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
Lake Conroe has been persistently naughty. Since nobody else seemed to be taking responsibility for its misbehavior, we took matters into our own hands yesterday and gave it a good spanking. I paddled it until I got blisters.
I think this will need to be done much more often, since I don’t think the lake has learned its lesson yet. On the other hand, I learned a few – interactive photo-map and details below…
That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more! I had intended to try to come up with another post for this month’s “The Giant’s Shoulders” anthology, but I’ve just encountered such an appalling concentration of disappointing un-science that I cannot restrain myself any further. Guess I’ll have to settle for one post in the anthology this month.
FoodTV’s new “Food Detectives” show sounded so promising. I thought to myself “‘MythBusters’ meets ‘Good Eats’!?!? That would be pure, refined, pharmaceutical-grade WIN!” Then I saw their premier episode. The “experiments” appeared blatantly and badly staged, and in some cases shockingly badly designed. For example, their “experiment” with refrigerator deodorants involved showing a guy sticking his face into a ‘fridge allegedly full of smelly stuff and filming him making faces while they timed how long he pretended to be willing to keep his face in there.
The Giant’s Shoulders blog carnival is coming up in two days, and I just realized I still haven’t gotten a post up for it yet. So, here it is.
I put up some quick reviews of several classic microbiology-methods papers for the previous edition of this blog carnival, but didn’t actually get around to putting up the one for what is almost certainly the most well-known microbiology technique: “The Gram Stain”. So, this post is about it:
Gram HC: “Ueber die isolirte Faerbung der Schizomyceten in Schnitt- und Trockenpraeparaten”; Fortschritte der Medicin; 1884; vol 2, pp 185-189
That’s “Regarding the Isolational(?) Coloring of Schizomycetes in Cut- [i.e. tissue sections] and Dried Preparations” in “Medical Progress”. The translation hosted by the American Society for Microbiology uses the word “Differential” where I’ve put “Isolational” – which is probably not quite right either but it’ll have to do for now – but I’ll get to that in a moment.
If you’ve ever been exposed to microbiology labwork before, you’ve almost certainly done or at least watched a procedure referred to as a “Gram stain”. In brief, you smear your sample with bacteria on a glass slide and bake it on, then you dump some purple stuff on it, them some brown stuff, then you rinse it briefly with alcohol, then you dump on some pink stuff, and then rinse it in water and look at it under a microscope. Bacteria that stay the original dark purple-blue color of the original purple/brown stuff are considered “Gram Positive”, and those that don’t instead appear the pink color of the last stain, and are considered “Gram Negative”. Many textbook authors and microbiology instructors will breathlessly proclaim that the Gram Stain reveals two “fundamental” categories of bacteria, but I’ll spare you my rant about that.
Properly speaking, this isn’t actually Gram’s stain, as described in his original paper. The modern variations that we’re all taught in microbiology class were developed later, and I believe they are nowadays based mainly on Victor Burke’s 1922 paper on the subject[1].
Regarding the title of the paper: “schizomycete” is what they used to call most kinds of bacteria. “Mycete” meaning “fungus”, as bacteria were assumed to be “plants without chlorophyll” just like molds and mushrooms, and “Schizo-” meaning “split in two”, since bacteria reproduce by splitting into two cells rather than by producing spores like “other” fungi. I say “most” because things like cyanobacteria (“blue-green algae”) or Green Sulfur Bacteria would have been referred to as “Schizophyta” (“fission-plants”). What Gram was originally trying to do wasn’t to differentiate one kind of bacteria from another, either, but to make it easy to tell bacteria from from the nuclei of cells in bacteria-infected tissue.
For that matter, Gram was really metaphorically standing on the shoulders of Koch and Erhlich, as he was building on their technique for staining “tubercle bacteria” – that is, tuberculosis-causing members of the genus Mycobacterium. Gram mentions that you need to stain this type of bacteria for the “usual” 12-24 hours to make this work, incidentally, as opposed to a few minutes for other “schizomycetes”. This suggests that you are expected to have some idea of what you’re going to find before you use the stain, as opposed to the modern implementation which is supposed to tell you something about what kind of bacteria you’re finding.
