Author: andy

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White Pre-Christmas

I must say, it’s easier to get into the Christmas Spirit when there’s snow on the ground already.  It always seemed that, growing up in Missouri, we were lucky to have much or any snow on the ground in the month of December, let alone this early in the month.  Of course, with the move to Iowa, we are significantly closer to the North Pole, where the snow will stay on the ground through mid-June…  But yeah, it’s kinda nice driving around listening to Christmas music on the radio with the sun shining and snow on the ground, knowing that Christmas is still a few weeks away.  Somehow the snow is a bit less worrysome for me knowing that it’s still December.  Of course, this only foreshadows the pains we will go through in January and February, but for now, it’s pleasant.

We did have highs in the mid-teens over the weekend, and lows in the single digits.  Glad we got our propane tank filled on Friday…

Regardless, we were expecting the First Big Snowfall Of The Year this past weekend (3-5 inches), but we only ended up with less than 2 in.  It was enough to cover the ground and was kinda nice to wake up to on Saturday morning.  We didn’t have much trouble driving around and the streets were quite clear, thanks to Iowa’s relatively decent road crew.

As a result of our busy-ness in the upcoming weeks/weekends, we also went and picked up a Christmas tree.  This year marks the first time we picked up anything larger than a “Charlie Brown Tree,” as we now have a bit more space to use for one.  Brooke had seen a place up near Cedar Rapids that we could go, so we headed up there on Sunday and cut one down.  It ended up being a little over $20 for a 5 ft tree, so I was rather pleased.  I’ll take a picture or two of it once I figure out what’s going on with the auxiliary flash for our dSLR…

On another note, the power supply went out on the web server last week, explaining the absence of the website for a few days.  I was concerned that the motherboard/processor had died, which would have ended up being a more expensive fix in the same month that we bought 250 gal of propane gas and Christmas presents, but thankfully, it was just the power supply…only a $50 fix, in the end.  It has gotten me thinking about the server upgrade that I’m planning, hopefully for 2011, so now I’m in the mode of searching for the best deals and “bang for your buck” on computer components.  Dangerous thinking, to be sure, but at least I can put off a large purchase for a few more months.

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Step 5: Bottling Day

The last step in making beer is the bottling.  After you have checked the specific gravity for the last time, meaning that it has held steady for a few days and the bubbling through the airlock has subsided, you can bottle the beer.  This is now the “priming” step, where you transfer the beer from the fermentation vessel to a priming vessel.

…but first there’s some cleaning to do.  It is important to ensure that the bottles and tubing, etc. are completely sterile.  Remember that th beer could be sitting for months, if not years, before you drink it – limiting the various critters that could get in there, aside from your yeast, is rather important!  You want to limit the soap you add, and you can use bleach or other kinds of cleaners.  The key is to rinse very, very, very well!  You can’t leave any soap or bleach in there or it’ll kill your yeast, let alone mess with the flavor of the beer!

It’s up to you what kinds of bottles you use.  The last time I did this, back in undergrad, we used Grolsch bottles almost exclusively because they were 16 oz and had resealable tops, thus alleviating the need for bottle caps.  This time, we went with an assortment of bottles with the same kinds of reusable tops, as well as cappable 12 oz bottles.  In the image above, you’ll see a few large 2 L bottles, some medium sized 1 L bottles, and then the standard 12 oz bottles.  We’ve been saving all of these as we’ve drank beer over the past few months, so that’s a cheap route to go.  Just be sure that the bottles you’re saving are not screw cap style, as you can’t re-cap those.

This part can be done in various ways, but the kit from Northern Brewer comes with a nifty little siphon doohicky that you put about 6 in into your beer, pump twice, and beer flows from the fermentation vessel down to the priming vessel.

Now, the priming vessel is pretty key.  The “priming” aspect of the beer is relating to a few factors.  One, there’s a lot of “leftovers” in the fermentation vessel that you wouldn’t really want to drink, so we’re siphoning off the top and leaving the remainder on the bottom.  You lose some beer in this, but seriously, you don’t want to drink (or see…) that stuff on the bottom of the bucket…  Secondly, in the priming bucket, we also add some more sugar.  This is being done to get the yeast active again for a brief period, producing a tad more alcohol.  For our purposes, however, it’s the CO2 we care about: carbonation.  The sugar we add at the priming stage gives the yeast enough food to continue some fermentation in the individual bottles, thus providing the carbonation we need for the beer.  It’s all done naturally.

