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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.  🙂

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Step 1: Buy Some Beer

I woke up Saturday morning to find out I got my paycheck a few days early (!!!!), so I went ahead and got me a beer kit.  My boss, Dr. Doorn, had suggested a company that he’s gone through in the past called Northern Brewer, based out of Minnesota/Michigan.  He pointed out that they’ve got a pretty good variety of beers (he’s right…) and, perhaps most importantly, their close location means that shipping happens quite rapidly, so you don’t end up waiting for your package to arrive for a week or more as I would, perhaps, have to with William’s Brewing.  When comparing the two, it seems like their kits are very comparable in build and price, but Northern does seem to have a wider variety of beer options (94 options at the time of this writing), and you get to choose what kind of yeast you want (e.g. dry, liquid) and what kind of priming sugar.  Otherwise, everything else comes in each kit.

I got the cheaper set for now, as my Dad still has a few glass carboys from when he made wine a few years back.  If I decide to go that route, I can certainly do so, but for now, I’ll stick with my tried-and-true method.  For my first beer, I decided to go with a Honey Brown Ale (pictured above).  I went with that one for a few reasons, but one of them is that, compared with the other options, it should be ready relatively soon (close to 4 weeks).  Also, if you’ve never had one, a Honey Brown beer variety (assuming I do it right…) ends up being pretty smooth, not very bitter, and has a sweet flavor to it.  Therefore, hopefully, it’ll have a relatively wide appeal at Thanksgiving/Christmas gatherings this Fall/Winter.  For my next one, I’ll probably go with something more “hoppy,” which is the style of beer I tend to gravitate toward anymore.

As the title of the post implies, I’ll be writing these in a series of “Steps” as I go through the process, and as such, I’m completing a few things right now before the beer is even here.  One is measuring the temperature in my intended brewing location: the unfinished, cellar-like basement of our house.  I’m recording the temperatures 3-4 times a day at varying times in hopes of getting an idea as to how stable the temperature will be.  The “cellar-like” part should hold stable, but that is where our furnace is and our washer/dryer, so I’m not sure how the “swings” will affect the brewing process.  Typically, you want your fermentation to occur in a relatively stable environment: not too cold, not too hot, but also not swinging wildly between extremes.  When I did did some brewing back in undergrad, we noticed that the yeast could be “shocked” into inactivity if the temperature dropped too far.  That meant the yeast, effectively, stopped doing what I wanted them to do: make alcohol and, consequently, beer.  So between last night and this morning, the temperature was hovering between 56 F and 60 F, and that’s fine by me.  Again, the yeast can handle temperatures in a variety of ranges, but they don’t like their temperatures being shifted around.  I could probably brew in the upper-40s to low-50s and be fine (with the right kind of yeast…), but the fermentation process would just be slower than it would in the upper-60s to low-70s.

Secondly, I’m collecting bottles.  Most beer kits come with a capper and bottle caps, the latter of which you can always purchase more of for relative cheapness.  We’ll slowly collect “interesting” 12 oz bottles, but basically we’re sticking with those that don’t have markings on the glass itself, like Sam Adams bottles or New Belgium bottles do.  We’ve got 24 of those, which should hold over 2 gal of beer.  I’ve also got two 2 L bottles, and nine 1 L bottles, all of which have reusable tops on them, so they don’t require capping.  Those should hold nearly 3 gal of beer, bringing me up to the 5 gal of total storage I will need.  I’ll probably try and keep a good mix like that, keeping most of the beer in the 1 L bottles, but making enough in the 12 oz bottles to either give away or take to gatherings in single-serving amounts.  We’ll probably collect more of those 12 oz bottles over time, but for now, we’ve got enough.

So hopefully the kit ships today or tomorrow and I’ll have it this week, and assuming all goes according to plan (which rarely happens, I realize…), I should have something quasi-drinkable by Thanksgiving.  The carbonation process will not have had much time around Thanksgiving, as that’s a bit over 3 weeks away), but this variety of beer shouldn’t require all that much carbonation, anyway.  It all depends on how the yeast do in the basement environment and whether they keep fermenting at a good pace.  We’ll see!

