Adventures in brewing

I finally decided to take my first steps beyond a simply kit brew, so on saturday I gathered the ingredients together (amber malt extract, chocolate malt, cascade hops, and ale yeast) sterilized the tools, and got down to boiling. I am keeping a brewing notebook, so I won’t put everything on here as well, but there were a couple things that I should have done better.

1. Wort does not pour well from a full saucepan… it’s too thick. So next time I’ll use the boiling pot or something with a pour-spout.
2. The yeast needs to be pre-conditioned. I took it out of the fridge, opened it, and dumped it into the 90-degree wort. I’m pretty sure I thermal-shocked the yeast because it took around 6 hrs for the fermentation to start.
3. Need to add the hops later in the boil. It turns out that most of the hops’ aroma and flavor actually get boiled away.
4. Probably need to cool the wort more quickly. The faster the better. Pouring it into a fermenter pre-filled with cold water should be pretty effective, but it was still too hot and I ended up adding more cold water to cool it down. I may actually have diluted the wort too much by doing this.

A couple pics of the chocolate malt after steeping and draining:

Vista grr

So I got my spiffy (and shiny) new Dell XPS M1130 laptop. (2.1Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB mem, 250gig HD, LED backlit 13″ monitor… and Vista.) Each time I started the machine, or resume from hibernation, my hard drive thrashes like crazy for about 20 minutes. You’d think with 4GB of memory, the hard drive would almost never need to be accessed except when loading programs. You’d be wrong. Welcome to SuperFetch. This is a program that runs in the background and pre-loads from disk into memory to allow for faster load times for frequently-used programs. Well, it keeps trying to preload my 8GB virtual machine file (that I use to run Linux concurrently with Vista). Hence the hard drive thrashing. I can sort of see the logic of using a pre-fetch device… on a desktop. A note to Microsoft: I use a laptop, and I like to be able to suspend and re-awaken my laptop in a hurry so that I do things like… I don’t know… move it? When all of that stuff is pre-loaded into memory, before the computer can sleep or suspend, it has to either unload it, or write it out to a temporary disk file. Double the hard disk use, double the memory use, half the convenience.

Thankfully, this demon was pretty easy to exorcise from Vista with the right incantations.

Urglu

This morning while riding the bus to school, I watched as a woman got on the bus with a scarf wrapped around her face like it was 20-below outside. (It was actually 40, with a stiff wind and some snow.) Apparently, she had a cell phone buried under the scarf and was having a single-word conversation with someone on the other end.

I had to chuckle as I recalled the old “urglu” game. For those of you who never had to do one of those ridiculous getting-to-know-you games, the object is to appear to have a complete conversation using only the word “urglu”. In this case, however, I think the word was a breathy “murfff”.

“Murfff…. murfff… murfff. Murfff-murfff. Murfff? Murfff. Murfff-murfff.”

Freedom of Choice Act

Wow. Seriously? I hope that everyone has a chance to read this bill prior to it being voted on by Congress. It expands Roe v Wade to allow termination of a pregnancy for any reason prior to “fetal viability”. “Viability” is determined subjectively by the physician performing the abortion and is defined by the bill itself as: “The term `viability’ means that stage of pregnancy when, in the best medical judgment of the attending physician based on the particular medical facts of the case before the physician, there is a reasonable likelihood of the sustained survival of the fetus outside of the woman.“

I have serious concerns about the intellectual capability of an individual who aspires to be the President of the USA who does not realize or acknowledge that the ability of a fetus to survive outside of the mother depends very much on the care received. There is absolutely no reason that this definition could not be applied to a full-term, healthy baby since it too has a zero chance of survival outside the womb if it is simply abandoned.

Oh, and the bill would remove the right of the states to make their own abortion laws.

So really, which of the candidates has the most “extreme” position on abortion?

to Yahoo…

1) Move Jerry Yang from CEO to CTO.
2) Cut 50% of non-US staff and facilities. Retreat back to your core, original, loyal base.
3) Sell Search. Yes, I realize this was your first service and that all of Yahoo was built from it, but it’s a dog. And you won’t catch Google.
4) Buy Skype from eBay and then wait for eBay to totally tank. Resurrect Yahoo Auctions and link it to Shopping.
5) Forget developing your own peer-networking stuff. It’s been done to death, just use someone else’s API.
6) Flickr is great. Answers is pretty cool. Finance is nice. You have stuff to build on.
7) You are a portal. Make it the best, easiest, nicest place to go for news, stocks, video, etc. iGoogle is nowhere close and MSN may already have you beat. But it’s the only thing that really defines Yahoo as a single entity anymore.

Global climate change theology

The big question in climate change… do the collective actions of humans significantly and potentially disastrously affect the climate and environment of the world.

If you subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible, then the answer is obviously an unequivocal yes. See, theologically speaking, the world was created by God as a paradise for mankind. That paradise was destroyed due to The Fall / Original Sin thus allowing for sickness, pain, and climate conditions that are altogether unfit for people who like to run around naked (fig leaf or no) surviving on eternally-ripe fruits and veggies from abundant sources. So really, the question about humans creating bad changes in the world climate is moot.

“The debate is over.”

New volcano simulation

My advisor feels strongly that all scientific publications should be peer-reviewed, so in light of Kevin’s valuable insight into my post about the finite element analysis of a point load on an elastic plate, I refined my model and re-ran the simulation. The result is clearly more realistic and can easily be verified by means of a field trip to Hawaii, or by a viewing the award-winning, critically-acclaimed documentary, Joe Versus the Volcano.

New volcano simulation

Dear Mr. Millionaire, here’s some more dough. You’re welcome.

Anyone see anything odd?

Did I just watch a massive, taxpayer-funded stock pump and dump? Around mid-morning yesterday, Comerica’s stock (CMA) was around 29.00 per share. At opening this morning, it jumped to 54.00 on a volume of around 700k shares and then immediately fell into the 40s and now 30s with a more normal volume of 50-100k shares. Doesn’t it strike anyone else as odd that a single stock could nearly double in value in less than 24 hours, get massively traded and then fall back to its starting price… all within 8 minutes of the opening bell!? I mean, it’s no secret that the government just injected a couple hundred billion dollars into the financial business (thanks a lot, Republicrats), but is it really a coincidence that someone or some group of folks just made a total fantasy killing of around 1.75 million bucks of profit in 8 minutes flat???

Dumb signs

Really? As opposed to prepaying after?

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Starting FEA work – flexural plate with a point load

Deformation of a buoyant plate with a point load

I’m starting to make some headway with the Finite Element Analysis software that we use here (MSC Marc). The image above is the result of a simple model that simulates a large load on a floating edge of a deformable plate. In a geologic sense, this is supposed to represent a volcano sitting on the edge of a crustal plate, which causes the one edge to sink into the buoyant mantle that normally supports it.