I have a shocking confession to make.

I think I may be a nerd.

No, no, don’t try to deny it. I think it pretty much has to be true for someone who reads a 10-page scientific paper (hover or click here to see the reference) in order to learn that bacteria-snot is slimy. Yes, I am a nerd. And for that I am deeply, deeply….

Oh, who am I kidding? I like being a nerd.

Stainless Steel fermenters at a breweryFor one thing, being a nerd allows me to fully enjoy one of the perks that my job gives me – namely access to a lot of scientific papers that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford to obtain access to from the greedy [insert your favority profanity here] who insist on charging $30 for permission to look at a decades-old articles for a day. I should add that this perk includes Inter-Library Loan for articles that I can’t get online, and the service on campus is great so far. Same day delivery of a classic article from 1930 in what I’m guessing most people would probably consider an obscure journal.

It doesn’t have quite the same thing in it that I expected from the source that pointed me to it, but I think it can still be considered “classic”. I need to re-read it more carefully to make a final decision on this, but I think I have my next “The Giant’s Shoulders” article in time for this month’s upcoming issue. And, yes, the picture attached to this post is a hint (and, no, it’s not directly related to the bacteria-snot article mentioned above in any way…)

Meme me!

As I mentioned in yesterday’s procastination excuse/hypnotic-cute-fuzzy-critter post, I was, without warning or provocation, viciously tagged by The Apprentice Lab Rat with a nasty case of the “5 Things” meme. O Cruel Fate!

I still need more audio to assemble Stir-Fried Random Episode 3. Meanwhile, here’s me meme:

(Note: These answers should not be used for psychiatric evaluation purposes. Unless it amuses you.)

5 things I was doing 10 years ago
Continue reading Meme me!

Stir-Fried Random Ep 02:Sex, Violence, and Cinnamon Bears, y’all!

Only about five more days until the next “Giant’s Shoulders” blog carnival. I still need to pick a paper. ARGH!
(UPDATE 20081126: I’ve removed the embedded flash player – it seems to ignore me when I explicitly tell it NOT to automatically start playing rather than waiting until you intentionally hit “play”. Sorry for anyone annoyed by the autoplay. The embedded player will not return until I solve this.)

Meanwhile, here’s this week’s episode of “Stir-Fried Random”, weighing in at a MASSIVE 12 WHOLE MINUTES or so. As before, there’s an “<audio>” tag pointing directly at the Ogg Vorbis audio for those of you running a beta of the Firefox 3.1 series, a recent version of Opera, or (I believe) the current Safari on a system with the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component installed. There is also the usual embedded Flash®-based mp3 player and direct download links for both versions.

Somebody please let me know if I’m making a fool of myself here… Anyway, here are the show notes:
Continue reading Stir-Fried Random Ep 02:Sex, Violence, and Cinnamon Bears, y’all!

Stir-Fried Random: Alferbeetagama!

(Update 20081104T1050: added a minimal embedded flash-based player at the bottom of the post, if you’re willing to settle for mp3 quality and want to listen from your web browser…)
(Update again 20081126: I wish I had realized before that the stupid thing was autoplaying despite explicitly including “autoplay=false” in the parameters. I’ve removed the embedded player again until I find a way to prevent autoplaying. Sorry about anyone that was annoyed by this.)

I was going to post this last night, but there appears to have been another bout of database connection errors again at my ISP (“host blocked due to too many connection errors”). I’m guessing either someone is DOS’ing the database server or one of the other users had some very badly behaved custom code running. They’ve got it fixed now, so here we go…

After staying up too (insert profanity here) late again despite having to get up extra-early this morning to vote before work…here’s the first real episode of Stir-Fried Random. Still only about 10 minutes long – I’d like to make it longer, but it’ll still probably take a few episodes of building up to it. An actual shiny new <audio> tag is included for those with bleeding-edge browsers that support it (let me know if it works – hypothetically the 3.1 Beeta[sic] version of Firefox and I believe the most recent Opera support this.). Otherwise, direct-download is available below the show notes:
Continue reading Stir-Fried Random: Alferbeetagama!

“They laughed at me! But I’ll show them all! AH, HAHAHAHA!”

Another T-shirt to add to my list of T-shirts I want.

I’m spending more hours shoveling my way through the books and papers and crap we’ve got up here at House v1.0, since if all goes well I’ll be making a brief run back down to Southeast Texas so we can sign the papers for House v2.0 down there, at which point we’ll be able to start actually moving. I sure hope this one goes through. Not only is it our third attempt to buy a house down there, but I’ve already identified a convenient location to build my “Intentional Food Microbiology” brewlab in it.

Since there’s no way I can afford to buy a -80°F freezer, I have an obvious interest in alternate means of preserving the yeast, mold, and bacterial cultures that I want to keep. To me, drying seems like the most desirable method when it’s feasible, since dried cultures should require the least amount of maintenance. After a several-month delay, I’ve finally gotten around to getting back in touch with the archivist at Brewer’s Digest to see about getting an old article on the viability of dried yeast cultures[1].

Speaking of old but useful scientific papers, there’s an extremely nifty challenge going on through the month of May (deadline: May 31st) over at “Skulls in the Stars” blog: find a classic scientific paper, read it, and blog about it.

“My “challenge”, for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre- World War II, as that was the era of hand-crafted, “in your basement”-style science. There’s a lot to learn not only about the ingenuity of researchers in an era when materials were not readily available, but also about the problems and concerns of scientists of that era, often things we take for granted now!”

I think this is a brilliant idea – the classic papers often seem to be forgotten and often explain things that people seem to take for granted these days. I already mentioned my post about the Gram Stain (original paper published in 1884), though that post really talks more about what has happened with the Gram Stain over the last 125 years rather than only being about the original paper. There are a couple of other classic microbiology papers that I’m going to try to get to if I have time before the May 31st deadline arrives.

I also need to get some yeast activated and get my must processed – I’m hoping a brief boil will reduce the amount of a yeast-inhibiting substance in it. I’ll post more detail after I get it going.

[1] Wickerham LJ, AND Flickinger MH:”Viability of yeast preserved two years by
the lyophile process.” 1946; Brewers Digest, 21, 55-59; 65.