Cute and Lethal

Wish I brought my camera cable...

Up in the Berkshires for a wedding, where it is beginning to gently snow. Two things: Glad I drove the Yukon. Wish I brought the cable that would allow me to post pictures of this pretty resort.

Update: Wish I remembered my bathing suit too. They have a great indoor pool--the cleanest I have ever seen at a hotel. They have trunks on sale in the gift shop but two things: They were expensive and I have maybe half dozen at home, so it is not as if I would get much use out of a new one other than today.

Great Althouse comments part n + 1

Richard said... The Raisin is a great symbol of lack of desire and disappointment. Who is ever happy to find out that their chocolate chip cookie actually has raisins in it instead?

Truer words never spoken.

How much pressure can a fermentation achieve?

This ought to be known since, in principle at least, it is a pretty simple experiment to envision. However, I have done a bit of searching on Pubmed and found nothing on this subject. There could be a couple of good reasons for this: 1. It could be such a well known thing that a published paper would be pointless. 2. There is no practical need to find out an answer to this question. Makers of sparking wine already know how much sugar to add to get the desired level of carbonation and avoid exploding bottles, so what more is needed?

Well, I am interested out of pure curiosity. But how to do the experiment? One could fill a strong tank with juice and yeast, then close it up and keep track of how high the pressure gets. One possible complication is that the yeast may run out of sugar before the pressure stops them. Or the alcohol may get so high that this kills off the yeast. Or the Carbon dioxide in solution may cause the pH to drop to levels that kill the yeast. A couple of these things can easily be eliminated, depending on what happens: Let's say the fermentation slows to a halt at 200 psi. We relieve the pressure and then close-up the system and it again builds to 200 psi. This would show that the alcohol is not too high and the sugar is not limiting. What about the pH? When you vent the reactor the CO2 will leave and the pH should be able to climb. The only solution I see to this would be to have a neutralizing agent in the mix, perhaps a bit of Sodium bicarbonate for instance.

Part of what interests me about this is that I don't have a good feel for the relationship between delta G (or the energetics of a reaction) and pressure. Surely it takes energy to generate pressure, so at some point the reaction would stop at some pressure. There are also concentration effects in chemical reactions. We have Sugar going to Alcohol + CO2 and this reaction gives-off energy. If neither the Alcohol nor CO2 harmed the yeast then at some concentration, the mere excess of either of these would slow and then stop the reaction from moving forward. This is Le Chatelier's principle.

The technical term for it is wine

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I made a little bit of hard cider. This is very easy to do: You just put yeast into a bottle of apple juice--having first made sure it contains no preservatives. Preservatives do their thing by stopping the growth of yeast, among other things.

I like my hard cider to be bubbly, so I do the fermentation in the original bottle with the cap on tight. One must remember to relieve the pressure fairly often so that the bottle does not explode though!

The first batch was going well, so when it was close to being done I started a second batch by pouring a little of the first batch into the new one.

I was relating all of this to a few of our younger guests (high school and college aged) and suggested that when this last apple batch finished, I planned to inoculate a bottle of white grape juice. It was purchased for a party, it didn't get drunk and our kids don't like it--so it seemed like a good way of getting rid of it.

"Wait"! One of the young guests said, "You can ferment grape juice"? He may have regretted the words before they were fully out of his mouth: Not due to me though. I am gentle on youth. I said something like, "Yeah, sure you can". rather than the title of this post. And yes, I did think of the mean answer before I replied.

Dahlia turned 10 on the 23rd but we had her party today

It was a bowling party in "mood lighting". Hence the psychedelic picture.

Where the office used to be

This spot is where our home office has been for the last 8 years. Now that we have a new office, posted about in the last week or two, the original is being pressed into family room service. Wasting no time, the Christmas tree is installed. This year a live one that we can plant outside after Christmas. My wife did all of the decorating with my one contribution being the addition of glass blocks to give a little more height.

A tale of two turkeys

We had 19 people over for Thanksgiving dinner, so I cooked two turkeys. One in the oven and one in the charcoal grill. They would have both fit into the oven side by side since I prefer birds that are in the 12-14 lb range, but variety is the very spice of life & all that.

The verdict: I pronounce you both guilty! Of being delicious, that is. They were different of course. The oven version, cooked mostly breast-side down @ 325 F. was very juicy and really as good as one could hope for. The grilled one I cooked breast-side up the whole way since the coolest part of the grill is the top and the breast requires the least heat. The meat was a little bit less moist than the oven one, but it was reasonably juicy and one can put extra gravy on it. The main difference was that it had a strong but pleasing smokey bouquet.