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Primer: Memory

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.

The whole idea of “memory” has intrigued me for quite awhile, arguably before I was even that interested in science in general.  Part of this is my attraction to all things computers.  I think I build my first computer (rather, helped Dad build one…) back in the late-90s, and at that time, I began to understand all of the components that make it function.  The idea of “input/output,” the function of a central processing unit (CPU), RAM and hard drives…all of these things proved relatively easy to grasp, and in light of these general functions, it made my understanding of the brain a bit easier in the process.

Let’s think of it this way.  You interact with computers in different ways, but one way is with a keyboard.  You type something into the keyboard and the data you input is converted by the CPU into something that can be understood by the system, in this case, binary code (i.e. a series of “1s” and “0s”).  All of your inputs from the keyboard are stored in RAM for faster, short-term access.  If you click the “Save” button on whatever you’re doing, however, the data stored in RAM gets sent to the slower-access hard drive.  As you open programs, information is pulled off the hard drive and into RAM so that your CPU can process it faster, and then you and your keyboard can get at and interact with it.  This is why, in general, having more RAM speeds up your computer because it can pull larger and larger programs into RAM so your CPU can get at it easier, and thus, you can interact with it faster.

In very basic terms, your brain works the same way.  We have inputs in the form of our 5 senses.  The information from those senses gets encoded by your brain’s Cerebral Cortex and is stored temporarily in the Hippocampus (i.e. RAM) before being encoded for long-term storage back in other regions of the Cortex (i.e. hard drive).  Most of the time, your brain “Saves” it’s data to the Cortex at night, which is why sleeping is so very important.  The “processing” portion of this paradigm can be confusing, but keep in mind that the brain is divided up into specific regions.  There’s a “visual cortex,” an “auditory cortex,” etc.  These regions (within the Cortex…) interpret what each sense gives you and then sends that information through the Temporal and Parietal Lobes (also in the Cortex).  From there, the information is spread to the Hippocampus (i.e. RAM) for “integration” before being set as full, long-term memories out in the rest of the brain.

How is that information stored, you may ask?  Again, it’s much like a hard drive.  If you’ve used computers extensively, you know that hard drives are divided up into “sectors” (ever get a disc read error that says “bad sector?”).  When you have a new hard drive, you start with a clean slate.  As you install programs and add files, it gets filled up.  Once you delete something, that sector isn’t really “deleted,” but it is removed from your access: it isn’t really “deleted” until it’s overwritten by something else (which is why you can sometimes retrieve old files off a hard drive that you thought may have been deleted).  Whenever you “defragment” your hard drive, you are basically trying to rearrange those programs to keep everything closer together, and thus, quicker to access.  The data that’s encoded on the hard drive is done in “1s” and “0s” (i.e. binary code).  Each 1 or 0 is considered to be a “bit,” while a set of eight 1s and 0s (e.g. 11010101, 10011010, etc.) is considered a “byte.”  This is where “kilobytes,” “megabytes” and “gigabytes” come from.

The idea of 1s and 0s comes from logic, specifically the definitions of “True” (i.e. 1) and “False” (i.e. 0).  If you have a “1,” then you have a connection.  If you have a “0,” then you don’t.

Bringing this back to neuroscience, the same general rule appears to apply with regards to memories, or the concept of “learning” in general.  In order to form a memory, it needs to be encoded much like your hard drive is: in a series of combinations of connections (or missed connections) between neurons spanning the entire brain.  There are various molecular mechanisms that can account for these connections, or lack of connections, and those go back to receptor theory.  Remember that neurotransmission involves the release of a neurotransmitter (e.g. dopamine, adrenaline, etc.) from one neuron to bind with a receptor on another.  If a neuron stops receiving signals from another neuron, it will remove its receptors from the outside of the cell, thus limiting or negating the signal.  If, however, a neuron keeps getting increased signaling from an adjacent neuron, the subsequent neuron will increase the number of receptors on the outside of the cell, thus making it easier to signal.  Therefore, we have a mechanism for strengthening or weakening the connections between two neurons.

