Liquid Water on Mars

It's generally accepted that billions of years ago, Mars was a pretty wet place. But over time, Mars lost its atmosphere and its water, and the oceans that probably existed on the surface dried up. With atmospheric pressure at 1% of Earth's, and with temperatures rarely getting above freezing, liquid water on the surface of Mars today seems like an unlikely prospect. But not impossible. In the past few years, space probes have found features called recurring slope lineae, dark streaks that appear in the Martian summer and fade away during the winter. It was suspected that liquid water was forming these features, but the evidence was not there.

As you may have guessed, today NASA announced that the evidence had been gathered, and they could definitively say that the RSL were in fact formed by liquid water. Now, I don't want to overstate the importance of this discovery. The water is filled with a kind of salt called perchlorate, which lowers the freezing point of the water to well below zero. That's good for liquid water, not good for life, as we know of no organism that could live in such an environment. In addition, we're not talking about some big gushing stream running down a crater, but what basically amounts to damp soil. There's not a lot of water available. However, finding any amount of liquid water is fantastic news. Just because life as we know it could not survive there doesn't mean it's completely inhospitable, and any manned missions to Mars could certainly use it. I think it's absolutely incredible that for so long, we assumed that liquid water could only exist on Earth, but we've found it on Europa, on Enceladus, and now, on Mars. That's 4 different planetary systems that we can find liquid water, spread out across a billion miles of space. At this point, I would be more surprised if life did not exist elsewhere in the Solar System then if it did, because with every discovery of liquid water, the odds of finding life improve.

A Trip to Wigle Whiskey

When you think of whiskey, two places probably spring to mind: Scotland and Kentucky. And if you did think of another place, I can almost guarantee you weren't thinking of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But at the turn of the 18th century, western Pennsylvania was quite the place for whiskey, with over 4,000 stills documented. That's impressive, considering there probably weren't many more people then that living in western Pennsylvania. By 1808 the stills of Allegheny County produced so much whiskey they could have provided half a barrel's worth to every person living in the U.S. That is a lot of whiskey.

Obviously, times have changed. Today, there is only one distillery in all of Pennsylvania. That distillery is Wigle Whiskey, located in downtown Pittsburgh. And yes, it's pronounced "wiggle". It was named after one of the instigators of the Whiskey Rebellion, Phillip Wigle, who was German and would have pronounced his name with a V instead of a W and with a long I. But, we are Americans, and we have a proud tradition of mispronouncing foreign words, so wiggle it is.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to get a picture of the entire building, but this is not a large operation. The building the distillery is in looks like just another building. The distillery itself only produces 9,000 bottles of various liquors a year, which is not surprising considering the small scale of everything.

The whiskey making process is pretty similar to the beer making process. Our tour guide commented that whiskey is basically distilled beer, and the process starts out basically the same. They had samples of the predistilled, um, fluid (I know it has a name) which was, well, it tasted like...it had taste. I finished it though. I've been on a tour of the Troegs brewery, and while Troegs is by no means a large operation, it completely dwarfed this place. But Wigle prefers to keep things small. Small, and completely organic, using only local ingredients.

This is literally most of their operation.

There's an upside and a downside to this philosophy. Of course, the upside is that their products are of the very highest quality and taste. I won't go into details because the art of liqour tasting is a field I don't want to waddle into. I couldn't tell you about the intricacies of the flavors or whatnot, but I enjoyed everything I tasted their, even the gins, and I do not like gin. The various whiskeys I tried were all excellent, and the bottle of Pennsylvania bourbon I came away with is some of the best whiskey I think I've ever had. It has lots of flavor, but it goes down very smooth, with almost no bite of alcohol afterward. It's the kind of liquor you can let sit and savor, rather than gulping down as quickly as possible before the alcohol overwhelms your mouth.

You can probably guess what the downside is to completely organic whiskey. Just like organic everything, Wigle whiskeys are very expensive. Sure, they're nothing against Scotch, where you can easily spent upwards of $100 for a good single malt, but compared to other bourbons, they're pretty pricey. Before I went to Wigle, the most I'd ever spent on a bottle of bourbon was $45 for a single barrel reserve whiskey. Kentucky Spirit from Wild Turkey if you're curious. The bottle of PA bourbon I bought cost $58. I think it was worth it though. It's actually new, I got a bottle from the third ever batch of the stuff, which is kind of cool.

This was a doubly interesting trip for me, because even though I grew up in Pennsylvania, I've never been to either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia before. Nearby, adjacent, in the area, sure, but never in the city. I still have to go to Philadelphia, but at least I've been to Pittsburgh. It's an interesting place. It was grey, cool, and raining during my trip, so not ideal visiting conditions. I was struck by the abundance of old industrial type buildings, surely relics of Pittsburgh's past. They were everywhere, even downtown. But as we walked the mile or so from our parking garage to the distillery, we actually passed right through an arts and crafts festival. It wasn't on the same scale as say, Artsfest, but there were lots of people out and about. The overall effect was kind of strange. But it was a good kind of strange. I hope those old buildings don't get demolished to make way for classic urban gentrification, they give the city an interesting atmosphere which I enjoyed.

So, even though it was about an unpleasant a day as one could imagine in mid-September, the quality of the whiskey plus the fun of taking a little stroll through a surprisingly interesting city was well worth the long drive. I took a few other pictures as well. One of them is hilarious.