The Big Room (and the little things in it)

Oh, I forgot to mention here that Episode 4 is up at http://www.dogphilosophy.net, where I’m trying out the “Powerpress” plugin for WordPress to see how it works out. Please give it a listen and let me know how it is.

I’m still plotting to expand out to three different podcasts/oggcasts or so, including of course the current Stir-Fried Stochasticity podcast (Science news direct from primary sources: scientific publications), an intermittent “Perceptive Peripatetic” series literally based on random things that I happen to run into as I wander around which happen to amuse, interest, or inspire me, and a “The Computer Is My Friend” free-fun-with-computer-nerd-stuff podcast. Upcoming episodes being considered for each include:

Stir-Fried Stochasticity
• Episode 5: This Episode Is Garbage (concerning Landfills)
• Episode something-higher-than-5: “Two Mass Spectrometers, High Performance Liquid Chromatography, and a Female Donkey” (concerning exactly what it says…)
• Episode also-something-higher-than-5: “Is there anything Beer cannot do?” (concerning some interesting beer-related publications I’ve collected)
• Various other papers from various fields have also been collected for consideration. Suggestions are welcome.

Perceptive Peripatetic
• “The Firebreathing All-Devouring Skybeast of the Gulf” (inspired by a photo I took recently, if I can get it to turn out the way I want it.)

“The Computer Is My Friend”
• Episode 01: “Freetarded” podcasting (concerning practical, ethical, legal, and technical stuff I’ve run into and considered while trying to support this new podcasting hobby of mine – hopefully useful for anyone else interested in producing their own audio and/or video for the web and for public participation.)
• Episode sometime-after-01: “Enterprise Linux Must Die” (Tentative plot: it’s actually “pro-Linux” but is a rant against “Enterprise” distributions, or at least one in particular, and some praise for “rolling releases”).
• Episode also-sometime-after-01: “Freetarded” mobility (concerning Android, Meego/Maemo, and my quest to get as much functionality on my cellphone while remaining as “Legally Free” as possible. Might possibly include instructions for making an external microphone adapter for various cellphone models, and might also include some (optional) video content.
• Episode yet-another-sometime-after-01: Where? (Concerning geolocation, geolocated digital photos, other geolocated media, “geotagging” in general, and some verbal chastisement for people who say they are “geotagging” but [in my opinion] are not.)

The schedule for all this is still unspecified (but far quicker than “another year” until the next episode, at least), and as usual is heavily influenced on what anybody who is willing to listen might be interested in. I may be doing this for fun rather than profit, but the fun will be greatly enhanced if I’m not just sitting here talking to myself. Feel free to post in the comments (anonymously if you prefer – just put a fake email address in the field that asks for it.)

My schedule means I have virtually no time to do anything but work (including the commute) during the week, and increasingly the two days of weekend that I have tend to have an overflowing list of “stuff I’ve been wanting to do – often for quite a while – but can’t possibly do much of in the time I have this weekend”

I’ve got a minimum of two different podcasts/oggcasts that I can be working on (Episode 4 of “Stir-Fried Stochasticity”, regarding Tuberculosis and “heat-fixing” [and ninjas], should be ready to post soon. I also have plans to do an intermittent computer-nerd podcast, perhaps also to be submitted for “Hacker Public Radio“.) I have a bit of relatively minor but useful hardware-hacking to do (make a cable allowing me to plug an external microphone into my Android phone for potentially recording podcast/oggcast material and other things). I have work to do on www.dogphilosophy.net (which I plan to turn into the main podcast/oggcast distribution site). I have vague ideas of general creative endeavors that I could work on developing. I have a seemingly endless mass of domestic chores that could be attended to (it’s quite frightening to think of myself as “the neat one” in this house…).

It’s grotesquely hot outside as usual (why is it that no matter what part of the country I live in, the temperatures seem to spend most of their time 5-10°F above supposedly “normal” for the last decade or so? My hypothesis is that the universe dislikes me for some reason), so outdoor activities are currently lacking from my list.

I need one of those “life” things I keep hearing about. I’ve heard they’re kind of fun.

Any suggestions from anyone (anonymous or otherwise)?

P.S. Motorola corporation sucks. Thankfully it turns out HTC (unlike Motorola) actually knows what “geotagging” means…

Also P.S.: only one post and one off-blog comment letting me know the “Breakdancing Ghost of Narada Falls” post actually worked. Did anyone else listen to it (or try to and find they couldn’t)? If so, how did it sound? Thanks…

Gather around the campfire, boys and girls and everyone else. It’s story time.

