“Everyday is a battlefield, but if you fight with anger, you’re the problem. If you fight with joy, you’re disillusioned.” – Carlos Santana in Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
Jan 032010
Sep 022009
I recently saw that a friend got a second yogurt maker. I hadn’t heard of such a device and I envisioned something like a bread maker where you put in all the ingredients and some time later you have yogurt. After some research I found that yogurt making is a simple process. Heat milk to 185 degrees F, cool it to 110 degrees F, add cultures from starter or live culture yogurt, and keep it between 105 and 112 degrees F for at least 7 hours. The yogurt maker handles that last part, which is the part I’d need to replicate.
My first thought was to check the oven. It goes down as low as 80 degrees F (great for letting dough rise). The oven doesn’t have every 5 degree interval on it, instead having every common temperature. Unfortunately getting yogurt cultures to do their thing didn’t make the cut. The oven jumps from 80 to 100 to 125.
The next idea was to use the induction cooktop. The cooktop can go way below normal settings you would get on a gas cooktop unless it is the really old kind that has the always-on pilot light.
In all of these cases you need the milk and cultures in the container with a lid on. I used a remote bbq thermometer in the pot to measure the temperature. First up was a quart of water in the tall sauce pan on the lowest setting. The remote thermometer showed it climbing well over 115 in no time.
Next I decided to try half a gallon in a large sauce pan. The climbing temperatures were slower but they also passed 115 without too much time passed.
I then decided I needed more surface area to dissipate heat so the big skillet was up next. Luckily I could just dump this water from one vessel to the next for each test. On this one the temperature dropped the most before the heat was once again applied so maybe it would work. Unfortunately this one had the fastest climbing temperature. Yes there was more area to eliminate heat, but there was also a lot more area to absorb heat!
I thought I was out of luck when I remembered the cast-iron wok. It has a small area base and a wide open top, perfect! I put two sheets of foil on top for my lid and after heating in a slow climb the temperature held steady at 114 degrees F. Figuring there must be a way to make it work I reconfigured the foil into a a very crude cone with an opening in the top. After some more tweaking I got it to stay steady at 107 degrees F for 45 minutes!
So, can I make yogurt? Probably. I think that it would have an iron flavor to it by the time the batch was done though. Also there’s a significant setup time needed for that foil cone to see if it is just right. It’s probably better off to get a yogurt maker.
Other things to try:
- We have a portable induction cooktop that might be able to go lower, but probably not.
- Using a mason jar in a water bath. An uncovered pot might be able to keep the temperature low enough.
Sep 112008
I was just noticing that several of the close states, according to electoral-vote.com, have very short legal residency requirements for being elligible to vote. Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Washington all require 30 days to be allowed to vote. Arizona can be thrown in too since it’s fairly close and only requires 29 days.
I’m not moving anywhere, it’s just an observation.
Mar 012008
For awhile now as I ride to and from work I get to look at the increase in graffiti around here. It’s ugly and it’s pretty much impossible to stop because catching someone in the act is very very unlikely. So I started brainstorming ideas on how to stop graffiti.
- More graffiti! I know that sounds counter-intuitive but when you think about most graffiti as being territory markers then you start to see it as someone’s personal calling card. So the idea is when you wake up in the morning to find some fresh graffiti you add something like “eats ass” to it and then have the police wait that night for the tagger to fix the amendment. Cost is fairly low for the extra spray paint, and the wall already needed repainting so no extra cost there. The main cost comes from the stakeout and the social cost of having obscene message in highly visible areas. Chance of success? Probably not very high. I don’t see a lot of back and forth when rivals deface their tags so why should a little insult matter to them?
- Video cameras. Basically this is the obvious appraoch where businesses would have tog et video cameras, mount them in a hidden or out of reach area, and make sure it’s high enough resolution so the perpetrator can actually be identified. The problem here is that video cameras like that are expensive, they are easily defeated with masks or just taken out directly.
- RFID tags. I came up with this when I decided video cameras were too expensive but it involves more infrastructure. First you need to get spray paint makers to put RFID tags in the cans, then when you show your driver’s license to buy your spray paint the RFID gets linked to your driver’s license number. Business owners need to buy a series of readers (about $20 each) to monitor the taggable parts of their building and when graffiti happens they can get the RFID that did it and give it to the police. The downsides to this plan are privacy concerns about purchases being tracked. Also the RFID signals can be blocked but then a tagger has to carry around jamming equipment which I don’t think is very likely; tagging seems be somewhat a crime of convenience.
- Honey pot. I just thought of this one last week after seeing another under-construction building tagged. Incomplete buildings always seem like a good target. An incomplete house will be tagged but a completed house gets avoided, though fences always seem to be fair game. So the idea is to find an empty lot and put up some very cheap non-permanent pre-fab structure. Then use a stakeout or cameras to catch those that show up to do their tagging.
Any other ideas?
Jan 122008
Nicole was telling me about a product called Scargo which is a combination of oils to help scar tissue. My first thought was that the logo should be a snail, followed by the thought that it should come in a snail dispenser that you rub over your skin leaving a trail of the stuff for you to rub in.
Jun 082007
See that windowed deck/bar that goes across the front and hangs over the sides some? I’d put a moving red light in there to make it an ocean cylon or an ocean Knight Rider.
May 312007
From when I was in the Chicago O’Hare airport security line when everyone was taking off their shoes:
Do foot fetishists have to work at keeping their cool going through airport security?
From when I was brushing my teeth last night:
If we develop intelligent machines, are we going to ban and destroy all copies of movies and books about man/machine war? Seems like you wouldn’t want them to know you’re afraid of them.
Would that then extend to media with scenes of violence against machines like the destruction of the fax machine in Office Space?
Apr 192007
I mean besides to take care of an itch. It seems likely that the cause of an itch is often some external irritant so scratching might elliminate that irritant or bring your attention to it. What I noticed the other day though as I was having an allergic reaction is that scratching increases blood flow to that area. So perhaps another reason is to get blood to the area so white blood cells can deal with anything that needs to be dealt with.
In January 2006 Discover magazine changed ownership to be owned by Bob Guccione Jr. The change in content was immediate. Now a large percentage of the content is human interest stories about how a scientist felt about their research instead of abou ttheir research, tongue-in-cheek articles like the fight between Fahrenheit and Celcius, and a list of 20-things you didn’t know about X which is actually more like 15 because some of them are split into two to pad the list.
Anyway, they still manage to have good things from time to time (not good enough to subscribe anymore) but an interview with Newt Gengrich they ran in the October 2006 issue is one of the highlights of the past year. I didn’t know that he was a strong supported of sciences and probably would have ended up in a science related field had he not gone the history/politics route. After his time in congress he went to universities for a few years to catch up on what he had missed in science while he was in congress.
I thought the most interesting point of the interview was his suggestion that we pay kids to take math and science classes. I’ve heard pay schemes for kids before but this one sounded better to me because the kids would only get the payout if they got a B or better. The idea being that instead of kids spending time after school in a minimum-wage job, they can earn the same minimum wage and put the time to studying. I can see a few problems with it, especially as fights begin as to what is worth paying for, but the idea has potential I think.
Jun 112006
I’d have it play the music from Frogger.