Posts

Posted on

New Brewing Setup

Since moving in a few weeks ago, I’ve slowly been trying to get all my beer brewing materials moved to their ultimate destination in the basement.  One of the perks to living in this house is the double-sink down there, allowing for soaking and cleaning of bottles and other brewing gear without the need to take over the kitchen sink.  Unfortunately, however, the sink was clogged up (likely from whatever painting and plastering materials had been cleaned previously in that sink…).  Anyway, I think I’ve got it mostly cleaned out, though running water through it over the next few weeks will probably help dislodge whatever’s left in there.

Regardless, I set up our large folding table next to the sink and have stacked most things either on it or under it.  I probably need something a bit better for all the bottles, but for now, this will do.  I also ran an electrical cord around so I could plug in an old computer stereo set to listen to music and podcasts while working in the basement.

For my birthday this year, Mom and Dad got me an outdoor propane burner and a large, 5 gallon brew pot, which I finally got to use last week.  Obviously, I can only use it outside, but I can already tell this is a better way to go than using an electric oven.  It’s usually very easy to get a “boil-over” using the electric range, but with gas, it’s very easy to back off with the heat to slow down the boil.  Thankfully, it was a beautiful night last week to brew outside.  I’m probably not going to be so lucky when I’m out brewing in February, though…  😛

Last, but not least, here’s our first beer in the new place: a Dunkelweizen.  It’s still bubbling away downstairs and should be ready for bottling early in the week after Thanksgiving.  Brooke’s hard apple cider is already in bottles and should be conditioned well enough by Thanksgiving, however this Dunkelweizen will probably not be aged long enough until Christmas.  I think we’ll probably try to get another one fermenting within the next week or so.

Anyway, I’m excited about the new setup.  Should make it easier to clean up and get some brewing done without having to get the kitchen cleared up in time for brewing.  Hooray, beer!

Posted on

Fred Flintstone Wants To Kill You

I’m slowly catching up on podcasts from the last few weeks when I wasn’t really in Podcast Listening Mode, and recently, I listened to On Point’s discussion on recent research on vitamins.  Much of the discussion focused on recent reports suggesting that over-dosing on vitamins for years could do more harm than good.  Specifically, they discussed a recent study called the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) where men took the daily recommended dose of Vitamin E and were found to be 17% more likely to develop prostate cancer over the 7 years they were followed.  This news comes after another recent study from the Archives of Internal Medicine suggesting that multivitamins, folic acid, and iron and copper supplements may increase mortality in older women.

This all reminds me of what Dr. Shaffer told us in psychopharmacology class back at Truman: you don’t need vitamins if you eat a healthy diet.  Human physiology is set up to absorb the nutrients you need and get rid of the ones you don’t, provided you eat the diet your body needs to survive.  This includes vegetable, dairy, grain and meat sources.  If you start removing any of those sources of food, you either a). replace those nutrients with something like a multivitamin, or b). die sooner.  Apparently, however, new data like those referred to above suggest that even with the replacement of nutrients, your body still may not be very happy with you.

Brooke and I talked about this a few days ago and we both had a question about Folic Acid (Vitamin B9) intake, as this is one of those vitamins pregnant women are instructed to take to limit the risk of congenital malformations of children, including spina bifida and cleft palate.  The recommended daily allotment of Folic Acid is between 400 and 800 ug for a pregnant woman per day, though your doctor may prescribe more if there’s a history of problems in your family.  Bear in mind, however, that it’s important that women of child-bearing years have Folic Acid in their diet or take supplements before they are pregnant, as it’s more important in the early stages, before many women even know they’re pregnant.

Speaking of which, what are the ways to get Folic Acid in your diet, aside from a pill?  Spinach, peas, beans, egg yolks, sunflower seeds, white rice, fortified grain products (e.g. pastas, cereals), livers and kidneys, among others.  Now, I ask you: How many women between the ages of 18-25 are eating anything from that list on a daily basis?  I’d guess not very many.  They’re probably going to get most of it from breads and cereals, though the recommended daily allotment of folate is added to the product: it’s not endemic to wheat.

(Side-note: The U.S. government, on their Women’s Health fact sheet, says that vitamins are still essential to ensure you are getting the daily allotment of folate every day, and that it’s possible to do so by diet alone, yet difficult.  Anyone reading this should go by what their doctor tells them.  I’m only using folic acid as an example.  I am, by no means, a medical professional.  :-))

I guess my larger point is that vitamins are alright, but trying to rely on them in order to avoid eating foods that we as Homo sapiens have evolved to require over millenia is unwise.  It’s more important that we get proper dietary sources of vitamins and minerals that our stomachs have “learned” to take advantage of for generations.  This isn’t to say you should only eat organic food, or only eat food that you grow yourself.  Sure, organic sources can be healthy, but I’d argue that it’s better you eat your broccoli every day regardless of whether it’s organic or not.  Women of child-bearing years should be eating food from the outlined sources above anyway.  Men at risk of prostate cancer should be eating grapes, leafy green vegetables, and avoid trans fats anyway.  Heck, regardless of whether you’re “at risk” of prostate cancer or “at risk” of becoming pregnant, these are things you should be eating anyway.