(This is both an attempt to entertain AND a technical test – I’d be most appreciative if any or all of you left me a comment letting me know how this works for you. I’ll put some technical information at the end of the post.)

This story concerns a certain location in Mount Ranier National Park…

After you hear this harrowing tale, if you can’t make it out to Mount Ranier National Park to verify the story for yourself, you can see a picture of the monument online. Click or scan the QRCode image to the right to see it after you’ve heard the story.

Feedback is welcome and encouraged. For those who are interested, here’s what this post is supposed to do, technically:

If you are viewing this post in a modern (HTML5-supporting) browser, the “native” audio player in your browser should appear above, allowing you to press “play” and listen to the story. All but one of the modern HTML5-supporting browsers support the high-quality (and legally free to use) “Ogg Vorbis” audio format and will play that version. If you are in the minority of HTML5-browser-using population (Safari), an MP3 version should play instead. (The problem with Safari is that Apple doesn’t include a Quicktime component for Ogg media formats out of the box. Personally, I would recommend going ahead and installing the Free Quicktime Components, which will enable Ogg media formats for Safari, iTunes, and all other Quicktime-using programs.)

If you are NOT using a modern, HTML5-supporting browser at all (or are perhaps using one I’ve never heard of that supports neither higher-quality Ogg Vorbis nor MP3) – mainly Microsoft’s “Internet Explorer” browsers and really old versions of Firefox or Opera that may still be in use – if you have Java installed, a Java-based Ogg Vorbis player should appear instead, allowing you to play the higher-quality audio anyway.

If your browser doesn’t support HTML5 AND doesn’t support Java, a link to an Adobe Flash-based MP3 player should appear. Click on that, and you SHOULD have a window pop up that will play the lower-quality MP3 version of the audio.

In short, nearly everyone should be able to play the audio if I’ve done all of this correctly. Please let me know.

Posted from Packwood, Washington, United States.

I’m still around, honest.  Just got back from a semi-business trip involving way more sitting-in-a-car than is comfortable.  I have a few pictures from the trip, which I’m working on getting uploaded to my Panoramio page.  A few are up now, a few more will follow soon.  See anything you like?

Meanwhile, I’m way behind on sleep.  Good night, y’all.  More in the next day or two…

I’ve been talking about it for months, now I’ve finally done it: I’m calling it “Pigsfly Pie”…and it’s awesome.

If you’ve not run into it before, there’s a classic Pennsylvania “Dutch” recipe called “Shoofly Pie“, which is more or less a dense molasses cake in a pie crust. It’s quite good…but I’ve improved on it. As the name implies the secret ingredient is the semi-official food of the Internet…Bacon.

Here’s the secret recipe:

Dry(ish) Stuff:
• About 155g all-purpose flour
• About 28g (2 Tablespoons) cold unsalted butter
• about 114g “dark brown” sugar
• about 300mg (around 1/8-1/4 tsp) salt
• about 10 slices of crunchy cooked bacon, finely chopped.

Wet(ish) stuff
• About 3/4 teaspoon (Google says this is about 3.6g) baking soda
• About 177g (3/4 cup) of boiling water
• About 128g (4.5 ounces) of Maple Syrup
• About 115g (about 4 ounces) Blackstrap Molasses
• About 5ml (1 tsp) vanilla extract
• One whole beaten egg

Oh, yeah, and:
• A 9″ radius pie crust

Processing:
1. If you’re using a frozen pie crust, thaw it then poke holes in it with a fork and bake it at about 200°C (around 400°F) for about 10 minutes to prepare it for the wet filling.
2. Mix all of the “dry” stuff besides the bacon together well – I actually used a potato masher to thoroughly mash together the butter/sugar/flour until it was homogenous. Then, take out about a quarter-cup worth of the mix and set it aside as a topping, then mix the chopped bacon into the rest. (edit 20100602 to remove the extra “until”…)
3. Put the baking soda in a bowl, and pour the boiling water on it.
4. Mix in the syrup, molasses, and vanilla, and stir well.
5. Beat the egg, then carefully mix it vigorously in (hopefully the liquid will have cooled sufficiently that it won’t curdle)
6. Quickly mix the main portion of the dry stuff with this wet stuff. Small chunks will be no big deal. The texture should be roughly similar to waffle or pancake batter.
7. Pour this into the pie crust. A typical “deep dish” crust will leave some room left over. A “regular” pie crust will be filled to the top and leave you with a few tablespoons left over. Don’t worry about filling the crust to the very top – it tends to harden up as it expands so it doesn’t overflow in my experience.
8. Sprinkle the about-a-quarter-cup of dry stuff that you saved over the top
9. Bake 40-45 minutes at 175°C (about 350°F)
10. Let it cool at least an hour before cutting
11. Eat with an optional topping of whipped cream.
12. Make ecstatic “MMMMmmmmmm” noises in appreciation of my culinary genius.

