Dr. Joseph over on the “(It’s a…) Micro World (…after all)” blog posted a list of his ten favorite microbes. After showing up in the comments of his post and being a wiseass about E.coli and Gram staining, the least I can do is participate here. Besides, it’s a great idea. Therefore here are ten of my current favorite microbes:
Month: November 2008
Stir-Fried Random Ep 03: All I Want for Christmas Is…
Thanksgiving = Shopping, evidently. Anyway, since this is about the time of year when the vast population of my devoted fans around the world begin demanding to shower me with gifts and asking what kinds of gifts they should give me…this episode of Stir-Fried Random has some suggestions. Enough suggestions, in fact, that I didn’t even have room to include a Nerd Word, Emprical Observation of the Week, or Microbiology Microlecture. Therefore, while this episode will probably be slightly less interesting to the microbiology and computer-nerd focussed listeners, it should be of special interest to members of my immediate family, secret admirers, cultists who worship me as a living embodiment of divine spiffitude, and agents of the NSA, FBI, CIA, USDA, and Federal Department of Blog Enforcement who are busily profiling me. There is some other stuff though – please give it a listen, pass copies along to your friends, play it over the Public Announcement system at school, turn it into a techno-dance remix video on YouTube®, whatever.
As usual, direct download links for mp3 and ogg versions, plus <audio> tag support for those with really new browsers to listen in place, and embedded Flash-based mp3 player for everyone else who wants to listen in the browser instead of downloading and singing along during your commute or whatever.
(UPDATE 20081126: I’ve REMOVED the embedded player for now – it seems it ignores me when I tell it to wait until it’s told to before it starts playing. Autoplay annoys the heck out of me, and this seems to insist on it. The embedded player will remain gone until I get it to behave properly. Meanwhile, you can double-click or “right-click -> save as:” on the ogg or mp3 download link to get the audio files to listen to. Apologies to anyone ambushed by the unwanted auto-playing of the sound…)
Show Notes:
Continue reading Stir-Fried Random Ep 03: All I Want for Christmas Is…
Double-Ewe Tea Eff: “Modified Food Starch”
One of my projects is to appease one of my weaknesses. As I’ve probably mentioned before, “Gluttony” is my second-most-favorite deadly sin. If you’ve been listening to “Stir-Fried Random” (new episode coming shortly, I promise) and reading the blog recently, you can probably tell that among my large collection of “a peculiar fondess for [whatever]” attributes that I possess is one for “Cinnamon Bears“. While they’re not too bad as far as candy goes, they’re still not good for me. Plus, like any candy they can get to be kind of expensive. (Dear Amazon.com: The package plainly says “2/$100“. You’re selling these in groups of 12. Now, I only carried my calculation out to 3 significant figures, but I estimate that this should cost $6.00. Not “$6.85”. Plus $7.90 for shipping. $14.75 for $6.00 worth of convenience-store candy is just stupid.)
Anyway…I’ve gotten my grubby paws on a small bag of erythritol, which is effectively a calorie-free sugar alcohol produced from a regular sugar by a natural fermentation process. All I should need is one or more thickening agents and some oil of cassia and/or other flavors and I should be able to come up with a recipe for my own pig-out-all-I-want, even-better-than-mass-market cinnamon bears. Food is one of the few areas that I seem to have any natural artistic talent with, so I ought to be able to handle this.
The trick is going to be getting the right texture. I’ve found recipes online that use gelatin or pectin. The store-bought product, though, uses “Modified Food Starch”. How exactly do they “modify” the food starch? I vaguely recalled that it was an acid-treatment process that partially breaks up the long glucose polymers, but I wasn’t sure. As any modern nerd would do, I decided to ask My Friend, The Internet.
Most places seem to be vague about what exactly the “modification” is, but it became quickly obvious that there were multiple treatments that result in “Modified Food Starch”. Ah, but I was in luck! The Food and Drug Administration actually has a specific entry[1] in the Code of Federal Regulations, which can always be counted on to definitive. So, I went and looked at good old Title 21, Volume 3 of the Code of Federal Regulations and…WTF?!?!?
They list a bewildering array of chemical and enzymatic treatments that all get lumped into “Modified Food Starch” (or “Food Starch-modified” as they quaintly put it).
I guess my happy new box of “Corn Starch” will have to remain unmodified for the time being. At least until I can figure out how to produce my own ?-amylase [without spitting, that is]. I also have unflavored gelatin and pectin at my disposal here, so I’ll come up with something.
Anybody got a good reference on industrial food processes?…
[1] 21CFR172.892
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!
Perhaps a cute picture will distract everyone…
The Apprenticing Lab Rat went and tagged me with a meme…I’m almost done with it, but I’m being alerted by my Minister of Domestic Affairs that it’s bedtime. Also, I still have to get more audio recorded to assemble a worthwhile next episode of Stir-Fried Random for the two or so people who listen to it (if you’d like to help, I’m taking questions and/or suggestions for topics in the comments…). I’m planning to do a segment on my “Giant’s Shoulder’s” submission for this month regarding Lactic Fermentation, and some bits about what I want for christmas (surely at least 75% of The Internet wants to hear about that…), but obviously that’s insufficient…
Hopefully the picture of the Bendycat will keep everyone making “Awww, how cute” noises and distract you all until I have time to post tomorrow…
(Why is “mnemonic” such a hard word to remember, anyway?…)
“On the lactic fermentation and its bearings on pathology.”
Lunchtime – time to get this posted…(Let me know if this page is loading way too slowly…)
For this month’s “Giant’s Shoulders” I offer you mouthwash and yogurt.
Indirectly, at least.
Continue reading “On the lactic fermentation and its bearings on pathology.”
RSS Feed Fixed
Oh, now this is interesting. I finally realized my RSS feed was Fupped Duck. Now that I have it fixed, the “Visual/HTML” mode switch on WordPress’ built-in post editor is working properly again, too. Most peculiar.
Seriously though – RSS throws a hissy-fit if there’s a single blank line at the beginning of the output? Really? Jeez.
Okay, enough whining from me for now. Let me know if everything still appears to be working and if the RSS feed is indeed fixed for all y’all. And listen to my podcast and let me know how it sounds, or either I’ll drive over to your house and kick your butt, or you’ll hurt my poor little feelings (pick whichever form of coercion works better for you.)
Thanks.
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!