Still, Gram does report that some bacteria take the stain and some don’t, giving us a preview of the “differential” character of the modern version. He specifically notes typhoid and some causes of bronchial pneumonia fail to hold the stain. Given that Typhoid Fever is caused by a strain of the “Gram-negative” butt-bacter Salmonella enterica, and there are a number of “Gram negative” bacteria as well as “Gram positive” that can cause pneumonia, this makes sense. He also does mention the use of Bismarck Brown R a.k.a. Vesuvine as a counterstain in order to make the nuclei of the infected cells brown in contrast to the dark blue of the infectious bacteria in the tissue.
For much of the century-and-a-quarter since Gram’s publication, the question of why the Gram stain works was thoroughly investigated, and even today I occasionally hear or read assertions to the effect that the Gram Stain isn’t well understood. I disagree with this just as I think its importance to bacterial identification is grossly overblown, and if you want to know why, I have a previous post all about why the Gram stain works and how we know. You may or may not also be interested in an older post regarding whether or not “acid-fast” bacteria like the ones that cause tuberculosis (which don’t stain at all when using the modern version of the Gram stain) are “Gram Positive” or not. As always, if you spot any errors or have any questions, please let me know…
[1] Burke V: “Notes on the Gram Stain with Description of a New Method.” J Bacteriol. 1922 Mar;7(2):159-82.
Mozilla Firefox 3 so far seems to be a nice improvement over the already-pretty-good Firefox 2, but in one particular respect it’s doing something that I think is very bad. As of Firefox 3, the Mozilla corporation apparently no longer believes that anyone can legitimately encrypt the traffic on their own servers without permission from a “professional”. A well-meaning attempt to protect “consumers” on the internet has gone a bit too far and crossed an important philosophical line, in my opinion. (Oh, and sorry for the long block of imageless text that is this post – I couldn’t find any appropriate images to sprinkle in here.)
This all has to do with the way Mozilla now has Firefox 3 treating a particular type of “SSL” encryption mechanism. To understand the problem it might help to have a little bit of possibly oversimplified background…
Imagine you want to exchange messages with someone else and you don’t want other people to eavesdrop on you. You might get a strong box and a lock for it. You get two keys for the lock, and give one to your friend. Then, you can just lock your messages in the box and send it to your friend, who uses their own copy of the key to unlock it (and can then place their reply back in the same box and send it back to you). This is the way it used to be done digitally – you and your friend would agree on a “password”, and that password would be used to encode and decode the messages. This is the “shared key” model of encryption.
There are two problems with this, though – first, if there are more than two of you exchanging messages, either everyone has to have a copy of the same key, or you have to keep track of a very large keyring full of keys for every person you communicate with. The second problem is the fact that at some point while setting this up, you have to convey the key to everyone in an insecure manner. You have to tell the other people the password on the phone, or out loud in person, or written plainly on a piece of paper, or whatever. This presents an opportunity for someone else lurking nearby to find out about it. What’s worse, since the key/password is “shared”, not only can the lurker now read the messages you send to your friend if he or she can just intercept the box temporarily, they can also read messages sent in reply, or to anyone else who’s using the same key.
The alternative is “Public Key Infrastructure” (“PKI”). SSL is an implementation of the concept, as is PGP (See also Mozilla Thunderbird’s enigmail extension for PGP encryption support for your email). In this much more secure scheme, you only send your friend enough to let them encode the message, but not to decode it. By analogy, it’s like sending them a lockable box with an open lock attached, while you keep the only key. They put the message in, lock it, and send it to you. Nobody between them and you can read the message. You send your replies to them in a similar box that they send to you with their own lock attached. Digitally, you generate a complicated “private key” code that you use to decode messages sent to you, and from THAT you generate a “public key” – the equivalent of the box with the open lock. You can safely give this out to anyone, since it can only be used to send secret messages TO you: messages encoded with the “public” key can only be decoded with the “private” key.
That does leave one potential problem though – what if someone ELSE manages to masquerade as the message-box carrier, and he makes and delivers to you a box that looks just like the one that belongs to your trusted friend, maybe with a message saying “Hey, it’s urgent, I REALLY need to borrow $20, but I’ll pay you back tomorrow – please put $20 in the box”? It looks an awful lot like your friend’s box, so you stick $20 in it and send it off, and the fraudster in the messages stream between you and your friend walks off with it. This is referred to as a “Man in the Middle” attack.
