Month: September 2008

“Berry-Pomegranate” is the new “Strawberry-Kiwi”. Discuss.

We actually (finally) got power and internet back LAST weekend, but this week’s been too hectic to get back into proper blogging again yet. Spending the day dealing with unexpectedly severe, sudden acute “hay-fever” type symptoms hasn’t helped (fortunately, that seems to be just about under control now, hopefully I’ll be feeling more normal after a decent night’s sleep.)

We did actually get out on the lake for a long lake-spanking session last weekend. I finally managed to get some time to go through the pictures yesterday, so there’ll be another interactive photo-map sometime soon (I hope) – and of course more fermentation.

Meanwhile, is it just me or is “pomegranate” the new “in” flavor, much as “kiwi” was about ten years ago?

Brief post-Hurricane Ike update

Now the T-Mobile cell tower that we were previously using for dial-up internet seems to be offline as well, so for the moment we can only get internet access if we drive to College Station (which we have just done to pick up some more clean-up supplies).

The weather seems to be getting back to a milder theme. It’s even supposed to cool off and be less humid starting sometime tomorrow afternoon, so hopefully there’ll be some time to go paddle out and check out how Lake Conroe handled Hurricane Ike.

Meanwhile, this has royally screwed up the return to Idaho to get things taken care of at House v1.0 there. I’ve had to make some alternate arrangements through some kind folks who are friends of ours up there who are going to be able to keep an eye on the place for us (and for whom I’m very grateful!) until I/we can finally get some time off to get up there in person. I’ll probably get in touch with my employer-to-be and see if I can or should start later this week instead of next Monday as originally planned to leave time for the trip.

More pictures to be posted at some point. Stay tuned (and tell the power and internet companies to get their butts in gear!)

I WANT MY FRIGGIN’ ELECTRICITY!

99%(!) of Entergy Texas’ customers are apparently without power right now. I wish they’d actually put some effort into preparing the lines for severe weather and streamlining the repairs, instead of letting the whole thing fall apart and then getting the state legislature to approve yet another “Hurricane Cost Recovery Charge” to be added to everyone’s bills to pay to return everything to the same “ready to fail at the next batch of severe weather” state…How do I get in on this deal?

Being without air conditioning in southeast Texas this time of year is almost intolerable. If they manage to restore service quickly despite my cynicism, I’ll probably feel a lot less cranky…

On the upside, it appears there should be some scenic carnage visible out on the lake if I manage to get some time to get out and paddle around a while between bouts of moving bits of broken tree around the yard. Here’s a sample shot taken from the shore of Lake Conroe earlier today:

Continue reading I WANT MY FRIGGIN’ ELECTRICITY!

Ike’s blowing through…

Power has been out since 2am, and the cable(TV|internet) is out as well. It’s times like this I’m glad I can “tether” my cellphone to the computer and get internet access that way. It’s painfully slow by modern standards (56k dial-up) but it works even when the power’s out.

The region of Ike’s eye just went by a little while ago. We were near the western edge of it, according to the weather radar. Winds died down somewhat and we were able to get the dogs to go outside and drain themselves. Now the wind is picking up again as it heads north.

Fortunately, our house (as far as we can tell without close examination) seems to be intact. At least, there are no streams of water leaking in or trees sticking through a wall or shards of glass all over the floor. The yard’s not so lucky though – large sections of trees are everywhere, and several sections of the useless “rustic” ranch fence that surrounds the back yard are crushed. Maybe the homeowner’s association will let us put up a real fence now.

We should now have another 6-8 hours of slowly diminishing strong winds to sit through, and then the worst of it should be over. Hopefully it won’t take too long after that for them to get power restored – it’s kinda hot in here. Meanwhile, we’ll just sit and watch the wind playfully ripping chunks of tree loose and flinging them to the ground.

There ought to be some interesting things to see around the lake once the wind dies down enough for it to be safe to go paddling around again.

And now I’m signing off for a bit while I’ve still got some battery power left. Probably more updates later…

It’s (Still) Comin’ Right For Us!

There’s some indication that Ike may be starting to curve more quickly towards the East, which would be a good thing. If Ike passes to our East, we should be in the lowest wind/fewest tornadoes part of the storm.

By the way, am I the only one wondering why the news reports feel compelled to make their weather reported stand there on location in the middle of the hurricane? “I’m standing here in the middle of the street a few miles from Galveston, and as you can see on your screen, hurricanes are windy. Also, wet. Back to you, Fred…”

I’m wondering what happens if the storm floods the sewers and they have to report on that. “I’m standing here hip deep in filth…”

Other than a couple of flickers, power is currently still on and internet it still live. Hopefully it’ll keep up. If we’re lucky and Ike ends up crawling past far enough to the east, we might, maybe, escape without serious power outages…

I’ll probably post again “tomorrow” (well, after sunrise today anyway…) if internet and power are still up when I get up.

Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: the primary kingdoms.