The priming vessel comes with a valve and tubing that you can use to fill bottles with.  Really, once you’re at this stage, things go pretty quickly.  Also, as the bucket dictates, don’t store your children in 5 gal buckets.

For the record, here’s what our beer looks like after a little over 2 weeks in fermentation.  Looks like beer, eh?  Tastes like it, too.  Granted, no carbonation yet, but it already had characteristic flavors of a nut brown.  I tasted it the previous time I checked the specific gravity, which was only two days earlier.  I noticed a change in the flavor of the beer just in those two days!  In some ways, I probably should have left the beer in the fermenter for an additional week, to let it age a bit more and develop more flavor, but if I wanted to drink it for Thanksgiving, it had to get into bottles.  Maybe next time!

In the end, we bottled two 2 L bottles, six 1 L bottles and twenty 12 oz bottles.  Not too bad for $30 and a few weeks of fermentation.  🙂

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Primer: Structure of the Brain

These posts, tagged “Primer,” are posted for two reasons: 1). to help me get better at teaching non-scientists about science-related topics; and 2). to help non-scientists learn more about things they otherwise would not. So, while I realize most people won’t read these, I’m going to write them anyway, partially for my own benefit, but mostly for yours.

I can’t say I’ve been excited about writing this one, as brain anatomy is, quite possibly, the most boring thing I can think of to write about.  I did a rotation at SLU in a lab that focuses on anatomy and how individual brain structures interact with one another, and that 6 week period was more than enough for me.  As that professor told me, it’s very important work that someone needs to do, even if it may not seem all that interesting.  This kind of work is how researchers have figured out which brain component “talks” to which other one(s), and how intertwined all these connections really are throughout the brain.

For the sake of this posting, I’ll simply point out that brain mapping has been carried out in a variety of ways.  Quite a bit of it has been done over decades when people would hit their heads.  If they would lose their memory, or their sense of smell, clinicians could localize the injury to a specific area of the head, then look at the brain post-mortem and see what happened.  Ultimately, they would find a lesion of dead tissue in that region that lead to the deficiency.  Similarly, the study of stroke victims also provided clues to the function of certain brain locations, as a stroke occurs when blood flow is cut off to an area of the brain, typically leading to damage.  Alternatively, modern science uses a series of stereotactic injections of traceable materials in mice, rats and primates that can be visualized in brain slices, showing that a series of neurons in one area are connected with neurons in a separate region of the brain.

It is through this work that certain pathways were elucidated, including the reward pathway (very important for drug addiction, gambling addiction, etc.); the movement pathway (mostly for Parkinson’s disease, but important for voluntary movement, in general); the sensory systems (how the visual cortex signals, the auditory cortex, etc.); the amygdala (figuring out what this structure did and where it went led to quite a few labotomies back in the day); and memory (signals transfered between the hippocampus, the reward system, and the cortex…very complicated network…).  It is through brain mapping like this that helped determine where everything connects together, and which areas are important.

While the human brain is a difficult nut to crack, it can be divided up into different portions.  For the sake of this little blurb, we’ll focus on the three primary divisions of the brain: the prosencephalon (forebrain), the mesencephalon (midbrain) and the rhombencephalon (hindbrain).

The prosencephalon, or forebrain, is further divided into the telencephalon and the diencephalon.  The telencephalon consists, primarily, of the cerebrum, which includes the cerebral cortex (voluntary action and sensory systems), the limbic system (emotion) and the basal ganglia (movement).  As you can see from that list, for the most part, the telencephalon is what constitutes what “you” are: your thoughts, your feelings, and your interaction with the world around you.  It’s where a lot of your processing happens.  The telencephalon in humans is quite a bit more developed than in other species, which is really what separates their brain from other, lesser developed species (i.e. the human telencephalon is what really separates them from a chimpanzee).  The diencephalon, on the other hand, consists of the thalamus, hypothalamus and a few other structures.  The thalamus and hypothalamus are very important for various regulatory functions, including interpretation of sensory inputs, regulation of sleep, and release of hormones to control eating, drinking, and body temperature.