The solution to that is “signatures” – every public key is “signed” by someone who is assumed to have somehow confirmed that the person with the public key is who they claim to be – as though the lock on our metaphorical message box is now engraved with: “Joe Schmoe paid us $25, so we checked his driver’s license and sure enough it was him. You have our word on that for 365 more days after which point we’ll have him come in and pay us another $25 to do it again. Signed, Verisign®”. Assuming you trust Verisign to verify this, you can feel confident that it really is Joe Schmoe sending you the message asking you to let him borrow your car keys. The digital version is slightly more complicated than this and much harder to forge, but the analogy will serve.
If Joe Schmoe doesn’t care about needing your car keys or credit cards or whatever, though, he can just engrave the lock himself. “Joe Schmoe didn’t pay anybody anything, but take my word for it, this lock really does belong to Joe Schmoe. Signed, Joe Schmoe.” Many times, you’re really not worried about anything more than deterring casual snooping. Nobody’s going to go to the trouble of crafting a fake “Joe Schmoe Message Lockbox” and finding a way to intercept your messages in order to steal your precious Secret Ginger Cookies Recipe or to see if you and Joe are maybe sending dirty jokes to each other or whatever, but maybe you don’t want your message carrier to read your messages and find out either way. There’s no point in paying some Internet Public Notary once a year to “verify” that the person asking you to tell him “how the one about the Pokemon™ character and Minnie Mouse™ goes” really is your dorky friend Joe Schmoe and not an imposter.
This brings us to Firefox 3. It used to be that self-signed encryption certificates popped up a simple message letting you know that although your connection was encrypted and safe from eavesdropping between you and the server, you only had the sending site’s word that they were who they said they were, so are you sure you want to connect anyway? As far as I know, every other major web browser still behaves that way, but Firefox 3 has gotten overzealous about being “more secure” than everyone else, and now claims that self-signed certificates are “invalid”, presenting the user with a misleading scary popup box full of jargon about the “invalid” certificate possibly being fraudulent. If you know what you’re doing, you can click your way through a few layers of windows at this point and tell Firefox 3 “Yes, shut up, I know it’s self-signed, I don’t think Al Qaeda set up a fake web-site to steal the ‘list of 10 things I’d do with a stale twinkie if I was stranded alone on a desert island with one’ that I’m posting to the ‘naughty junk food stories’ discussion board. I just don’t want everybody else in the hotel knowing that I’m doing it.” Of course, Firefox 3 acts all along as though it’s your butler and you’re telling him that you want him to open the front door for a stranger there carrying a bag and a gun and wearing panty-hose over his head. If you don’t know what you’re doing, the messages scare you away, and you just use an unencryted link to avoid the scary message, and hope nobody else in the hotel happens to be watching the wireless network traffic…
In short, if you are running your own server, Mozilla insists that you must go ask permission from Verisign or one of the other “trusted” corporations that Firefox knows about if you want your users to be able to use encryption. You cannot possibly be using encryption legitimately unless you’ve paid one of them for their signature, apparently.
My problem with this isn’t the money, really. In fact, apparently at least one of the corporations on Mozilla’s list of approved “Certificate Authorities” offers basic service for no charge, and even the ones that charge you often don’t charge more than a buck or two per month. It’s not even much of a technical issue, since it doesn’t look like it’s too much more of a hassle to get a certificate from an “approved” Certificate Authority than to generate one’s own self-signed one. If this were being done by Microsoft Internet Explorer or Apple Safari or some other proprietary browser I doubt I’d even blink. But Mozilla Firefox? Darling of the “Free and Open Source Software” world (and in my opinion, aside from this one issue perhaps the best browser available), where the desire for freedom from third-party restrictions prompts efforts against proprietary multimedia schemes, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and the use of patents to prevent innovation? THEY are effectively suggesting that you can’t be legitimately enabling encrypted connections to your servers unless you’ve asked for authorization from an approved third party? Seriously? That seems like a pretty serious deviation from what the “Free and Open Source” philosophy is supposed to be.