So yeah, I don’t really think that vitamins are that bad for you.  But what is bad for you is trying to rely on them, or other supplements, as a substitute for a healthy diet.

(Final Note: An actual medical professional posted this article up on Huffington Post to help assure people that they shouldn’t necessarily stop taking all their vitamins and that there are some flaws in the conclusions being drawn from these studies.  As with anything in science, more studies are needed to come to any real conclusions on this matter)

Posted on

Back in the Swing of Things

Here's what I'm using all day now.

I’m sure I’ll have more to report on in the future, but for right now, I can safely say that I’m settling in at the new job.  I’ve been telling people for awhile now that there would be a definite “learning curve” with the science carried out here, and believe you me, I wasn’t kidding.  I’m having to re-learn basic circuit mechanics (i.e. resistance, capacitance, voltage, etc.) from physics class 8 years ago in order to comprehend the bulk of what I’m doing, so that’s where much of my learning is coming from.  The rest of it is coming from the actual manipulations of cells in order to collect meaningful data.

Basically, what I’m doing now in the lab of Steven Mennerick in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University, is termed “electrophysiology.”  It’s a technique used to record changes in current and voltage across the membrane of a cell, in this case, hippocampal neurons from mice.  I’ll write more about this in a Primer sometime after I get more settled, but in short, the process involves attaching an electrode to the interior of a cell, and then a second electrode outside the cell in the surrounding fluid.  Depending on what drugs and ions you have present in the two locations (intracellular and extracellular), you can record peaks that look very much like ECG recordings from your heart.  These peaks will tell you whether sodium, potassium, calcium, chloride, etc. are entering or leaving the cell, which in turn tells you about how the cell functions.  Specifically, it gives you insight into neurotransmission, as the process of a cell receiving a neurotransmitter (e.g. dopamine, adrenaline, etc.) must involve some change in the flow of ions across the cell membrane.

The rig pictured above is the one I’m learning on.  It’s a large microscope with some tubes and electrodes running up to the state where the dish of cells sit.  Then, you use some little knobs and widgets to move the electrodes very slowly toward the cell so you don’t kill it by “popping” it.  So yeah, this takes some practice.  You have to make sure you don’t break the cell open, you have to make sure you don’t damage your electrode, and you also have to make sure you’re doing everything fast enough so that certain components of the system don’t “go bad” to the point where you need to replace them.  There’s a healthy balance between speed of operation and “care” of operation in all of this, for sure.

Aside from learning how to actually puncture and gather data from the cell, I’m having to learn about the aforementioned physics of circuits.  Good thing my Dad works with circuit breakers, just in case I ever need some help.

I’m definitely making progress, though.  I’ve been able to successfully puncture (or “patch,” as the technical lingo goes) more than a few cells, so right now, I’m working on consistency more than anything.  I’m hoping to get some more reading done today or tomorrow so I begin to understand why I’m doing some of the things I’m doing.

At the very least, it’s keeping me busy.  🙂

Posted on

Jolicloud

This is what the desktop screen and apps look like in Jolicloud.

I’ve mentioned previously that we’ve got a Dell Mini 10 netbook.  To be honest, it doesn’t get as much use as it did a few years ago when we lived in St. Louis and our desktop computer(s) were on a different floor.  Once we moved to Swisher, and now back to St. Louis again, the desktop is only a room away from the living room, so there isn’t much of a need to have a laptop constantly running…let alone the fact that we both have Android smartphones now, where it’s even faster to look something up quickly if it’s needed.

Thus, I get to “play” with the netbook a bit more than I used to.  I find Windows XP to be extremely slow on the system: slow to boot, slow to open programs, slow to do just about anything.  Therefore, I’ve toyed with a few different alternative operating systems.  Because Ubuntu 11.10 appears to have some serious issues with the graphics chip on the netbook, I decided to give Jolicloud a try.

Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu, incidentally, but runs quite a bit differently.  It’s designed to do everything within a browser as much as possible, though it is capable of having stand-alone programs installed as well.  In the desktop screen pictured above, most of those programs are opened within the Chromium web browser.  You can listen to music, edit documents, use maps, check your status updates, and browse the internet just as you can from any other computer.  The benefit here, though, is that the netbook is much more responsive because all it’s effectively doing is loading a web browser.

I guess the main downside is that it really requires an internet connection of some type, so if you aren’t on wifi anywhere, you can’t use the OS (to do anything productive, at least).  But hey, where does that happen anymore, anyway?