The mesencephalon is comprised of the tectum and the cerebral peduncle.  The tectum is important for auditory and visual reflexes and tends to be more important in non-vertebrates, as they don’t have the developed cerebral cortex that humans do (more on that later).  The cerebral peduncle, on the other hand, is a mixed bag of “everything in the midbrain except the tectum.”  It includes the substantia nigra, which ties into the movement system and reward system.  I think it’s fair to say that, aside from these things, the function of the midbrain, overall, has yet to be fully determined.

The rhombencephalon is quite important, even though it’s probably the oldest part of the brain, from an evolutionary standpoint.  It includes the myelencephalon (medulla oblongata) and the metencephalon (pons and cerebellum).  The medulla oblongata is important for autonomic functions like breathing and heart function.  The pons acts primarily as a relay with functions that tie into breathing, heart rate/blood pressure, vomiting, eye movement, taste, bladder control and more.  Finally, the cerebellum is important for a feeling of “equilibrium,” allowing for coordination of movement and action, timing and precision.

As you may have noticed, if you go from back-to-front, you’ll get increasing complexity in brain function.  For example, the hindbrain is important for very basic things like breathing, heart rate, and coordinated movement.  These are functions that are important in nearly all organisms, but especially so all the way down to the smallest worm and insect.  Further up, the mesencephalon starts to work in further control of reward and initiation of voluntary movement, giving the organism voluntary control rather than solely reflexive control.  Then, the diencephalon starts acting like a primitive brain, working in regulatory functions and more complicated reflex action to help maintain the more complex organism that has been assembled.  And finally, the telencephalon yields the ultimate control over the organism, with things like memory, emotion, and greater interpretation of sensory inputs.  As the image above dictates, the hindbrain (to the right-hand side) remains a large portion of the brain in the rat and the cat, but the human forebrain (the top/left-most portion) gets much larger, relative to the hindbrain.  With that size comes greater development of brain structure and function.

So yeah, the brain is kinda complicated.  Actually, it’s really complicated and, for the most part, I do my best to ignore all of the complex wiring networks that occur within.  However, it is important work that needs to be done in order for surgeons to do what they do, and for neuropharmacologists to develop drugs that target some brain areas and not others.  For the most part, I’ll leave this research to more interested people…

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Of Thanksgiving and Wireless Printers

This year marked our annual trek across Missouri for Thanksgiving, but the first time we’d done so with a nearly 9-month-old. We’ve done this every year since being married, but until now, we’ve only had a dog to deal with. This time, we had a baby…plus the carseat and luggage that goes with her. Needless to say, I’m glad we have a different car now, as all the stuff filled up the back to the point where we couldn’t see out of it any longer.

Regardless, we went to Hannibal for the Thanksgiving holiday where the majority of the Poor/Baumann clan typically goes.  Meg did great, for the most part, but didn’t sleep terribly well the second night.  As usual, the food was great, the company was fun, and the “Poor Women” entertained me with their video game shenanigans (this year, some fun with “Just Dance 2“…and yes, we have video evidence…).  On Friday, we continued our Tour of Missouri by driving to my parent’s house in Columbia where we hung out with the immediate family.  Again, Meg did pretty well the first night…and not so well the second night…  But overall, again, good food had by all, and a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit on Saturday night.

Either way, it was a pretty good trip.  We made it back to Iowa by mid-afternoon, so it allowed us to clean up a bit around here and prep for the upcoming week.  Christmas is going to get difficult, I imagine, as we were already pressed for space in the car on this trip.  We’ll need to pick up some kind of roof rack bag in order to make space for everything.  That, or Edie will have to spend Christmas with Sam…  😛

On a side-note, we didn’t do much Black Friday shopping.  I did pick up a few games online, and Brooke and I grabbed a new All-In-One printer from Wal-mart for $44.  Great deal.  And it works wonders.  Wirelessly.  It’s glorious.  🙂

And, on another side-note, I was looking to see if the Dave Matthews Band performance from the 2010 Grammy Awards was posted anywhere and, low and behold, it’s up on Youtube. I tried finding it the day after the awards and the only place I could find it was iTunes for $3. Outrageous! Therefore, I post it now. It’s, perhaps, the best live performance of them I have seen and, by far, the best performance of any group at the Grammy’s that night. They should have won.