I kind of doubt that’s what they intend to be doing here, but they are. I believe the core problem is that Mozilla has fallen into the trap of thinking about the “consumer” internet rather than the “participant” internet. I most certainly would expect, say, Amazon.com to present some additional verification to me before I send them my credit card information over the internet in exchange for “Oprah’s latest book pick” or something, but the same should not necessarily apply to someone who just wants to set up a casual message board, or whistleblower discussion site, or political dissident site (and the latter two cases might very well be worried about trying to contact a Central Authority for permission to set up the site’s encryption.) In their eagerness to show off how harsh they’re willing to be to protect Joe and Jane Netshopper from a fake paypal site, they’ve effectively said “if you don’t get permission from one of our Trusted Authorities, you’d better hope your Firefox 3 users are geeky enough to understand what’s going on if you don’t want their whole apartment complex to be able to spy on what they’re telling you.” For “Free Software”, that’s just wrong.
If I were Supreme Overlord of Mozilla, I’d be demanding one of two corrections – either correct the interface for dealing with self-signed certificates to quit trying to scare people away from them…or at least don’t treat such servers as any less secure than ordinary (unencrypted) pages with no certificate at all (i.e. encrypt the traffic, but don’t display the happy little Green Lock of Security icon that pages encrypted with “authorized” certificates get.) Since I’m not Supreme Overlord, though, I’ll have to settle for whining on my blog. Don’t worry, I only plan to do it this once and get it out of my system.
Executive Summary: Self-signed certificates mean “not authenticated”, not “fraudulently authenticated”, but Mozilla no longer believes the distinction matters if Firefox 3’s behavior is an indication of this.
Additional note: so far, the developers seem like they’re clinging to the new “OMG WTF HACKERS COME TO STEAL YOUR PRECIOUS! CLICK SEVERAL TIMES ON CONFUSING MESSAGES TO CONTINUE BUT DON’T COME CRYING TO US WHEN THEY RAPE YOUR HARD DRIVE!” user interface for this, so as of right now I predict that other than some minor changes to the wording to maybe explain slightly better what’s really going on there will be no real corrections any time soon. There is, however, another way around this mess, even if you want no third parties involved in setting up your encryption at all – you can run your own certificate authority. Your users will still have to deal with a popup, but only once for all the certificates you may want to generate for yourself in the future. If anybody cares, I can try putting together a post on how that can be done.
Okay, now that the boring review is over with…
Consider the cell. It doesn’t matter what kind of cell – bacterial, archael, fungal, animal, whatever. It’s still a tiny droplet of slightly salty water, thickened by a bunch of enzymes, other proteins, and various other substances floating around in the water. There’s also one other component that makes this a “cell” rather than soup: a bubble made of fatty material that the droplet is wrapped in, called the cell membrane. Depending on what kind of cell you’re thinking of, there may or may not be a “cell wall” made of some sort of rigid material, with the cell membrane inside of it. There may also be more than one membrane as is the case with the classic “Gram negative” style of bacterium, which has a second “outer” membrane wrapped around its cell wall. If it’s a eukaryotic cell, it’ll even have tiny little “organelles” inside itself wrapped in their own little membranes…but whatever. It’s the innermost one, inside of whatever cell wall may be there but wrapped around the cell’s guts, that we’re concerned with here.
Since stuff that will dissolve readily in water doesn’t tend to dissolve well into fats, and vice-versa, the cell membrane not only prevents stuff dissolved in the water inside the cell from leaking out, it also prevents stuff in the water outside from getting in. This lets a cell maintain itself at near neutral pH even if it happens to live in a very acidic environment, or an appropriate level of, say, sodium salts even if it lives in the Great Salt Lake.
This brings us back again to benzoic acid, which you should recall from the previous post alternates between a dissociated hydrogen-ion-and-benzoate-ion form and a combined, netural form in water. You may have noticed that foods preserved with benzoates tend to be sour, like fruit juices or soda. That’s because “sour” is the flavor of acid, and benzoic acid’s ability to be a preservative is only good in acidic environments
Useless Knowledge Break: the German word for acid is “Saurstoff”. Yes, that is pronounced like “sour stuff”, and no, that is not a coincidence.
