USA vs the Rest of the World Part 1

The RateBeer best awards http://www.ratebeer.com/RateBeerBest/? have always made me think.

All awards hove there Pro and Cons and im a big fan of RateBeer but the Dominance of US beer and breweries in the RateBeers best and top 50. Along side this some surprising UK entries that seem to have a much higher placing than me or the beer people i know would expect but on closer examination have a large distribution in the US.  All this has regularly made me think that maybe US members rate beers higher then Non US members.

Now without Access to the Database where im sure some large scale analysis could be done, im going to try looking at several beers  that will hopefully have a reasonable number of ratings from both US and Non US members.

So for Part 1, I have taken
Three Floyds Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout vs Westvleteren 12 (XII)

I looked at distribution of the Top 20 and Bottom 20 raters of each beer. (excluding as is ratebeers way any with less than 10 rates)

So for
Darklord all 20 top raters were from the US but only 10 of the Bottom Raters were
Where as for
Westvletern 13 of the top raters were from NON US countries but 11 of the bottom were also NON US raters

Now Its a  small sample of only 2 beers so id be fairly certain its statistically insignificant, but i hope to look at other beers in this way and others and see if a pattern emerges

Sunshine on Corstorphine

Way back 4 Years ago i got solar panels installed by EcoSunPower, which you can read more about here and i talked about the FITS scheme here and though the payments have dropped so has the cost of installing solar panels , making it still a worthwhile investment in my eyes.

But today im going to look back at my first FOUR years

What we see here is a month by month reading of what solar units i received vs the sight i used to decide on the viability of installing the panels. As can clearly be seen my use of the site consistently underestimated how much solar units i would produce. Only one in the 4 years did i produce less than the prediction.

From this days we can see the odd numbered years do better . Fingers crossed for this year then :-) That the sunniest month was July this year and the least sunniest was December 2011 and that February is 50 to 100% percent more sunny than January so things are looking up as we head into February.