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Step 4: Gravity, oh gravity

So, we selected our beer and we mixed all our ingredients. Periodically, however, we also need to check and see how the fermentation’s going. There are a few things that must be done while your beer is fermenting, ensuring that things are going…”smoothly”…

Here’s the fermenting vessel.  Nothing too special about it, except for the little trap at the top that contains water.  The main purpose for the trap is to show carbon dioxide bubbles escaping from the vessel to the outside of the bucket.  If you didn’t have an escape mechanism for the CO2, then you’d blow the thing up in your basement!  But more importantly, as long as you see bubbles, you know  your yeast is making CO2, and consequently, alcohol.

Here’s what your beer should look like, with a nice foam called krausen. This picture was only a few days post-start of fermentation. There should be a few inches of krausen on top of the beer.

You can use a “thief” to remove a relatively small volume of the beer for testing with limited introduction of contaminants to the brew. You could do this with a ladle or anything else, really, but this little guy is well-suited to removing beer and adding it to…

…another vessel that you can test with your hydrometer. The hydrometer is what you use to calculate the alcohol content of your beer, or wine, or whatever. It does this by measuring the density of sugar in a liquid. Since our beer started out as mostly sugar, that means it started at a relatively high “specific gravity,” in this case, 1.050. As the week(s) draw on, the yeast break down the sugar producing alcohol and CO2, thus the specific gravity will decrease as fermentation continues. There’s also a percent alcohol scale on the side of our hydrometer, so you can measure that, too. However, specific gravity is a calibrated system, so you can make adjustments to your numbers based on the temperature the beer was measured in.  It’s very easy to use, basically just pouring beer into anything (like the tube it comes with, but a glass of beer would work, too) and allowing the hydrometer to float in it.  There are markings on the side of the hydrometer that you read, like a thermometer scale, at the point where the hydrometer exits the beer.

I’m posting this after I checked it for the last time and I’ll go ahead and tell you that it ended at a specific gravity of 1.011. You can run these calculations yourself, generally by subtracting the last one from the first one. Alternatively, you can find a nifty website to do it for you. The numbers off the calculator come out pretty close to what my hydrometer told me: ~5% alcohol. The calculator, however, also estimates that each 12 oz beer will have ~170 calories.

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Step 3: Make Some Beer

In the previous post, I showed what some of the equipment looks like, and the various ingredients that go into this particular beer, a Honey Brown, from Northern Brewer. Now we get to put it all to work!

Remember that, prior to this point, we activated, or primed, our yeast and sterilized our equipment.  I can’t emphasize this enough: if you don’t have sterile equipment, your beer probably won’t taste right.  Many companies sell sterilizing compounds that are rinse-less, but you can always use bleach as well…just make sure you over-rinse the stuff to get rid of any excess bleach.

The first step in this kit is to take some of the assorted grains that the kit came with and steep them in a pot for 20 min. You can do this while you heat up the water to boiling. The kit came with assorted grains (including chocolate!) and a cheesecloth to use, so effectively, we’re just making a giant tea bag for your beer. Not all beers come with this kind of addition, but it generally adds some extra flavors to the beer before the malt even sees the water.

Speaking of the malt, once your water is boiling, you can add the malt to the water. In this black pot, we added about 3 gallon of water, which took quite awhile to boil…but once it does, you can add the malt, which then must be heated at boiling for 60 min. During this time, you can also get a second pot and boil an additional 2 gal (although, I’d boil more than that if you can…) for a total of 5 gal.

Prior to boiling, you can add your hops. They come in different shapes, but many kits send it in a pellet form that looks a lot like rabbit food. They smell like a good India Pale Ale (a really “hoppy” beer), and you can get different varieties of hops to bring out different flavors in your beers. Regardless, they usually go in prior to the 60 min boil, but you can add “finishing hops” at the bottling stage. This kit doesn’t include any finishing hops, though.

