Your Mom’s A Blog

My previous post has been received with mixed emotion.  In case anyone was wondering, yes, that was tongue-in-cheek.  This post will be accurate to the best of my knowledge.  Once again I will be covering spirits.

Like many things as ubiquitous as liquor, the origins of distillation have disappeared into the mists of time.  The noticeable usage and consumption of spirits begins in the early medieval period.  Arab alchemists were, most likely, the first to perfect distillation.  The expansion of Islam into Europe and the subsequent growth and expansion of European trade brought scientific communities together.  The knowledge spread and soon thereafter the product of that knowledge was becoming widely available.

There were mixed reactions to spirits but the majority of people accepted the new beverage quite willingly.  The medicinal value of wine had long been extolled by the ancients.  Because spirits were a concentrated version of wine or beer it was considered to be just that much more beneficial.  The real boon for liquor came with the age of exploration.  Beer and wine survived longer than water without spoiling but spirits where potable almost indefinitely.  An equal amount of spirits could make water safe for consumption or make several times the number of sailors forget their troubles.

As a brief and anachronistic aside, the British fleet probably saw the greatest effects thanks to Admiral Edward Vernon, aka Old Grogram or Old Grog (Grogram was a type of cloth used to make coats of which Admiral Vernon was quite fond.)  Old Grog diluted sailor’s rum with water.  This made for a good balance between potable water reserves and jolliness.  A short time later, lemon or lime juice was added to help ward off scurvy.  Some historians suggest that Britain’s maritime supremacy has to do with healthier, happier sailors.

In the early days of liquor, whiskey and brandy where the most commonly available beverages (brandy from the anglo-germanic brandt-wein and brandy-winn literally meaning burnt wine.)  Wine fortified with additional alcohol (the first of note being Port Wine, from Portugal.  I’m guessing you know where its name originates,) was also popular.  These new drinks now made much longer oversea expeditions possible.  The main items that returned in the cargo holds of these far-voyaging ships were spices.

Europeans had, apparently, been eating bland foods for so long that the experience of spiciness drove the creation and expansion of overseas empires (never mind the land and precious metals, etc.)  One such “spice” that tickled a particular European tooth was sugar.  The search for sugar took Europeans into Africa where they paid much of their local help in brandy or whiskey.  Like the priests of old, distilled alcoholic beverages became an abundant, reproducible, easily divisible and storable form of currency.  Not long after discovering their love of sugar they decided it made more sense to grow it themselves.

It should be mentioned at this point that the European love of sugar and desire to produce it as cheaply and abundantly as possible contributed heavily to the advancement of the African slave trade.  Any history of western expansion is inexorably tied with these sad portions of human history and the development of rum, liquor made from the byproducts of the sugar production or molasses, made the slave trade even more lucrative.  Sugar was already a highly valuable commodity.  The additional value of cheap rum in high demand caused the sugar industry to grow ever more rapidly.  More sugar meant more need for slaves, more slaves meant more rum and sugar, more Rum and sugar meant more slaves.  One of the most interesting facts about liquor is that demand seemed limitless, no matter how much was produced or how cheaply it could be acquired; there was always a call for more.

In the Americas in particular, daily life was awash in hard liquor.  The adversities of daily life in the colonies, particularly on the frontiers drove most people to distraction.  Even after the dissolution of British rule rum and various types of whiskey were widely and heavily consumed by the lower classes (which was almost everyone.)  So strong was the American love of whiskey that when Alexander Hamilton proposed a tax on whiskey by the gallon there was an all out rebellion.  Naturally the rebels didn’t do much because their goal was to be three sheets to the wind as often as possible.  It just goes to show that when the government drives through a levy that makes a county dry, good ol’ boys who were drinking whiskey and rye, start singing “This’ll be the day that I die.”

Having written about beer and wine, it seems only fitting (especially because it follows the chronology of the book where I am getting most of this information,) to write about spirits.  Not the evil kind, though their history has had little in the way of positive effect on human history.  No I mean heavily alcoholic beverages, the kinds that require distillation.  Because of the numerous different types I will focus on one in this particular post, namely brandy.

The history of brandy is not very long in the grand scheme of human history.  It begins in 1969 with the formation of the band Looking Glass.  Lead guitarist Elliot Lurie had an undisclosed “relationship” with a girl (her name is unfortunately lost to history forever.)  In order to lightly disguise that a song he was writing was about her, he changed the name of the song’s protagonist to Brandy (the girl’s actual name was reportedly similar.)  In 1972, Epic Records signed Looking Glass and produced their first album.  That album contained the run away hit Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl.) The rest is a roller coaster ride of meteoric rise to fame and tragedy.