One could consider a “strengthened” neuronal connection to be a “1” and a “weakened” neuronal connection to be a “0.”  It is in this way, it is thought, that memories can be formed on a cell-to-cell basis.

These neurons that memories are stored in are located throughout the brain, similarly to “sectors” on your hard drive.  As you stop using certain memories, the synapses of those neurons weaken to the point where they can be, effectively, “overwritten” in favor of a new memory.  This is also how the idea of “repressed memories” can come about, in that you can have a memory stored in a region of your brain that you have forgotten about, but can re-manifest later: if it isn’t overwritten, it’s still there.

From a molecular standpoint, scientists have a pretty good idea how memory “works,” but being able to decode those memories is a whole different beast.  Returning to our computer metaphor, imagine knowing nothing about computers and finding a hard drive.  What would you do with it?  Would you take it apart?  How would you know what it was?  Or what it contained?  And once you figured out that it, somehow, contained information, how would you read it?  If you eventually found out that it involved 1s and 0s, how would you know how those 1s and 0s were organized across the hard drive, and then finally, what they told you?

This is why it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever be able to make or see memories like we do in the movies, at least, not for a very long time.  It’s one thing to understand the basis for how it works, but it’s a whole other thing to try and figure out how it’s organized within a system like the human brain.  Also, it’s been estimated that the human brain contains terabytes of information, which translates to 8,000,000,000,000 to 8,000,000,000,000,000 individual 1s and 0s, or individual neuronal connections.

Imagine looking at a sheet (or multiple sheets…) of paper with that many 1s and 0s on it and trying to decide which version of Windows it represents.  Or where your dissertation is…not the Word Document, but the PDF.  That’s what we’re talking about.

So yeah, I just find the concept of memory to be fascinating.  With modern computers, we’re effectively reverse-engineering the human brain and, in doing so, learning more and more about how technological and biological computation can work.  But next time you see some “memory reading” device on TV, bear in mind what’s actually required to make that technology work.

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Yay, beer!

Back at Truman, my roommate Andrew and I both majored in Chemistry and had found out that one of our professors made his own beer.  My Dad had dabbled in wine making a few years ago, so I was generally familiar with the process of making an alcoholic beverage, but Andrew had never done anything like that.  Of course, being future chemists (he’s getting his Ph.D. at UNC right now in their Chemistry department), he figured that we could give it a try and see what we got.  Of course, I was perfectly fine with this and we got started, with some pointers from our Chemistry professor.

We looked into a few options, but settled upon William’s Brewing for the kit we wanted.  Pictured above, the kit basically includes two 5 gallon buckets for fermentation and priming of your beer, tubing, a gravimeter (for detecting the alcohol content), bottle caps + bottle capper, and some instructions to get you started.  The company also sells a variety of beers, although once you have the equipment, you can make beer any way you want from whatever company you want, or just get all the ingredients yourself.  William’s Brewing makes it pretty easy giving you the components you need in a single box (e.g. malt, hops, sugar, yeast), and have the yeast/hops matched for the variety that they are getting you (i.e. pale ale, wheat beer, etc.).

When we left Kirksville, Chambers and I sold our kit to another Chemistry student, but I always intended on getting back into it.  Chambers continued on at UNC and has made a few varieties since, and told me the turned out quite well.  In St. Louis, however, I never really had a good location for brewing.  Besides keeping your equipment sterile during the brewing process, the other really big thing you have to consider is the temperature of your brewing, and keeping it consistent.  Yeast tend to like a consistent environment when they ferment your malt and make alcohol, so allowing huge swings in temperature will “shock” them into either a hibernation-like state, or death – neither of which are particularly helpful when making beer.  In Kirksville, we did this by fermenting in a closet that was generally insulated from changes in A/C or heating in the winter time, only varying the temperature by about 5 F.  In St. Louis, at our first apartment, we didn’t really have the space for it, and in Soulard, the temperature swings were still generally difficult to manage.