As it heats, you’ll notice a foam forming on the top. This stuff is pretty sticky, so it behooves you to watch the pot as it boils (I know, right?). You don’t want it to boil over, ’cause this foamy stuff will overflow into your range…and it’s a pain to clean up, and the smell from it is also difficult to get rid of. So yeah, keep an eye on it – don’t go watch a show or anything! [Note: This particular batch didn’t boil over, but back in undergrad, we boiled them over many times…bad news…]

After you boil your beer (and another pot of water…), you need to wait for it to cool down. Think about that. You are waiting for 5 gal of liquid to cool down from boiling (~212 F) to…um…colder than that (~78 F) so you can add your yeast. This can take awhile. Even in Iowa when it’s 40 F outside, it still took forever, so I recommend using an ice water bath to help cool down the beer faster. You want this to occur as fast as possible. The longer you wait, the more likely you’ll get various critters and infections in there to mess with your beer.

Pretty color! You’ll pour it all into the bucket and then add any additional water to get it to 5 gal. It’s, of course, preferable to sterilize (i.e. boil) all water that goes in the bucket, which is why it’s probably best to boil the additional 3 gal rather than 2 gal, as you’ll lose volume over the hour that you’re boiling everything. Always best to boil some excess if you’ve got the space for it!

Finally, you seal ‘er up and put the trap on the top along with a small volume of water and move it to its home for the next few weeks. We are putting our beer in our basement, which is usually at an ambient temperature of 55 F (so far, even with the furnace running 20 feet away…). Now, 55 F is a touch chilly for the recommended temperature for our yeast (recommends 60 – 75 F or so), but within a few days, the bubbling had begun.

Speaking of “bubbling,” that’s what the trap on the top is for.  It’s got two little reservoirs with water in it that allows for CO2 to escape from the fermentation bucket while preventing other things from getting in.  It’s kinda shaped like the plumbing pipe beneath your bathroom sink.  Basically, in order to know that fermentation is occurring without popping the top of the bucket (assuming you don’t have a glass carboy, which I’m not using presently…), you can see bubbles flow through the water in the trap.  You should see this within 48 hours of adding yeast to your fermentation bucket – if you don’t, you probably need to move it to a warmer place, but thankfully, 55 F was “good enough” for my purposes.

In the next post, we’ll check the “specific gravity” of the beer, helping us approximate how much alcohol is being generated.  You usually do this a few days to a week after starting the fermentation process, and you try to limit the times you do this ’cause you have to actually open the seal at the top, potentially introducing invaders to your beer.

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The Science of Speaking Out

Ira Flatow had a group of climate scientists on his show, NPR’s Science Friday, this past week discussing the “fine line” that many scientists find themselves walking.  Philosophically, there are many in the scientific community that believe they should present the facts and allow the public to interpret them.  These scientists frequently just want to stay out of that realm of discourse, allowing the public (and, therefore, politicians) to decide how their data is used and what the best course of action is.  Largely, this is how it’s always been.  Early astronomers could tell what they knew, but had to wait for their ideas to be accepted by their respective communities.

This particular group of climate scientists, however, is getting together to move beyond the borders they have typically held themselves to, instead choosing to speak out with what they know and actually make policy recommendations based on their information.  Largely, this group adheres to what the great Carl Sagan once said:

“People are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.”

That is to say, these scientists are tired of presenting facts time and time again only to have them ignored and have other people’s opinions matter more than proven factual data.  To the scientific community, there is no question regarding the fact that global warming is occurring and that humans contribute to it.  In a separate (but related) issue, to the scientific community, there is no question regarding the fact that evolution is occurring and that natural selection is the most likely mechanism.  There is no question that frozen embryos are kept in that state for years and end up “dying” in a liquid nitrogen freezer when they could have been used for stem cell research rather than being discarded in a biohazard bag and incinerated.  Yet politicians, for some reason, are able to ignore these facts in their decisions of what is taught in our schools and what energy policies should be enacted and how important research could be conducted.

