That is correct, at least as far as beer goes. Lower original gravity, lower final alcohol content. It wasn’t light beer by any means, but not malt liquor either. Small beer had even lower alcohol. Cider would be higher because of the greater amount of fermentable sugars.
There is an idea floating around now, that he could have survived except for his “medication”. He (they suspect) was taking hellebore as a cure, and being impatient, kept upping the dosage until its toxic nature finished him. So, he may have been just another Darwin Award.
What I learned:
Columbus discovered America - so what about Norsemen, hunters from Asia crossing a land bridge, and who know who else?
People in Columbus’ time thought the earth was flat - not so, that idea was invented much later, as any decent sailor already knew better.
Straight posture meant a ramrod stiff spine - fortunately, I ignored it.
Eating huge amounts of food is healthy - Italian background sure shows there (but that’s family, not school - school had some sort of food pyramid nonsense).
Hiding under the desk will protect you from a nuclear strike - uh sure
The Normans were French - No, they were Danes who had “moved” to France and might have taken it over, given the opportunity
The Spanish misions were kind and benevolent, and “saved” the heathens - saved them for forced labor that is.
The Civil War was all about ending slavery - No, it was all about power and that’s it, at the simplest level.
Two nukes were dropped on Japan because they refused to surrender (too evil to quit I suppose?).
It depends. Is it DC or AC? If AC, it depends on the frequency. At the high ends of radio frequency, you start to see a skin effect. I are a electrical engginear 
Up through my senior year of high school, we were being taught that Columbus “helped popularize” the idea that the Earth was round. :rolleyes:
The Civil War was, of course, about slavery, and Lincoln was a wonderful, flawless leader who everyone adored.
Jews were the only victims in the Holocaust.
Plato was the first person to understand what caused shadows. He also thought that democracy was the best form of government.
“Politics” is etymologically derived from the Latin for “many tickets”.
Shy people just need people to talk to them more, and they’ll grow out of it. :mad:
Not exactly a myth, but a teacher once told me in fourth grade that asking questions wasn’t a good way to learn: you should just sit and listen to your teacher, accept what they tell you, and assume that that’s all you need to know.
Correct derivation: “poly = many.” “tics = blood-sucking insects.” 
I like that.
Another school fallacy: There is no such thing as a stupid question.
Can’t convince me of that. I think they just go into management!
Brady
I can think of some that devolved.
Brady
If that’s not right, why do I feel so much smarter after a couple of bottles of Guiness? :rolleyes:
Brady
What a great idea for a book.
There is also the not enormously implausible possibility he was slowly poisoned. There was certainly motive and opportunity, the methods of doing so in wine were reasonably well known and the semi-vague symptoms we know of could certainly have fit.
Well, to be fair they seem to have lost their northern identity very quickly - like within two-three generations at the most.
Mostly yes but with qualification - it wasn’t about ending slavery to be sure. But at the simplest level it was about slavery, from whence came the struggle over power ;).
And in fact it was :). SteveG1 is absolutely correct that the war wasn’t about freeing the slaves ( except for a relative handful of abolitionist politicians ). But the war was about slavery - that was the driving background issue that created the regional strife and political conflict.
This is one of those odd issues that has received corrective revisionism only to wander too far in the opposite direction. Many very well-educated people now correctly scoff at the old patriotic myth that the war was about the Union and Lincoln seeking to free the slaves. But they then take it a step too far by erroneously stating that slavery was a minor or non-issue in the outbreak of the Civil War. Nope. It was THE issue. Just not in its mythologized form.
At least IMHO. To be fair ( again and this time with reluctance 
) this has been argued several times on this board. But those who disagree with me are wrong :). IMHO :p.
- Tamerlane
True, but still misleading; that so many people who were nominally opposed to slavery were complicit in it for so long (even after the war was well and underway) demonstrates much about politics and the relativism of political value judgements that people–especially those who believe everything they hear on Fox News or All Things Considered–don’t grasp.