I’ve referred to cloud computing in the past.  Like many things, I think it works remarkably well, but you just have to know what you’re getting into before you boot the system.  Know what the strengths and weaknesses are before even trying to go that route.  You can’t expect to run Photoshop using low-powered devices that are designed to only operate within a web browser.  At the same time, though, you can get away with cheaper hardware with remarkably fast boot times and functionality.  So yes, a trade-off.

I’m enjoying it for now, though.  It’s always fun to install a new operating system and see what it can or can’t do.  At the very least, it gets me to use the netbook more often.  Still a good piece of hardware that has a few more years left in it due to software like Jolicloud.

Posted on

“Khaaaaaaan!”

Best. Movie. Ever.

Kristen came and visited this weekend.  Now that we live in St. Louis again, it’s a much more reasonable drive for her to come visit her niece, whom she hadn’t seen since last May.  Around the time we figured out that she’d be coming in, I was also made aware of a new Star Trek exhibition being displayed at the St. Louis Science Center.  The exhibition will be there until May, so there wasn’t really a huge rush…but, on the first Friday of each month, they run a special deal where they cut the cost of the exhibit in the evening and they show a movie in the Omnimax theater.  And the movie this month?

“Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”  Largely considered the best “Star Trek” movie.  As Khan said, “In my estimation, you simply have no alternative.”

We went to the exhibition after dinner and after we dropped Brooke and Meg off at home.  The exhibit itself was pretty neat, though I would have preferred fewer “replica” props.  Sure, they had actual uniforms worn by the various cast members throughout the series.  They had uniforms from each of the members of the crew from the newest movie, Spock’s robe from “Star Trek IV,” General Chang’s uniform from “Star Trek VI,” and  representative uniforms from all of the captains across all of the series.

There were a few ship models and some of the original props, but there were quite a few of the aforementioned replicas, mostly in the realm of communicators, badges, phasers, etc.  They definitely had some real ones and, to be honest, I’m sure the difference between the replicas and the real thing (which were only props, never truly “real”…) is minuscule.  Still, seeing more actual props that were used on the various properties would have been nice.  They did have scale models of a transporter and the Enterprise-D bridge from “The Next Generation,” mostly so they could take a picture of you and charge a ridiculous amount of money.  Still, it was cool to sit on the bridge of the Enterprise.

In the end, however, the real attraction for me was seeing “Star Trek II” in the theater.  It came out in 1982, the year I was born, so I’ve never actually seen this movie in a theater setting.  To be fair, it wasn’t ideal because they were projecting what looked like the DVD version of the movie up on a screen that is meant to wrap around you.  So, the image was kinda “curved,” and projected a bit higher than I would have liked.  The contrast was a bit “off,” as well, especially when the crew was shown on the bridge in very dark lighting.  But hey, when you’ve seen the movie countless times, you can forgive such things.

What I can’t forgive, however, is the omission of certain, key scenes.  Specifically, those regarding Scotty’s nephew.  As in, we see the kid, but certain lines of dialog that establish his relation to Scotty (as opposed to him being Random Engineering Cadette #7) are completely missing.  It’s just really weird as it’s been in every other version of the movie I’ve seen, so I just wonder where the heck they found this one.

However, seeing the movie with a crowd of people for the first time just brings an extra “magic” to a movie I’ve seen more times than I can count.  Once you’ve seen a movie you love enough times, there isn’t much else you can do to bring anything fresh to the viewing experience.  However, watching it with 200 other fans, some of which dressed as Starfleet crew or Klingons, is definitely unique.  Hearing cheers and jeers throughout was somewhat distracting, but still pretty great.

Overall, I think we had a good time.  Glad I got to see some bits of “Star Trek” history, and that I got to share it with my sister.  In the end, we came, we saw, we lived long and prospered.  It’s all I can ask.

Posted on

10.30.11 Dinner

Blueberry waffles and sausage. Meg ate two whole waffles (dipped in syrup, of course!)! She still left me with enough to have for breakfast a couple of times, though!

Posted on

10.24.11 Dinner

We’re getting back into the swing of things now, so more dinner posts to follow (hopefully, on a more regular basis!).

Curry-squash soup and pork potstickers. I love that soup so much I had it for lunch three days last week. Andy wishes it were more hearty. We’ll probably have it a few more times this winter 🙂

Posted on

A Brand New Day

Needless to say, this past weekend was somewhat hectic.  We got the truck loaded on Friday night with the help of relatively few (yet extremely helpful) people, which was shocking in and of itself.  At our parent’s suggestion, we ended up switching to a 26′ truck from the 22′ truck we had originally reserved.

Yeah.  That wouldn’t have worked.  We have far too much stuff.