An acidic environment means lots of extra hydrogen ions (“protons”) floating around. That also means that when a molecule of benzoic acid splits into a hydrogen ion and benzoate ion, it takes less time before another hydrogen ion comes by and the molecule can recombine again and therefore a bigger majority of the benzoate floating around at any moment is in the combined, somewhat fat-soluble neutral form. In that form, it can soak into a cell membrane if it encounters one.
If that molecule drifts through the membrane and gets to the inside of the cell, it may touch the less acidic watery environment there and dissociate into ions again and be unable to return through the membrane. The released hydrogen ions mean the inside of the cell becomes more acidic. As of today (20080806), the Wikipedia entry for Sodium Benzoate cites a single paper from the early 1980’s saying that when the inside of a yeast cell gets acidic enough, it prevents a specific step in the energy-generating process from working. This may be true, but there’s more to the story than this.
Obviously the membrane can’t totally seal the cell off from the outside, or the cell would be unable to excrete wastes or take in food molecules, so there are numerous specialized “transport” proteins that stick through the membrane to allow specific kinds of molecules in and out. Lots of biochemical reactions release hydrogen ions, so there are transport proteins that can shove hydrogen ions out of the cell and into the cell’s surroundings. The problem is that all substances naturally diffuse from areas of higher concentration to areas of lower concentration, so in an acidic environment the natural direction that hydrogen ions “want” to flow is into the more neutral cell. These transport proteins can shove the hydrogen ions in the opposite direction, but like pushing a boulder uphill it costs energy. This seems to be the primary reason that benzoic acid prevents bacteria and yeasts from growing – it makes them waste energy that they would be using for growth just to keep taking the hydrogen ions that the benzoic acid helps leak in through the cell membrane and shoving them back outside. The figure above is linked to a page at Helsinki university that discusses this type of preservative action in more detail.
Simple and elegant, and this seems to have been assumed to be the whole explanation for some time. But what happens to the benzoate ion when its hydrogen ion gets pumped away? Does it do anything?
Coming up next: Endocannibalism!
It’s about time I got to the long-promised post about benzoic acid. The thing is, I don’t want to assume everybody reading this is well-versed in chemistry or anything, so after much thought I’m going to split this into three posts. This first one is a bit of chemistry review for some topics that are important to how benzoic acid acts as a preservative. People who are bored by this or know more about it than I do are welcome to either wait for the next post or leave corrections or questions in the comments as you see fit. (Brief note to people reading this from the RSS feed – I’ve noticed that the stylesheet information doesn’t transfer with the RSS, so you won’t see where the web page view would indicate that there is additional information available for some of the terms here. Try hovering over various words and phrases in this post, though, and the information should pop up if it’s there…or just pop in at the main site and post questions if you have any.)
There are several ways people separate types of molecules into opposites. For example, ionic vs. covalent, polar vs. non-polar, or hydrophilic vs. hydrophobic. Although these three categories are each a little different from each other, they all relate to the same thing. As with all other chemistry, it all has to do with what the electrons are doing.
When atoms react with each other, they have a big fight over each other’s electrons. The reaction “finishes” (reaches equilibrium) when this custody battle is concluded. Each of the three categories above relate to how equitable the electron-sharing arrangment ends up being. Once the molecule’s atoms arrange themselves, if the custody of the electrons is distributed fairly evenly around the entire molecule, the molecule is considered “non-polar”. On the other hand, if the atoms at some corner of the molecule end up with more custody of the electrons than the other areas, the molecule ends up having an end that’s slightly more negatively charged (remember electrons are arbitrarily defined as being “negative”) than the others, and the molecule is “polar”. If you dissolve that polar molecule in water and the atoms remain together stubbornly clinging to the shared electrons, the molecule is considered “covalent” (“valence” refers to the area around atoms that electrons “orbit”), whereas if one or more of the atoms readily gains or gives up complete custody of one or more electrons and drifts away from the rest of the molecule, the molecule is considered “ionic”. (It amuses me to think of these latter two terms as “homoelectrical” and “heteroelectrical”. Yes, I am easily amused, why do you ask?) Plain old table salt is what you get when atoms of Sodium (“Na“) and Chlorine (“Cl”) get into one of these electron fights. If you were to look at a Periodic Table of Elements, take a look at the column way over on the left, with Sodium (Na) and Potassium (K) and so on. All of these have one electron that they just don’t really give a crap about. Way over on the other side of the table, one column over from the far right, you’ll see Fluorine (F), Chlorine(Cl) and so on. All of THOSE desperately want an extra electron (Chlorine is the third most electron-greedy – “electronegative” – atom, behind Fluorine and Oxygen). Stick Sodium Chloride in water, and Chlorine says “MINE!”, and Sodium says “Ah, whatever, who needs it?” and the gentle pull of the water molecules around them easily overcome the electric charge based attraction of the now positively charged sodium ion and the now negatively charged chlorine ion, and the two atoms drift apart.