But it was more complex than “good guys” and “bad guys”, just as in today’s world it is more complex than “The Coalition Against Terror” and “The Axis of Evil”. The motives of the North were not so clean and pure as textbooks would have you believe–the application of trade tariffs was indeed an attempt to keep the Southern states nonindustrialized and relatively impoverished to the benefit of the North–and the resistance of the South to abolition–while ethically unjustifiable from our perspective–was based upon a common belief in the economic necessity of slavery. We make those same rationalizations today, and for the same reasons. Without an understanding of what happened then, we can’t make the connection and learn the lesson now.
Grant’s wife owned a slave. Lee, on the other hand, never owned slaves and was philosophically opposed to slavery. “Leadership” sometimes doesn’t equal agreement, but rather complicity to the mean. The American Civil War was a pivotal moment, not only in American history but also, as it turns out, in world history, and is in some ways a battle that was never fully completed; a political (not just cultural) schism exists even today between the South and the rest of the nation in a way that was never true of any other region. It also represented the last (and worst) major conflict over trade slavery. To diminish it a simple “Blue vs. Grey” paradigm is to ignore an important and bloody lesson–that even democracies, lead by wise people and with the best of intentions–can and do fail to live up to even modest ethical standards and engage in needless conflict when their interests are unclear or conflicted. We could do with some of that lesson today.
Stranger
Oh and just to stay on topic - my sixth grade substitute teacher ( also an actor in the summer - I remember seeing him in an old gum commercial playing a butler ) declared that miscegenation was wrong because blacks were spreaders of sickle-cell anemia.
I guess he conveniently forgot or never knew that the trait is also found in some Mediterranean European sub-populations as well.
- Tamerlane
Actually, there is a germ of truth to that. It becomes more evident at higher frequencies and is called the “skin effect”.
Of course the most common reason for multistranded conductors in normal usage is for increased flexibility, which is why I was dumbfounded to discover that the electrical cable that connected to my VW Rabbit shoulder harness latch and ran through the door was solid copper! . It broke when I was getting ready to come home from skiing, with darkness upon me and a strong wind blowing the snow sideways across the otherwise deserted parking lot. Fortunately, I had read about this (thank you, Consumer Reports!), found the break, skinned the insulation off and completed the connection, allowing my engine to start. ** German engineering, indeed!** :mad:
Brady
Ah, and I see skimming this thread caused me to miss jfranchi making more or less the same point I just did. Oops.
- Tamerlane
I saw a program on (I think) the History Channel on the subject of the procurement of slaves from the west coast of Africa. I missed the first part, so I am not sure of which country it was, but the African woman leading the tour was speaking French. The slaves were brought in chains from as far away as several hundred miles. They were brought in by other black Africans who had captured them in battles. She said that the city was run by a black African king, and that the white slave traders were subservient to him. She said that black tourists, especially Americans, were greatly distressed by this news, the first time that they had ever heard this. Typically the women would cry and the men would beat their fists on the walls in frustration.
Brady
I was taught that his chest was burned when he saved the chariot that towed the sun across the sky, when some punk kid stole it.
Brady
BUT, all of my school textbooks showed the venous (oxygen-depeted) blood as blue. I did a survey of the people where I worked (almost all college graduates) and they all thought that blood was as blue as ink! Maybe the ones who had given blood had never been brave enough to watch their life’s blood draining away from them (does sound kind of scary, doesn’t it?).
I have painted several cars and trucks, and I would say that the dark blood is red with a bluish component. I think if a painter was trying to match that hue, it would probably involve including some blue pigment. I once repainted a VW with “cashmere white”. I watched as the guy gave it a tiny squirt of black. Matched perfectly.
Brady
So much for fighting ignorance:
After two years, you’d think he’d know the name of the place, or at least have the blurb corrected.
Maybe not the Germans, but when my sister lived in Alaska, they had some sort of dinner for visiting Russian pilots (her husband is a pilot). Corn on the cob is expensive in Alaska, because it has to shipped in, and my sister was proud of the fact that she was able to get some. The Russians were very impressed with the size of the houses and the fact that they had steak to eat, but remarked that “corn is what we feed the horses”.
Brady
I believe it! I once mentioned to a friend of mine that a lot of people thought that WVa was still part of the same state as Va. He told me: “If you think that is bad, a lot of people think Hawaii is somewhere down in the Caribbean”.
WVBrady