The verdict, based upon which one got eaten-up the most is that the oven one won. Deep down I know that really the grilled one is better, so like a climate "scientist", I'll just water-board the data a little and come with a new verdict: People are good and as such, they naturally wanted to eat up the less desirable turkey to leave the best for others. That's the ticket!

Joke from JAMES TARANTO's WSJ Best of the Web today

Q: How many climate scientists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. There's a consensus that it's going to change, so they've decided to keep us in the dark.

Thanksgiving

Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof: (via WSJ)

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

I plotted an aborted landing but ended-up flying right

One week after the marathon I injured myself. I don't think it was the marathon that did it either since I had run a couple of times after the race and was just fine. Rather, I think it was from running the day after straining myself with yard work. Go figure; a non-stop 26 mile race and I'm fine, but re-starting a recalcitrant lawn mower and I'm wrecked.

The injury spun out of control for a bit: My calf hurt so I favored landing on my heel--which then got a deep, deep blister. This caused me to compensate by thrusting forward with my good leg which caused it to get sore too.

I still ran, but slower. My experience is that injuries can take months to heal and if you stop training all that time you will be back to square one. So I ran, but I couldn't run very fast--till today. I actually set a PR for the below run. Not by much and with lots of pain still, but this is much better than pain + slowness.

Update: I paid for yesterday's exuberance: Today I ran a mere 4 miles at greater than 10 minutes per mile. I swear, some little old ladies with walkers zoomed past me but I can't be sure since it all happened so fast.

Behold, this fully-functional office space

There is actually more work to be done but the Rubicon has been crossed: My wife performed her first work-day in the room. There is no going back.

Dahlia is 10 today. Hurrah!

Finishing touches on the porch/study

There has been a self, and wife-imposed deadline on this multi-year project of turning a porch into a year-round office space.

All it really needs in order to become an office is for me to move the internet connection to the room and then put desk, chairs and computers in there. A while ago we thought it would be a good idea to have some built-in storage too and so we purchased a truck-load of Ikea stuff. The cabinets are not really required for office use but it would be a pain to do the work once all our work-things get put in. For almost a year all the Ikea boxes were stored here:

All of the boxes fit into the lower shelf on the left where there are two boxes remaining.

As one can see, they take up vastly less room in the boxes than when they are assembled.

If you can follow the cartoon instructions then the furniture looks good, functions well and is very solid. The problem I had was with missing parts. There were two missing parts in the first cabinet box, one of which was the instructions. I got fairly far before I realized that I was missing another part, so I opened up the 2nd box and eureka! It had directions and an obvious other part the first box lacked. I cannibalized from the 2nd to complete the first, and then from the 3rd to replace the missing part from the 2nd which had gone to the 1st & etc. In the end I think there were two sets of directions in 4 boxes and two missing hardware types. I checked with the Ikea site and in order to get replacement parts you need three things: The receipt (which we have thanks to a super-thorough wife), you have to go to an actual store (the closest one is an hour away) and it has to be 90 days from the time of purchase (it was about a year ago). I wouldn't have wanted to drive all that way when I could probably improvise something.

If you use your gray-matter, you can tell two things from the above picture: Which cabinet has the missing part and what the missing part is.

How could you know?

Obviously, the last wall unit will be the lower one since with this L shape, the logical place to start would be on the right side and then work your way left, with the lower left one in last. You can tell from the picture that there is more light coming from the low one. It would have been a darker one if I had used luan plywood instead of sheet-metal. The other missing part was the mounting brackets--I used hinges that I already had as a replacement.

All of this was 9 boxes: One for each wall unit and five boxes for the unit sitting on the floor (base, two sections, drawers, doors).

He keeps saying stupid things and yet people still listen to him.

The center of the earth is millions of degrees? He is only off by about three orders of magnatude, but what do I--a mere non Nobel prize-winner--know?

It is just the Byam and it is because of Gilmore

Other schools in our town allow Christmas themed gifts, so it is not as if this is some kind of rule from "on high". It is just the whim of the Byam principal, nothing more and is entirely typical of her ways. One incident in our daughter's class illustrates the point exactly: There was some rule against PG movies, but the teacher got permission slips from every child in the class' parents and still Gilmore nixed the movie when she found out about it! We have put three kids through that school and have a million stories of her blind adherence to rules and control-freakishness.

Situation normal: Running on an injury

I really lucked-out last year in that most of the time I had no injuries. This has lead to a false sense of security since most of the last eight years I have had one pain or another; usually the left Achilles tendon. It has been a good string: I've run 3 marathons, a 10k, a ten miler and a two mile race in roughly one year's time. Now things are getting back to normal in that one week after NYC I pulled-up lame.

