Or just plain Merry Christmas!

One of the most promising new webcomics---Wayward Robot---discussed on the podcast Web Comic Beacon (at about the 24th minute). The comic is drawn by my younger son.

Which beer style has the most calories? In general: porters. The least: lager, the style of beer with which you are probably most familiar. Budweiser, Miller, Coors, the majority of all mass-market beers are all brewed in the lager style.

These box-plots use data from the web site RealBeer.com. The editors of that site keep a running list of brewers, beers and the alcohol, calories, and carbohydrate content of, at this writing, 229 different beers from 72 different breweries. There are, naturally, many more beers and breweries than this around the world; this data reflects the beers of most interest to readers and users of RealBeer.com. The classification into styles of beer is my attempt, and any mistakes in classification are my own. You should visit RealBeer.com to learn more about beer styles. The RealBeer.com data set is most complete with alcohol values, but there is far less information about calories and carbs, owing to the greater difficulty of obtaining or measuring those values.

Here’s a quick lesson on how to read box plots: the dark, center line is the median, the point at which 50% of the values are above, 50% below. The next two horizontal lines are the quartiles: the top one is the 3rd quartile, which means 25% of the values are above it; the next is the 1st quartile, which means 25% of the values are below it. The top and bottom lines are the 5% and 95%-tiles, with the obvious interpretation. Points beyond these are more extreme values. Box-plots are intended to give you an idea of the spread, variability, and distribution of data.

But the main lesson is: if you are counting calories (and don’t insist on taste), lager beers are your choice. Lager and ales also have the widest ranges of calories, but this may reflect the fact that most of the data are from these two main groups. 44% of the beers listed are ales, 38% lagers, 4% porters, 8% stouts, and 6% wheats. There was also one barley wine, a style noted for its high alcohol content, which I classified into an ale since it is difficult to do statistics with just one data point.

How about alcohol content?

I have been playing the game of petanque for several years now. You may have seen its modified Italian form called bocce. Both games are similar, but whereas in bocce…

Shoot to kill

July 1995

(I wrote this about six or seven years ago and had it posted to my website where I was a graduate student. I thought that it was lost forever, and I only managed to find it because several people archived it. Truly, nothing ever dies on the web. I thank these kind people. It’s a little worn by time and could stand some editing, but I’ll leave it as it originally was.)

Of course, with a title such as this, I had better be able to prove it. After all, hundreds of books are written in the genre each year. Thousands exist to pick from. And who’s to say another, more awful book than the one I’m about to describe, will appear and usurp the uncoveted title of Worst Science Fiction Novel Ever?

These caveats notwithstanding, however, my faith is strong. In fact, I am so absolutely sure that I’m correct in my choice, that I’m willing to risk the title “worst ever”. More on this later.

Many aficionados of science-fiction were weaned, not with short stories and books, but with TV. So it was with me. I started with the original Star Trek, others perhaps with Space 1999. The youth of today will have to make due with Deep Space Nine or Submarine Show (whatever the name is). These shows eased us into the classics, such as Foundation or Stranger in a Strange Land. If you were lucky. Unlucky neophytes wandered into a L. Ron Hubbard treatise or some pulp boiler, complete with front cover fanged monsters menacing beautiful large-breasted women.

Once these innocents, these hapless souls, enter the morass of disagreeable pages they are lost forever to science fiction. Nothing will ever convince them to reenter the fold. Perhaps it is our duty, then, to purge the field of ill-conceived and poorly executed works?

This supposes that one is able to judge the intrinsic merit of the text. Modern critics claim that it cannot be done. They may be right. But this is academic to our subject: what does watching TV have to do with learning to read science fiction? In this case, everything.

Walter Koening played the lovable and overly proud Russian navigator of the Starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek. He appeared in the Star Trek movies. He also wrote a book. Perhaps he felt an inward pull, a conviction that led him to convey a profound message. Or, like William Shatner, it may be that he was trying to cash in on the series and his personal success and make a buck. You be the judge.