This brings us to “hydrophobic” and “hydrophilic”. There’s a truism in chemistry that “like dissolves like”. Polar substances tend to dissolve well in other polar substances, and non-polar substances tend to dissolve well in other non-polar substances, but polar and non-polar substances don’t mix well at all. Water is a polar substance – it’s got an electron-greedy oxygen atom in between two comparatively electron-apathetic hydrogen atoms. What’s more, the two hydrogen atoms aren’t on exactly opposite sides of the oxygen atom. The “H-O-H” arrangement is actually bent (at just over 104°, if you care), so a water molecule ends up being slightly triangular, with one corner being a little bit negative (where the oxygen atom clings more to the electrons) and two corners with the hydrogens being a little bit positive. Any other molecule with a slightly-positive or slightly-negative part will find that part attracted to one side or the other of water molecules, and as a result will tend to be pulled out into the water as the molecules bounce around [i.e. it will dissolve]. On the opposite end of the scale, molecules with their electrons relatively evenly spread over them tend not to be soluble in water. Large molecules like fats are in this category, which is why fat floats on top of water rather than dissolving in it.
There are two other random facts that I need to wedge in here somewhere. First, the line between “covalent” and “ionic” is actually kind of arbitrary. Water is considered “covalent”, but a very small fraction of the times that two water molecules run into each other, they’ll hit just right so that the slightly-negative oxygen atom on one of them manages to attract one of the slightly-positive hydrogen atoms enough to make it leave an electron behind and jump over. When that happens, you end up briefly with a positively-charged “hydronium” ion (“H3O+“) and a negatively-charged “hydroxide” (OH–) ion. It doesn’t take too long for a “hydronium” to find a “hydroxide” again and rearrange back into two water molecules, but in pure water at “standard temperature and pressure” (defined as 25°C and one atmosphere of pressure) at any time there are about 620,000,000,000,000,000 hydroniums and hydroxides floating around in a liter of water – assuming I didn’t screw up my math there.
And, finally: a classical definition of an “acid” is something that “donates protons” (that is, hydrogen ions). In water, that means a molecule that provides extra available hydrogen atoms that water can pull off to form “hydronium” ions more often that water alone does.
And now, at last, we reach the subject of the preservative known as “benzoic acid”. If you read the ingredients lists of the food and drink you buy, you’ll probably never actually see “benzoic acid” on the label. Instead, you’ll see “sodium benzoate” or “potassium benzoate”. If you remember, sodium and potassium don’t really care about one of their electrons, so when you dump “sodium benzoate” in water, the sodium goes floating off to play with the water, leaving behind a negatively-charged benzoate ion with its electron. The extra electron hangs out around the part of the benzoate ion where the electron-greedy oxygen atoms are, making the molecule quite polar. Along comes a new “hydronium” ion, carrying a hydrogen that decides it misses its electron after all, and it jumps over to take over partial custody of the electron that the sodium left behind. In short, you’re going from Sodium + Benzoate + Hydronium + Hydroxide to Sodium + Hydroxide +…Benzoic Acid. (Plus a molecule of water, which is traditionally left out of these kinds of equations, which used to be the “hydronium”.) With the hydrogen attached and sharing the electron, benzoic acid no longer has so much of a charge imbalance and is a lot less polar. Being an acid, Benzoic Acid can also give that hydrogen ion back up again to a molecule of water – exactly the reverse of the reaction that formed it.