Ike’s comin’ right for us, so I don’t know when the my power and internet access will die, and if so how long it’ll be before it comes back. However, while I’m still connected I wanted to contribute something again to this month’s The Giant’s Shoulders blog carnival. Since it’s in three days and there’s a chance our power might be out when the deadline passes, I figured I’d better hurry. Because of the hurry there are no fancy graphics nor even too much explanatory text here, but I’ll do what I can. Fortunately, the basics of today’s post isn’t too complex.

Depending on how rigorous your biology education was, there are a variety of ways that you might tend to categorize the fundamental types of living things. You might vaguely recall something about “five kingdoms”, which as I recall were “Animals, Plants, Fungi, Protozoa [e.g. amoeba], and Bacteria”. You might just segregate everything into either “animal” or “plant”. If your memory of biology education is a bit stronger, you might remember that “bacteria” are a separate group from the true plants and animals. A step more precise and you may split living things into the two domains of “prokaryote” and “eukaryote”.

The “plant” and “animal” distinction is pretty classic – until comparatively recently, bacteria were assumed to be “plants”, just as fungi (“plants” that lacked chlorophyll) were. Non-photosynthetic bacteria were referred to as “schizomycetes” (literally “fission” [splitting in two] fungi, because they reproduce by splitting from one cell into two rather than forming spores), while bacteria with chlorophyll (cyanobacteria or “blue-green” algae, and possibly the “green sulfur bacteria”) were designated “schizophyta” (“fission plants”).

Within the last fifty years or so, though, it’s become obvious that bacteria were a different type of life from fungi, chlorophyll-containing plants, or animals. The latter critters have cells that in turn contain “organelles”, which are more or less very specialized “mini-cells” within themselves. The nucleus, for example, is a compartment within the cell where the cell’s DNA is kept and processed. Bacteria, it turned out, don’t have any of these organelles (in fact there’s good evidence that at least some if not all organelles used to be bacteria, but this post’s long enough already so I won’t go into that), and life was re-organized into the bacterial “prokaryotes” (“before nucleus”) and the “eukaryotes” (having a “true nucleus” – i.e. everything that isn’t bacteria).

Then, along comes Carl Woese, who spoils this nice simple dichotomy. In 1977, he published (along with G.E. Fox) the subject of today’s post:
Continue reading Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: the primary kingdoms.

It’s comin’ right for us!

Hurricane Ike predicted tracks, going right through where we live as of 20080912T100000
(Click image for Wunderground.com’s interactive “Wundermap”…)

Actually, looking more closely at the picture there I think we may be slightly further west than it indicates, but it’s still very likely we’ll end up losing power for a while sometime tonight, but I still am going to try to get a post up for the Giant’s Shoulders blog carnival – I’ve got the paper picked out and read, I just need to do a write-up before I go to bed tonight. Currently it looks like the winds shouldn’t get TOO bad until late tonight/early-tomorrow-morning so we ought to have power long enough…

Yes, there’s a disturbingly severe hurricane “Comin’ right for us!” and I’m worrying about posting about a classic scientific paper before the blog-carnival deadline while I still have power. How’s THAT for dedication?

First we need to move stuff inside, though. I don’t want The Ascospore getting blown away…

Yeast needs to breathe

Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation deviceAs readers may have guessed from previous posts, my brewing interests are minimally conventional. Fortunately, the Basic Brewing Radio podcast seems to regularly expand well beyond the usual “fermented malt flavored with a tisane of hops” thing (I need to try to make my own “Ginger Beer Plant” from scratch one of these days…). A couple of weeks ago, they did an episode covering an experiment on aeration methods which was very interesting. It does my ego good to know that I correctly guessed how the results would turn out. You can get a copy of the nice write-up of the experiment itself here, but here’s the simple version:

Continue reading Yeast needs to breathe

Aqua-pedestrianism and Ice Cream Yeast

A teaser image from the interactive map below...Today’s batch of blog-based Stir-Fried Random includes another interactive map of a lake-spanking expedition, a very brief musing on search engines, and a return to “intentional food microbiology” discussion. To preview: you can get pizza without ever getting out of the water on Lake Conroe, “spanking” is amusingly popular for search engines, and no, there is not normally any yeast in ice cream, but perhaps there could be. Read on, please…

Continue reading Aqua-pedestrianism and Ice Cream Yeast

Evil Maps, Ancient Trees, and a Well-Deserved Paddling

A thumbnail image of our kayak. The full-sized image is linked from the map at the end of this post.Busy, busy, busy. There’s quite a lot going on at the moment here, and a number of potentially interesting topics that I ought to be blogging. Still, we did manage to get back out on the water and spank the lake some more, so in addition to another map-and-pictures travelogue of kayak paddling on Lake Conroe (at the end of this post), here’s a map-related story that came up recently.

Continue reading Evil Maps, Ancient Trees, and a Well-Deserved Paddling