GCN

The home-brew movement serves as a lesson in DIY innovation:

“We can learn several crucial lessons from this diverse, creative group, and that understanding will allow us to encourage innovation. For some, the main impetus for DIY is that it provides an outlet from their daily grind: Many employees suffer the life of the cubicle-bound “knowledge worker.” In his best-selling Shop Class As Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford argues that the elimination of industrial arts and home economics classes from public school curricula has left us dependent on machines that we don’t understand and frustrated by the outsourcing and off-shoring of production. We also derive little satisfaction from what we “produce” at work. We’ve become a nation of shoppers and consumers. DIY is a way to engage the physical things around us and create durable (and drinkable) objects. Based on informal conversations with other DIYers, some of these motivations include self-reliance, community-building, autonomy, independence from monopolies, an alternative to rampant consumerism, innate curiosity, and the desire to make something cool.”

For anyone who homebrews, or for those who have considered doing it, this describes quite succinctly why we homebrew.

Link: What Beer Can Teach Us About Emerging Technologies

One week before Christmas and you may already be tired of hearing the same old batch of Christmas tunes on your shopping adventures or local commercial radio station.

This selection of songs of Christmas songs is different. A antidote for cynical souls… take a listen to Arcade Fire doing a drunken version of The Christmas Song, or Jeremy Fisher’s tune, “Kamikaze Christmas Economy I Owe”, plus other songs by Luna, Belle and Sebastian, Radiohead, Fucked Up, Pearl Jam, Frightened Rabbit and White Stripes.