where GPS signals are intentionally jammed or spoofed to see whether vendor devices are able navigate in such a hostile environment. 
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260908-inside-the-fight-to-protect-the-worlds-satellite-signals

I subscribed to Byte Magazine in the glory days of personal computing from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.  Here's a web site which has very tiny digitized pages from Byte Magazine which are also searchable and amazingly enough zoomable enough to be fully legible.  Since I have such fond memories of Byte from that time, I find this website fascinating.
https://byte.tsundoku.io/

Phone hacking used to be a thing back in the days when long distance calls were ridiculously expensive.  Hackers found ways to make calls for no money.  One of the most interesting was a toy whistle which was included in cereal boxes.  John Draper, aka Captain Crunch, got his nickname from his use of this whistle for phone hacking.  Another interesting fact about phone hacking is that prior to starting Apple Computer, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak designed a Blue Box which helped make phone phreaking easier.
https://boingboing.net/2026/09/08/fountain-pen-capn-crunch-whistle.html

I've been a fan of Sherlock Holmes stories as well as the many ways they've been adapted since I was a kid.  The way the character ends has fascinated many fans including me.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/various/sherlock-holmes-and-the-mystery-of-his-endless-afterlife/91626765

The term "load-bearing people" in this article caught my eye.  I think most organizations have a few people quietly doing excellent work but whose efforts aren't recognized.  These people may not be appreciated until they finally leave.  Sadly it's not only work where people can feel unappreciated.  Make sure you let people whose company you value what they mean to you while you have the chance.
https://mikefisher.substack.com/p/load-bearing-people

I've been wearing glasses due to being near-sighted for 60 years.  Apparently that condition gives me an elevated risk of retinal detachment, glaucoma, cataracts and myopic maculopathy.  I've always thought of my poor vision as a nuisance but I guess it's more serious than that.
https://www.aao.org/newsroom/news-releases/detail/ama-backs-formal-classification-nearsightedness

Since I'm planning on retiring soon, I'm always interested in hearing about interesting hobbies.  Building a Soviet-era supercomputer out of vacuum tubes is several orders of magnitude more ambitious than I'm looking for.  It's still fun to read about.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/08/retired-man-turns-spare-room-into-soviet-era-supercomputer/5295046

I've known that cosmic particles (secondary particles created when cosmic rays impact Earth's atmosphere) pass through objects for a long time.  Some attribute bit flips and random computer crashes to these particles.  I never thought about them passing through our bodies though.
https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/how-many-cosmic-particles-are-passing-through-your-body-at-any-moment

News stories which involve space travel always catch my eye.  Launching a mission which hopes to reach Alpha Centauri in less than 80,000 years seems hopelessly optimistic and a waste of resources better spent solving the numerous problems facing humanity.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/09/private-group-wants-to-launch-cheapest-possible-mission-to-alpha-centauri/

Since I'm most definitely not a fan of modern art, the news that an art collector tried to make a bid of $4000 for a broken vacuum cleaner in an art gallery thinking it was an experimental sculpture made me smile.  A mistake like that should be a clue that the collector has more money than common sense.
https://artinc.co/art-collector-bids-4000-on-broken-vacuum-cleaner-only-to-discover-it-was-trash/

The author of this article suggests that LLMs have placed us at the intersection of the Dunning-Kruger effect and the Voigt-Kampff machine from the movie Blade Runner.  It's an interesting observation.
https://www.thesimgap.com/p/the-synthetic-yes-man-ai-dunning

I've found South Park amusing since I saw the first episode nearly 30 years ago.  They always seem to find crazy ways to stay relevant and are often controversial.
https://southpark.cc.com/news/beycql/after-29-years-south-park-changes-its-name

Apparently leather can be made from fungus instead of animal hides.  I'll be interested to see when products made this way reach market.  It makes me picture tough guys wearing mushroom jackets.  Nah, it doesn't have the same ring, does it?
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2026/09/plastic-free-fungus-based-leather-is-going-big/

Starlink and other companies which have large numbers of satellites create a number of problems.  The RF frequencies their signals bleed into the surrounding frequencies used by radio telescopes. Also, the sheer number of satellites interfere with viewing by traditional telescopes.  Don't get me started about the absurb plans of Reflect Orbital, either.

https://www.gadgetreview.com/starlinks-signal-leakage-is-threatening-radio-astronomys-most-critical-frequencies

An engineer has managed to turn a simulated fly brain into a day trader for cryptocurrency.  Apparently once you can simulate the effects of dopamine on a brain, you're most of the way there.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/engineer-turns-simulated-fly-brain-into-a-crypto-day-trader-posts-downloadable-sim-to-github-166-700-virtual-neurons-read-candlestick-charts-for-dopamine-hits