That’s the punchline to this: in water, a molecule of benzoic acid might at any one time be without it’s hydrogen and therefore charged/polar and hydrophilic, or it might have the attached hydrogen and be uncharged, relatively non-polar, and be comparatively hydrophobic…or “fat-soluble”.
Next post: So what?
Don’t misunderstand – I like all kinds of foods made with eggs. Eggs are tasty. They’re handy. They’re nutritious, too. Their protein is so good they are the standard against which nutritionists have historically compared other food proteins. As a bonus, a medium-sized egg contains only one-eighth the cholesterol in a single ounce of human brain (and is much less likely to give you kuru).
However, could it be possible to come up with a more inconvenient packaging scheme? This thing was obviously designed by someone that hates us. “Let’s see, we’ll make it tasty and very nutritious. But just so people don’t think we like them, we’ll make it the consistency of snot, and package it by sealing it inside a specially-made, inedible brittle container so that you have to literally smash the thing open to get at the food, ensuring that the consumer* gets nasty goo all over his or her hands, or gets shards of the container mixed in with the food, or both. That’ll show the little jerks. And if that’s not enough, we’ll also have that container extruded out of a chicken’s butt.” (For some odd reason, as I write this, I’m picturing an Evil Santa Claus giving a presentation to the Evil Elves who are about to go off and implement this idea…”Sneezy, Drippy, and Runny – you three will head up the design committee…”)
They’re not screw flies or anything, but perhaps eggs can still count as an example of “irreducible grotesqueness”. (The picture, in case it isn’t obvious, is an egg separator. The image is linked to the site where you can buy them.)
This short rant has been brought to you by I’m-Making-Too-Many-Egg-Based-Meals-Lately Industries. That, and a second test to make sure I’ve got the DNS issues that I initially had resolved now. Can you all see this? I’d be thankful if everyone who was seeing this would post a quick “yeah, I see it” in the comments so that I can get on with the real posts again.
* Am I the only one who finds it insulting to be called a “consumer”, as though I were nothing more than a gaping mouth with a wallet? Am I sitting here mouth agape like a baby bird, waiting for a “supplier” to stroll by, grab some money out of my wallet, and cough up some “product” for me to “consume”? (I contend that I am not a “consumer” but a active participant in this economy, dagnabbit!)
Move is underway. Here’s a quick update / test.
On the way home (to Texas, that is, with a load of furniture from House v1.0 in Idaho) we adopted a co-dog. Now Cornelia isn’t the only official dog in the house.
Yeah, I know, pretty frivolous stuff. What do you want – this is mainly a test post. You guys ARE seeing this post, right? (Please comment and let me know). I’ve finally found and jumped through the hoops necessary to migrate the bigroom.org website over to the new host. It’s also running on the old server in House v1.0 on the DSL line as well, but this post isn’t getting put on it. If I’ve done everything correctly, hosting for bigroom.org should now be handled by Eskimo North. Just a few other minor tweaks and I’ll be set to return to House v1.0 and shut down the old server so I can move it down here to Texas.
I’ve gone from about 4400ft elevation down to about 250ft, but the plastic bottles of Mountain Dew® Wine seem to have positive pressure, so it would appear there is still some live yeast left in there and the priming sugar is slowly doing its job. I’m pretty sure the benzoic acid is what’s slowing down the activity so drastically, but it hasn’t killed it off yet.
I’ve also got a couple of entries in mind already for the next The Giants’ Shoulders blog carnival, and hopefully some more crazed brewing project news to offer sometime. And, of course, the promised post on why benzoic acid works. Stay tuned.
As part of the moving process, bigroom.org is going to be moved to hosting on “Eskimo North”, who I found via a Google™ search for “Linux-friendly” ISP’s. If all goes well, there’ll be no noticeable interruption. If all doesn’t go well, there may be up to a day or two while the site appears to be down (while the change propogates around the Domain Name Servers). If this happens, please don’t give up on me!…
Sometime in the next 24 hours or so I’ll take this physical server down so that I can bring it with me to the new Asylum, which will take a couple of days. Hopefully everything will have transitioned over to the new host before I do that. Wish me luck. More postings in a few days…
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