After listening for awhile, an individual called in and asked a question that intrigued me, and it’s one that I haven’t really considered up until now: why is it that members of Congress, and politicians in general, feel the need to question facts of science, yet do not pose the same questions toward religious beliefs?  Let us assume that all politicians turn their magnifying glass toward all information that comes across their desks (hah!).  Shouldn’t that magnifying glass analyze all information the same way, equally?  Shouldn’t they ask, “Well, this group of people used rigorous experimental techniques and verified their findings, and this other group didn’t.  Which should we believe?”

I mentioned this concept to Brooke and her attitude was, generally speaking, “That’s Just How It Is.”  This is true, but it still irks me.  I realize that this is how religious beliefs have always been.  There has always been a large enough group of individuals that are so adamant about their beliefs that, no matter what facts you give them, they will not shift policy to match.  The most recent issue of childhood vaccinations and the misconceptions about them comes to mind.  I’m not sure if this is a failing of critical thinking skills or education in general, but it’s been such a pervasive problem throughout history that I have to wonder.  Frequently, it takes at least one generation to change minds about these things, and in some cases, many generations.  I’m just afraid that, on many of these issues, we don’t have that long.

Case in point: the Catholic Church condemned Galileo‘s heretical thinking about the Earth revolving around the Sun as “vehement suspicion of heresy.”  He died in 1642 and he couldn’t be buried with his family because of it (to be fair, the Church moved his remains to their rightful place almost 100 years later).  However, the Catholic Church waited over a century before accepting heliocentrism, and until 1965 to revoke its condemnation of Galileo himself.

Scientists are getting a little annoyed with that kind of treatment.  Granted, the world moves faster today and ideas are disseminated and accepted much faster, yet Natural Selection has been a concept for over 150 years and there are still people that use the phrase “but it’s just a Theory.”  It shouldn’t take over 150 years, let alone 300 years, for ideas to be accepted when those ideas are revolutionary to our understanding of our place in the universe, and it really shouldn’t take that long for governments to make policies that use legitimate scientific data to actually preserve our place in that universe by preventing our extinction from it.  In 300 years, without any change in policy, we won’t have California or Florida anymore.  It will be too late.

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D.B.D.

A few years back, I was at home for Christmas break and had a gathering, of sorts, with some folks from High School to attend.  We happened to have family friends staying with us, who had two young children.  One of those kids, apparently, had some kind of sickness, ’cause that very night, I came down with one of the worst viral infections in recent memory…and it only lasted a few hours, enough time for me to miss the party.  Figures.

Since then, I’ve been particularly wary of babies and the diseases they carry.  Sure, babies are cute, but they’re breeding grounds for a variety of viral and bacterial infections, especially when they go to day care and are exposed to a wealth of things that the other kids are exposed to.  The immune systems of babies are heavily taxed during the first few months to years, as they are being exposed to all kinds of things that they’ve never seen before, let alone the fact that their immune systems aren’t even fully operational yet.  My sister had quite a few ear infections during this period, largely because she was teething and her body simply couldn’t handle all the stress (and Meg has no teeth yet…).  So yeah, it seems like whatever you get from them hasn’t been knocked down in the least, so you end up getting something even worse than you would have had you contracted it from someone older.  (I have no scientific basis for this assertion…just observation…)

I typically refer to these as “Demon Baby Diseases.”  Not necessarily because they come from “Demon Babies,” but because they’re so bad, they surely must be borne of some evil not known of this Earth.  They’re bad.  Truly bad.

In general, my immune system is pretty spectacular and I don’t tend to get sick.  Sure, I’ll get a cold once a year and usually have a non-productive cough for a few weeks in the dead of winter, but aside from that, I don’t get viral or bacterial infections.  I’ve always found this somewhat remarkable, and it probably has something to do with genetics, as to my knowledge, my Dad doesn’t really come down with much of anything, either.  Brooke, on the other hand, is a bit more likely to come down with things.  Granted, I usually work in somewhat sterile environments, so we’re all pretty attuned to the idea of keeping things clean.  Brooke, however, deals with many other individuals in different environments, so she’s hit from all sides with a variety of different things.