Now that we’re in Iowa and we’ve got quite a bit more space, I think I’m ready to get back into it.  I think Brooke’s even on-board with helping me out from time to time, so long as she gets some of the beer, of course.  Once I actually get this going, I’ll post about what the full process is, but I’ll go ahead and mention right here that we should get around 5 gal of beer per batch, and each batch takes around 2-3 weeks from start to drink-ability.  5 gal translates to 40 pts, so if you figure that the average cost of a kit from William’s Brewing is around $36.90 (depending on which kit you get, of course), it ends up getting you 40 beers at about $1 each.  Not a bad deal, methinks.

My goal is to get one of these things purchased in early November and, if all goes well, have a batch ready by Thanksgiving.  I can’t guarantee that batch will be good, but I’ll certainly drink it.  It may take a few tries before I figure out the best placement of the fermentation bucket, the styles that work best with our water (we are using well water, but I’ll used the filtered stuff for this…I don’t like the taste of sulfur in my beer, and I don’t think the yeast will like it much, either), and the logistics of actually making the beer in our small kitchen (more on that when I describe the process…).  So yeah, hopefully a good trial run by Thanksgiving, and maybe my first truly spectacular batch by Christmas.  If all goes according to plan…

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How We Wash Our Diapers


I think that just about everyone who uses cloth diapers has their own “secret” to clean, fresh diapers, but since we know a few new parents who are getting ready to delve into the world of cloth diapering, I thought I’d share my washing routine in case it might help!

We keep our dirty diapers in a plain trash can with a lid that came from Target for under $10, so everything wet or soiled, including flannel wipes and, when I was still breastfeeding, flannel nursing pads, goes in there. When Meg was only eating breastmilk, the poopy diapers also went in as is. Now that she’s eating solids and the poop wouldn’t break down in the washer, we just dump what can be dumped into the toilet and throw those diapers into an ice cream bucket that’s on the stairs to the basement where the washer and dryer are so we can grab them on the way down with the rest of the diapers.

Generally, we wash diapers and covers every 2-3 days during the evening after Meg is in bed. Our normal routine is that I “Prewash” everything on cold first, then soak everything in warm water with a couple of coffee scoops of baking soda. I used to take out the covers and soak just the diapers in hot water, but decided that was using too much energy for not a lot of difference in cleanliness, so recently switched to a warm water soak. I let the diapers soak for about an hour, then wash on warm with an extra rinse cycle. I just use Tide Free and Clear detergent and a couple of capfuls of vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser of the washer. I’m usually not a name brand snob at all, but since we have well water, I think the Tide really does do a much better job than other brands of baby-friendly detergent, although when Aldi has their brand of dye and perfume free detergent, I use that, but they only have it every once in awhile. By this point in the routine, I go to bed and Andy handles pulling out the diaper covers to air dry and putting the diapers in the dryer on the highest heat setting. By the time we get up in the morning, the diapers in the dryer are finished and the covers are dry enough to either put away or pack in Meg’s day care bag.

We do have a couple of all-in-one diapers that Andy just puts in the dryer and they seem to still be holding up ok, but I’m not sure how they would continue to wash if we only dried them in the dryer and only used those?

I’ve bleached all of our white prefolds maybe twice in the last 7 months, but hung prefolds and handmade fitteds outside on a really sunny day to be sun bleached every once in awhile. I had plans to hang everything out on the clothesline for as long as possible, and while I did hang out clothes all summer, the diapers didn’t make it out that often, especially since I started working, just because the dryer is so much faster and can be done overnight. As always, feel free to ask either of us any questions about cloth diapering, because we think we’re pretty good at it and it’s working out so well for us, we think anyone can handle it!

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R.I.P. Garden

May 2010-October 2010


Last weekend, while my mom was here to take Meg to Target to buy toys, we finished pulling everything out of the garden and turned the dirt over in preparation for the long Iowa winter ahead. I didn’t know what we were really getting into when I planted in May, I just wanted to see what would grow and what wouldn’t so I can really get going next spring. I learned that the dirt is so good here that everything grows monstrously and need twice as much room as I gave it, it’s hard to mow under out of control squash, and cheap tomato cages aren’t worth the 99 cents I spent at all. I’ve ordered my seed catalogs and am looking forward to plotting out next year’s garden plan before I start my seeds inside in a few months!