In any event, we got it loaded and I drove the truck down from Swisher on Saturday morning, with Sam riding shotgun.  I pulled up to the new place (pictured above) just after 2:00, so all things considered, I think I made reasonable time.

We got the truck unloaded relatively quickly, this time with a bit more help than we had loading on Friday.  Had some problems with getting furniture up our narrow staircase to the upstairs, though.  Sadly, my orange swivel rocker won’t fit, and neither will the box spring for our full-size bed.  The mattress itself barely made it up there, so that’s something, I guess.  Meg’s room is mostly set up and the guest room is pretty much full of boxes, and will surely be the last thing to be completed.

The back yard. Nice covered porch and much, much less grass than I had to mow in Iowa.

The family hung out into Sunday, so we made a good deal of progress toward unpacking, though there’s plenty more to do.  We mostly chilled last night and watched the Cardinals game.  Brooke went to work today and Meg and I hung out, getting a few things done.  I did some work organizing the pantry, our bedroom and other miscellaneous areas of the house.  Meg was a bit fussier than usual, though I’m sure this is because a). her Mom had to go to work, and she was awake when Brooke left, and b). she’s finding herself in new surroundings.

So, we went to the park!

This park is about 2 blocks from us.

Thankfully, there’s a nice park very close to our house, well within walking distance.  There’s a playground, as well as benches, a field, and so on.  In general, a nice resource to have nearby, especially as we don’t have a really good place for her red swing.  Good thing the park has swings fit for Meg.  🙂

"Wheeeeee!"

Meg didn’t get to swing much this week, so she was eager to get in.  I kept asking if she was “all done,” and all she’d say was “no.”  Well, that and “wheeeee.”  We stayed at the park for a good 20-30 min, checked out the slides (which were a bit wet for my taste), and then walked back home for lunch.

In all, a pretty good day, despite Meg’s mood.  Nice having Brooke back now, too.  New “Dinners” posts forthcoming.  🙂

 

Posted on

Scary Movies 2011

It’s that time of year again.  Unfortunately, we’re kind of in the middle of a move, so my typical holiday classics of “Halloween,” “Alien” and “Hocus Pocus” are packed in boxes at the moment.  Therefore, I’ve got Netflix to help me out in this time of transition.

I made Brooke watch “Scream” last year, as she’d never seen it before. To be fair, I hadn’t seen it in years either, but watching it for what was probably the fourth time, it still held up and was quite good. I didn’t particularly care for “Scream 2,” and “Scream 3” was overly terrible, but the reviews for their fourth outing earlier this year were surprisingly positive. “Scream 4” came in the mail late last week, but I didn’t get a chance to watch it until Sunday night. I can safely say that “Scream 4” is right up there with the original. The question of “who the killer is” became easy to answer as the series moved forward, but this flick does a good job of drawing that final reveal out further, so while it may be obvious early on, the ending itself isn’t as certain. If you liked the original, I highly recommend this one.

Never seen it and it’s been in my Instant Queue since last year at this time, but still haven’t gotten around to watching it. It’s a remake of the 1973 George A. Romero flick of the same name about the effects of biological weapons testing near a small town in Pennsylvania. The 2010 remake is now set in Iowa and deals with a “mysterious toxin” that infects their water supply, leading to zombie-like behavior. Obviously, we wanted to watch this because it was set in Iowa. Now that we’re moving, it seems like the appropriate time to watch it.

“Red State” is fascinating to me, not because of the subject matter, but the way it even came about. In short, it’s about a group of teens doing what your typical horror movie teens do (drugs, sex and rock & roll), and how they get lured in by fundamentalists looking to make an example of them in a particularly violent and gruesome manner. Kevin Smith (of “Clerks” and “Mallrats” fame) wrote and directed the movie. He even got the movie financed and distributed himself, partially just to prove that it could even be done by a single individual or small company, without the help of a major distributor or movie production company. In many ways, it was a return to his roots in “Clerks,” famously filmed for $27,000. Regardless, I’m fascinating by this movie. It’s very existence is so odd, self-produced/marketed/written/directed by a guy that is famous for making movies about “dick and fart jokes.” Looking forward to it, for sure.

Finally, “The Thing.” I like throwing in some classic scifi/horror movie when possible, especially one I haven’t seen before (gasp!). This one’s also on Netflix Instant Queue, so you can’t argue with convenience. This one is by John Carpenter (who also did the aforementioned “Halloween”) and it’s actually a remake of 1951’s “The Thing From Another World.” Of course, now that it’s 2011, it’s time for another sequel (or prequel…) to come out, though this latest iteration isn’t getting the best reviews. Regardless, I’ve never seen it and it’s sitting in my queue, so I don’t have much of an excuse anymore.

I think that’s a reasonable list.  I’m sure others will pop in there, as well.  I don’t start the new job until November 1st, so that gives me some free nights to watch some scary movies over the next week.