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.

It’s a bright red bug (6-legs), about 2.5-3mm long and probably about 1mm wide. The head is probably 1/4 of the total length and is more gray-brown in color. When walking the body is fairly high off the surface at about a millimeter. The antennae are about the length of the body with the last 1/3 of that being about twice the thickness of the lower part.

Saturday evening was another Santa Cruz Roller Girls roller derby match, this time between Fistful of Dollies and Beach Flat Betties. These two of the three local teams that the all-star team draws from to play against teams from other cities.  The Dollies ended up winning by about ten points but it was pretty close all the way though. Robin Yo Life joined the announcers which was nice for clarifying what was going on at various points and amusingly it sometimes turned into comments that were meant more for coaching what was happening at that moment. Next match in Santa Cruz is on June 28.

Sunday we went to Bay Meadows for the final day of live racing and it was really crowded, both from people there for Mother’s Day and people there for the last day. For the first half there was a lot less smoking going on than normal, but then the parties with mothers thinned out some and the smoking kicked it up a notch. The horses ran, we lost money on our small bets, we ate junk food, it was a lot of fun.

Of course we had to try it on a whole bottle, so we got a fresh bottle, dumped out about a third of the water and put it in. After a few minutes and a little spilled water, we now had a miniature water bottle. The cap still fit but everything else was smaller. It was shorter and of reduced diameter. Try it! I wouldn’t recommend drinking out of the new smaller bottle though.

First we put 4.6oz (not fl.oz.) of water in four 0.4oz styrofoam cups.

Cup 1 was tap cold water.
Cup 2 was room temperature water.
Cup 3 was tap hot water.
Cup 4 was boiling water.

Unfortunately I didn’t record how long we kept them in the freezer, but when we removed them we weighed the total water mass, the ice mass, and the water mass.

I recall the first cups weren’t left in long enough so we went for the 10oz cups. In the 10 oz cups it’s clear that through evaporation the boiling cup has gained surpassed the cold water cup, not in total ice mass, but in remaining water to freeze. It’s clear it will freeze first.

The reasons for the rapid freeze:

1. Evaporation. It’s clear that the water in the hotter cups evaporates more quickly which remove energy from the cup but also reduces the mass requiring freezing.
2. Convection. The hot water has more churning as parts cool at the top they get heated again by still warm water which gives off more energy. Also it keeps the warm water circulating more than the cold water so they warming effect goes on longer and can give off energy faster.

Last night I bought Brain Age for the Nintendo DS. It was made based on the research of Japanese neuroscientist. He found certain types of exercises stimulated blood flow to various areas of the brain and Nintendo took those activities and put them in electronic form. It evaluates your brain’s age and so you can see how you are improving with the best age being 20.

The initial evaluation used voice recognition where you had to say the color the color-word was drawn in so for “Red” you would say black. I paused for awhile after 10 because it said 10 completed and I thought I was done, instead it was just a milestone. Anyway, my starting brain age is 55. I look forward to getting down into the 20s.

I would have thought that humor was perceived as more intelligence, but a survey I read yesterday showed that the impression women had of the humorous men was that they were less intelligent. It seems that if you are doing more verbal humor which would attract the verbal humor loving female that more intelligence would be required, but I guess a sense that the male is a clown takes over and the humor is just appreciated for humor. Also, since some researchers now think that intelligence is completely determined by the woman I guess selecting for intelligence isn’t really necessary and whatever leads to humor can be the focus.

I also mentioned that when I exercise that in the first 15 minutes I feel asthma starting but then it goes away. He told me that most exercise induced asthma follows one of two patterns. Either you get it in the first 10-15 minutes and can work through it (or not), or you get it when you are done exercising. I get both of those so he told me to get an air-flow measurement tool so I can track it for awhile and report back to him and we can go from there.

Many people seem to feel that you either have to belive in evolution, or in creationism, or in intelligent design which is the newest form of creationism. However, there is room for these things to complement one another.

Let’s say life was created. From parents to children, one generation to the next, the children are combinations of traits of the parents. Like all changes, some are better than others, and in the long run and over many sets of children, the better things are going to be more well off than the things that aren’t as good. We have seen this with people immune to diseases and with bacteria becoming resistant to drugs. That is the basis for evolution, but in no way does that discount creation. You can say the system that we call evolution was created. We don’t know why, but we also don’t know why we were created in the first place. We just know we were created in God’s image. To us an image is a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional scene. It’s not perfect, and obviously is not going to have all the qualities of the original. We, being in three dimensions, perhaps are limited renditions of a higher dimensional nature of God.

Science neatly sidesteps the why because they have no idea. All science is saying with evolution is that this system is in place and has been identified and that can be used to build more knowledge about the world we live in. This all fits since we were also created as curious creatures who also happen to be excellent at manipulating symbols and information. We can’t help but try to figure stuff out.

First it didn’t distinguish between what people consider creative, like painting or composing, and general every day problem solving. Those are treated as equal creative endeavors. I personally feel that the abstract creativity (arts) is different than the practical creativity (how do I make the square peg fit the round hole).

It mentioned that people who have temporal lobe deterioration get more creative and people who previously couldn’t paint are now winning awards, etc. It also mentioned that the left brain, which is more focused on logic and reasoning gets developed as a child and the creative (right) side gets pushed down in many people. That was pretty much it for how much is known about creativity.

I also learned there are no standardized tests to determine creativity, just rules of thumb that creativity experts use to try and gauge. So things like take this shape and make a picture, take this set of shapes and make a picture, take this shape and complete the picture are used and then evaluated. Which by their definition would also be a creative act. According to the article just stringing words into a sentence is creative on some level.

I guess I’m just disappointed in an article that presented so little information. Especially when the next article showed that fMRI, which is the current main tool for study, is so unreliable for actually reading the brain.

I think that’s rediculous. To stumble on the one cell out of millions that happens to be the Bill Clinton cell? I can believe that it’s part of a network that consistently fires in response to things associated with him, but to think that they stumbled upon the one cell out of billions? No. If that cell were removed I’m sure the person would still easily identify and have all their associations for Bill Clinton.

I think it’s really cool and odd at the same time that you can mimick elements with clusters of other elements and makes be think that we’ve been missing something in our explanations for how things work.

Anyway, this one claimed that women aren’t but that men are attracted to that behavior. Then I read that they found this out through a survey. I think there’s a big difference in reaction between reading about an act in a survey and actually seeing it. I’ll bet that the results would be quite a bit different if the people were observed while observing these “dangerous acts.”