So why do I write this now?  Well, we had a nice weekend up here in Iowa sans Meg, as we shipped her off to hang out with Brooke’s parents for the weekend.  By all accounts, the weekend went well: Brooke and I went out to dinner Friday night and went to a winery on Saturday, and Mark and Diana very much enjoyed having their grandbaby with them, and Meg was good the whole time.  But when we got home Sunday, Meg wasn’t feeling well.  She felt warm when we picked her up in Hannibal, but she slept most of the way back home.  She was acting mostly fine, but still felt warm right before bedtime.  But bedtime didn’t go so well.  Really, it didn’t “go” at all.  Brooke and I probably got 4 hours of sleep that night, as we traded off with a crying baby, which is, thankfully, not something we typically have to do.

Long story short, Brooke was home with her Monday and Meg didn’t get much better.  We traded off every two hours over Monday night, and I took off work Tuesday and took her in to the doctor, as her fever hadn’t subsided.  Turned out it was strep.  Eeeeeesh.

The doc got her on amoxicillin and, shockingly, by Tuesday night, Meg was already feeling better.  She wasn’t 100% or anything, but she was able to sleep (which, for a kid that had only slept a few hours over a period of 2 days, was much needed…you know…’cause they’re supposed to sleep something like 14 hours a day or something…).  I stayed home with her again yesterday and she was acting like her normal self, although she was a bit “clingier” than usual.  Last night, again, she slept relatively well.

So I’m back at work and Meg’s going to daycare again today.  Generally, things are back to normal…but now Brooke thinks she may be coming down with something.  Probably not strep, but still something.  And, most likely, a direct result of a near complete lack of sleep over those few days.  Thankfully, so far, I’m unaffected, but I’m ever vigilant.  Always watching for the next Demon Baby Disease.

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Step 2: Prep Work

The beer kit itself comes with various components, some of which are consistent across kits and other components that are specific to the variety you are making.  In this case, we’re making a Honey Brown, so it has a few “extras” to it.  The most important components that come with each kit are:

  • Malt extract – the sugar that the yeast end up acting on for fermentation
  • Hops – gives beer it’s “flavor” and the bitter taste you find in many Pale Ales
  • Yeast – dry or liquid
  • Priming sugar – regular ol’ sugar used in the bottling process

You’ll see that there are a few extra components in this kit, including a “mixed grain” product that we will steep in the water prior to the boiling of the malt, as well as honey for the, you know, “Honey” part of “Honey Nut Brown.” The assorted grains include chocolate, as well, providing another interesting, yet subtle, flavor for the beer.

The kit arrived at home while I was at work, but Brooke was kind enough to remove the liquid yeast from the packaging.  The yeast is the only component (usually) that needs to be refrigerated until you’re ready to prime them, but Brooke thankfully bypassed that and went ahead and got them started.  You’ll see that it comes in a little bag that looks flat, yet after you break a small ampule on the inside of the bag (by smacking the bag with your hand)…

…you get this within a few hours sitting out on our porch in the sun (i.e. it needs a relatively warm place for this part). As Brooke points out, you are effectively just “priming” the yeast as you would with any bread recipe. If you get dry yeast, you have to prime them like you do bread, but if you get the liquid yeast, you do it all in one cute little packet. Once it blows up to this level, though, you can use it.

The rest of the kit is pretty straightforward. Technically, this part is a separate kit: I ordered a “Brewing Kit” (pictured here) and then the actual “Beer kit” (first picture above), so they were actually different products. This bottom one is the portion I will re-use for other beer varieties.  I’ll probably hit up these different components as I use them in this series of posts, but I’ll point out a few items now:

  • Two buckets – one for fermenting and one for priming and bottling
  • Plastic tubing – mostly for use in the bottling process
  • Bottle capper and caps –  so you can save any ol’ non-twist top beer bottles and re-cap them with this system.  Woooo, recycling!
  • Cleaning solution – ’cause you need to ferment your beer in clean stuff.