Next time I make it, I’ll probably use a deep-dish crust, then float pecan halves all over the top before sprinkling on the topping and baking…

All Hail Bacon!

Posted from Conroe, Texas, United States.

Ah, the latest WordPress for Android release appears to have solved the problem with getting new posts entered and posted…

I have a shiny new Android-based phone. I’d still rather have a MeeGo/Maemo one, but I got tired of waiting for something besides the expensive (though desirable) Nokia N900 to become available.

More to follow relatively soon, but I wanted to try out the beta-test version of the Android WordPress blog-thingie.

If you see this post, it works (at least well enough to get a basic post up-I still need to figure out how to do raw HTML from this thing…)

“Nero” here seems to be the only thing I can find growing in the stuff I put the Lyreleaf Sage flowers into. Maybe some kind of Brettanomyces yeast? I’m going to have to autodidact myself into a better understanding of yeast ecology. Not to mention yeast physiology – am I seeing two cells undergoing postconjugational sporulation there in the middle of the image?

I’m a bit puzzled that I don’t see anything that looks much like bacteria in here. “Everything is everywhere” right? And yet, I’m not seeing any obvious acetic-acid bacterial growth here. Kind of a bummer, since that’s REALLY what I’m after here overall, but that’s okay. I can play with Nero in the meantime. Anybody know if you can make (palatable) leavened dough with Brettanomyces yeasts?…

I still need to go try the same cultivation on some “Texas Bluebonnets” and “Indian Paintbrush” flowers, since those are blooming around here now too. I figure there’s bound to be some Gluconobacter floating around out there somewhere. I suppose in the worst case, I can try cultivating some off of fallen fruit later in the summer when stuff starts getting ripe.

This unassuming little flower just happened to be conveniently near here. As far as I can tell, it’s a “Lyreleaf Sage” (Salvia lyrata). I plucked a flowering section and dropped it into a container of my special selective media a couple of days ago. It’s starting to get a little flocculant and there’s a faint “fermenting yeast” smell, so there’s something going on in there. I didn’t see much yet last night when I took a closer look, but I did see these, which I assume to be pollen grains from my bioprospecting sample.

See?

I had to do a Fred Transplant last week. A grey fuzzy mold had taken up residence in on the sides of the jar above Fred’s liquid culture, so I set up a fresh container with fresh water and flour, and dipped a spoon down the center of Fred to the bottom, pulling up just a tiny amount of the stuff in there. Then I mixed it into the fresh stuff and covered it with plastic wrap (instead of a paper towel this time.)

Fred smells like Swiss Cheese Feet right now, but he’s obviously still growing, as you can see from last night’s “Gram Stain” microscopy. The slightly blurry light-red-brown lumps are, I believe, yeast cells, possibly Saccharomyces boulardii, since I dumped a capsule of supposedly-still-viable “probiotic” yeast of that species into Fred previously. I have no idea who the bacteria are in here at the moment. I did also see a small number of longer, thinner bacterial cells in there (presumably Lactobacillus) though most of them are the ones you see here.

Meanwhile, I’m about to dig out the still-unused Hillbilly Autoclave and try it out on the media I’m mixing up to try to obtain a culture of genuine wild “native flora” vinegar/kombucha yeast-and-bacteria to play with from the local wildflowers that are just now getting into full bloom.

My starting recipe goes something like this: I mix up about 2 Liters of distilled water with about 100g of glucose (“Dextrose”/”Corn Sugar”), 100g of sucrose, 500mg of L-Arginine, and enough phosphoric acid to drop the pH down to about 5.5 to 6.0. That is intended to be then poured into small “canning” jars in about 100ml amounts and pressure-cooked for at least 15 minutes to sufficiently sterilize and seal them. Meanwhile, a single generic-brand children’s chewable vitamin is crushed up and dumped into a 4-oz bottle of cheap vodka and well shaken.

Then when it comes time to go bioprospecting, I’ll pop open the jar of acidic sugar solution and add about 5ml of the cheap-vitamin-vodka to it to give me about 2% ethanol, and then go find some flowers to cut off and dump into the jars, which will be loosely covered with foil (to let air in but keep dust out) and put in a nice quiet cupboard to grow for a few days.

Hypothetically, the only things that are likely to grow in that will be microorganisms associated with vinegar-making. At some point I’ll also make up a batch of sweet black tea and see if I get a kombucha-like culture going in it, and make up some solid media to try to isolate individual microbes from it.