The same year that Brandy was released it topped the charts for 3 weeks and went gold later that year.  Looking Glass, the struggling artists became overnight sensations.  Unfortunately their polished studio sound conflicted with their hard edge from previous years.  Fans were made and lost overnight.  What followed was a downward spiral into the depths of depression for all the band members except for drummer Jeff Grob.

Grob had long been a connoisseur of fine whiskey and scotch.  His contribution had been to recommend the addition of this line:

And there’s a girl, in this harbor town
And she works, laying whiskey down
They say “Brandy, fetch another round”
She serves them whiskey and wine

Grob and Lurie had been arguing about the merits of whiskey and wine respectively for years.  In an attempt to reach a middle ground and potentially prop up the bands teetering finances, Grob set out to make whiskey from wine.  His initial creation, a distillation of wine with the delicacy of wine, but the kick of a good scotch, was an immediate success.

The next hurdle was what to name the amazing new beverage.  Many ideas were proposed including Wineskey (derived from blending wine and whiskey) and Grolurskyval (derived from blending portions of all the band members last names.)  Finally it came to them, Brandy.  The drink would bear the name of the forlorn girl from the song.  It was perfect.

Unfortunately the band was denied both patent and copyright when it was discovered that the name Brandy conflicted, not only with Epic Records copyright of the song, but also with a similar beverage by the same name that had been discovered several thousand years earlier and was already widely produced and distributed.  The band never recovered from this final blow.  The next year Elliot Lurie died in a terrible gardening accident that has gone unsolved to this day.  A short time later, Jeff Grob became the first rock star to die by spontaneous human combustion.

The remaining two members of the band (whose names are sadly also lost to history) were left stunned by the deaths of Grob and Lurie became deeply spiritual.  After a long period out of the public eye they formed the Christian Brothers Distillery which makes fine brandy to this day.  Their memoirs were later purchased by Rob Reiner and adapted for screen.  The final product This Is Spinal Tap was a runaway success despite numerous libel and slander suits from Def Leppard.

What do we want from our data?

There are 6 generally accepted qualities that data should have.  Data should be:

• Accurate:  Reliability and precision, the degree to which the correctness of a quantity is expressed
• Relevant:  Appropriate to decision making requirements
• Secure:  Cannot be inadvertently or unscrupulously destroyed, accessed or altered
• Shareable:  Many people can access it
• Timely:  Most current information
• Transportable:  Easily ported to the necessary decision makers

Data and information may take many forms, some of which may be difficult or nearly impossible to capture.  Graphs, images, tables, reports, documents (narrative) and sales materials are all types of data and information.  Corporate culture and social networks are also types of data and information that are highly used, but difficult to capture.  When a new employee arrives, they often tap into this soft data management network that is collectively managed by the employees.  Who hasn’t started a new job and wondered “Who do I talk to about this problem…?”  Usually we go to someone and ask.  That person will then tell you “how things are done here” (corporate culture) or “go talk to so-and-so” (social networking.)  These are vital to a company, but are rarely documented and less often still, well documented.

This illustrates the difference between hard and soft data and information.  Something that is hard is not reliant on a flow of energy (computer or human brain), e.g., things found in filing cabinets, hard-drives, drawers, warehouses, etc.  Something that is soft is found in the human brain, on RAM, on a computer monitor (and not saved), etc.  Granted that the average human brain will work in some capacity for around 70 years, which is longer than the life of any hard-drive up to this point, it is still considered soft information.  Why?  I don’t know, it just is.  Probably has something to do with our current inability to directly access data stored on the human brain via IT.

If we roughly reverse the good values of data we get the 6 things we want to avoid:

• Badly Interfaced:  Hard to scrupulously access
• Delayed:  Long waits for requested data
• Not Integrated:  Data is scattered all over the dang place
• Redundant:  Same data stored in different places for no good reason
• Uncontrolled:  Data gets into the database willy-nilly
• Unrealistic:  Data doesn’t reflect a real world need

These are bad, don’t do them.

The beauty of the web is the power of interconnectivity, now many businesses can have internal and external data sources.  Internal are those sources which are collected by the company.  External are databases compiled by some entity outside the company.  The real challenge becomes integrating data from an external source, where the IS department has no control over the 6 positive data qualities.

For all my local cohorts I hope that this is in someway helpful or thought provoking.  Our clients are big on Web 2.0, even though when pressed for an exact definition they may not be able to give a clear, unified picture of their views and needs.  This is normal as most clients know what they need, but not exactly how to get it or what form it should take.  In any case, remember what is good and what is bad about data management.  This may help guide certain systems forward.  Or something.  This kind of thing is found in books anyway, so someone thinks it’s important.

Source:  Mostly from Wiley’s Data Management, Databases and Organizations, by Richard T. Watson, 4th ed.