The most common advice I get when I talk of injuries is that I should just quit running until I am healed. The problem with this is that it takes from six months to a year to heal and if I stop running all that time I will be back to square-one when I resume. So, I will do what I have been doing the last few years: Run, but not as hard; use lots of ice-packs and eat a lot of aspirin. Oh yes; and learn to accept that my calf is going to hurt when I run and most of the rest of the time too.

I've got to keep things in perspective: I don't have a life-threatening disease--just a bit of pain when I engage in a hobby (a hobbly?) that I don't even much care for.

Veteran's day off

My normal day off happened to coincide with Veteran's day, so the kids were off from school and we all had an outing around lunch time.

Most of the trees have lost all leaves, but sometimes you come across one that is a little tardy.

This natural area is called "Lime Quarry" but the only rocks I notice are made of granite.

Yeast Quest

Some years ago, back when we lived in Vermont, my next door neighbor brought home a truck-load of apples and owned a cider press. Since he had an essentially unlimited supply of apples, he made a deal with me: Press a gallon of juice for him and I could take a gallon for myself. That seemed overly generous, so what I would do is press two or three gallons for Joe and then fill a juice pitcher for myself.

Along the way I got the idea of trying to make cider. The unwashed apples should have plenty of native yeast on them and the acid of the juice would tend to suppress bacterial growth, so I figured that all I had to do was put the juice into an air-tight container and wait. What I used was a plastic juice bottle with a screw-on lid and I just let it sit in the garage until I noticed some swelling from internal pressure. I would loosen he lid gently to relieve most--but not all--of the pressure every day or two. I kept doing this until the fermentation slowed down to a crawl and then gently poured the cider into a fresh clean juice bottle, leaving all the sediment out. A couple more rackings and I put the cider into wine bottles and was done.

In the intervening years, my wife and I have gotten hooked on hard cider, especially the Woodchuck Draft Cider -- Granny Smith. The stuff is good, but it is pricey and so I have been of a mind to try my hand again at making cider. The only problem is that the cider you purchase in the grocery store is pasteurized, so if you don't add yeast it will just sit there. I began looking into yeast and there are no brew shops very close to where we live. I could order some on-line but I hate the idea of buying something for a buck and then paying five dollars for shipping, so things remained so until last Saturday.

We were up in Nashua a-clothes-shopping for the oldest girl and on the way to Old Navy, we went past a place that looked like a brew-shop. Not wanting to loiter in a clothes store, I dropped-off the wife & daughter and went back the half-mile to the brew shop. The shop turned out to not be quite what I expected: They were a place where you do brewing. You pay something like $200 and they supply all the equipment and supplies as well as help for their customers to brew beer. Then you come back in two weeks to bottle your 6 cases of 22oz beers. So they didn't offer to sell me any champagne yeast, but did give directions to a place about five miles further up the road. The directions were long and complex. While listening to them, I was thinking to myself, "There is no way I'm going to even try to find that place, I'll just bag-it till another time...". But I hadn't heard from the girls and the thought of standing around in a clothes store was daunting, so I set-out in the direction given and figured I could turn around if I got lost, or a call from my wife. The directions were perfect. The shop and the shop-keeper were perfectly charming. I got my yeast for 75 cents and even picked up a fancy 24 ounce beer 9.5% EtOH by volume for about 5 bucks.

I'd rather pay $5 for a fancy beer than for shipping. You can't drink shipping.

A day of gasoline powered things

Sunday was as pretty a day as one can expect in early November for New England. It must have been close to 60F and sunny. It was the perfect time to run over leaves with the mulching mower. I was about half way through my 2nd tank of gas and the mower had been getting increasingly sluggish, so I figured it was time to clean the air filter. Indeed, it turned out to be fully packed with leaf dust--I really wondered how it could have run at all with such clogging. The machine had other ideas: I put the clean filter back on and the mower would not start, or would start for a second and then quit. I checked the gas. I checked the oil. I cleaned the spark plug. I adjusted the carburetor. I got blisters on my hand from the pull-cord. Finally it began to run and ran like a champ til I was done: A tank and a half later.

After that, my wife wanted to run the leaf grinder--to deal with leaves in places I cannot mow, like flower beds. Given my bad experience with gasoline-powered devices, I approached starting the leaf shredder with dread. It got going on the first pull, not bad considering that it hadn't been used since last Fall.

Since I had reached the back of the garden shed I figured I may as well pre-position the snow blower to the front of the house. It too started right up and it still had old gas from last Winter in it.

Just for the sake of completeness, I should have seen if I could get the chainsaw running. It is a good thing I didn't think of this: If I got the saw running I would want to cut down a tree (lots of them need to be cut down) and this would have just created a lot of work for myself. It was already Sunday afternoon and I had the rain gutters to clean still.