In the next post, I’ll show some pictures of the actual brewing process, but bear in mind that these steps are very, very important.  The yeast need to be ready before you can start the brewing process, so a few hours need to be allotted to allow them to prime.  Secondly, all the equipment pictured above must be sterile, otherwise you can introduce some bad flavors to your beer.  I’m not going to show pictures of the sterilization process, as that would be very boring, but just keep in mind that any item that comes in contact with your beer needs to be sterilized.  You can’t over-sterilize your equipment.

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The Digital Generation

I was listening to NPR’s OnPoint podcast from November 2nd, where Tom Ashbrook was interviewing Douglass Rushkoff on his “Rules for the Digital Age,” discussing Rushkoff’s new book “Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age.” The discussion bounced around quite a few topics, but largely focused on the thought that people today take their digital presence for granted and that people interact with digital media in such a way that they don’t control the outcome, but instead they are controlled by their digital media.

For example, Rushkoff recounts a story from their PBS “Frontline” documentary, “Digital Nation,” where the producers ask a child: “What is Facebook for?”  The kid’s answer was “for making friends.”  It’s a relatively simple answer, and one that many adults would also provide, yet the true answer is “to make money off of the relationships, likes and dislikes of its users.”

As another example, Rushkoff says that students when we were growing up decades ago would go to the World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica in order to get a “primary source” for our book reports.  Now, for many people, simply using Google is “good enough” to find the information you want.  If you use Google’s Instant Search option, introduced a few months ago, your search results change by the second and are largely influenced by traffic on those sites, yet Google is perfectly capable of adjusting the results so that some pages show up first and others don’t.  For many users, they’re just “The Results” that they get, however the user typically doesn’t think about the vested interest that Google has, as a company, in making money off of their Search ventures.

Rushkoff’s solution, outlined in his “10 Rules,” is generally that people should be more computer literate.  He says that kids today that take a computer class in junior high or high school learn Microsoft Office.  To him, that’s not “computers,” but instead it’s “software.”  You aren’t learning how a computer works.  You aren’t learning about what programming had to go into those programs.  You aren’t learning about the types of programs available (i.e. closed-source vs open-source).  You simply accept what you are given as Gospel without critically thinking.

As I listened to the discussion, especially with regards to Google, I had to think about this past election which saw the rise of the Tea Party.  While many of them would have you believe that they were all educated, intelligent, active people, so many of them were taken advantage of by other third-party groups, primarily corporations.  These are individuals that believed what they found in Google searches without thinking critically about what they were discussing.  Rachel Maddow did an interview in Alaska discussing the Senate race of Tea Party favorite Joe Miller (who lost…), and the supporters outside were angry about all the policies that Attorney General Eric Holder had supported, and his voting record prior to becoming A.G.  Of course, Maddow points out that Holder never held public office, and thus had no voting record.  But these people believed it because that’s what they were told.  It’s what they read on the internet.  As if “The Internet” is to be equated with the Encyclopedia Britannica of old.

Rushkoff’s larger point, in my view, is that people today simply don’t have the critical thinking skills to handle what digital media has provided.  So much information is now provided with so many more sources that individuals can’t effectively wade through it and discern whether what they are reading is fact or fiction.

I’m not sure that a better understanding of computers alone would be enough to combat the problem, honestly.  Rushkoff suggests that some basic programming skills would be helpful for people to know as well, much as people thousands of years ago had to learn to write when “text” was invented.  He believes that the invention of text empowered people to write laws, to hold each other accountable, and to be more than they were.  He believes that giving everyone basic programming skills would do something similar, where they would be more likely to know and understand why a computer does what it does, and how the programs on your system interact with programs on the internet as a whole.  I barely have any programming training and I think I’ve got a relatively decent handle on how the internet works, but most of that was self-taught over nearly two decades.  I certainly don’t think it would hurt to have kids learn some basic programming, but they’re already missing the boat in various other subjects that programming is surely on the bottom of the list.

To me, it’s the critical thinking part that needs to be improved.  With some basic critical thinking skills, hopefully, people would be more informed about everything they do in their daily lives: in raising their children, in voting for elected offices, in thinking about where their food comes from, in choosing which car to drive, in where they get their information, and so on.

But hey: if people want to learn more about computers, I’m all for it.

P.S. Happy birthday, Mom.  🙂