Britt’s Blog

The Beloit College Center for the Sciences has officially received Platinum LEED Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

The building has also won a Design Excellence Honor Award in Interior Architecture from the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

In addition, they have fixed the pressure problems so that the front doors no longer get stuck closed in cold weather, my office now maintains a habitable temperature more or less year ’round, my motion-detecting, ambient-light-sensing indirect overhead lighting has always worked like it should, and they say they’re going to fix my blinds so that I can open the screens fully, which will make it much easier to to operate my operable window.

W00T to the Kettle Chips factory in Beloit, also, for their gold certification. They didn’t get platinum certification, but our building does not produce delicious, delicious potato chips, so I think it’s clear who the real winners are.

If you are not listening to RadioLab, why the heck not?

A recent episode The New Normal, encapsulates all that is awesome about RadioLab. Here we have some very sciencey animal behavior stuff, plus genetics of artificial selection, and then a very touching human interest story about a transgendered movie theater owner who becomes mayor of a conservative Colorado town, and to top it off a rumination on how we became human.

Awesome.

Via Unclutter, a story from a Duke University grad student who lives in a van.

This of course recalls the story shared on Car Talk by a young woman who discovered her beau, a Stanford medical student, was also living in a van. The story had a happy ending, and the two of them piled into the van for a road trip across the continent. [Unfortunately, the links to Car Talk show summaries are for memory-jogging purposes only, because, unlike every other public radio program in existence, Car Talk not only does not have a free archive, only their "top rated" episodes are available for pay from Audible.com. Get on the stick, Tom and Ray!]

All I can say, is thank goodness I picked science as a career. Science grad students are typically supported through assistantships, don’t pay tuition, and get a large enough stipend to afford a modest apartment of some sort.

Also, I don’t think these shenanigans would have worked in northern climes. If there’s a grad student at UW Madison living in a van at the current temperature of -2°F, I’d recommend dropping out and finding gainful employment.

This morning there was a thin layer of snow on the ground. I went out to run, and when I turned around and saw my shoeprints, I realized that I had left an interesting trail.

Actually, my feet were just about as cold as you might assume. I think I need to get the kind that actually cover the tops of your feet, or I’m gonna give myself frostbite.

“To the Best of Our Knowledge” is a show out of Wisconsin Public Radio, also available, of course, in convenient podcast form.

It caters to the literate and the nerdy. I love how they’ll drop a reference to, say, Sisyphus, without being compelled to tell the audience, “That was the guy who had to keep pushing the rock up the hill.” ‘Course, that means that a few references go whistling over my head, but it’s a small price to pay to not be condescended to.

Lately, I’ve been impressed by Boots on the Ground, their 5-part series on the war in Iraq. It is most definitely not easy listening. This is rough stuff. But if Americans are fighting and dying and killing over there, the least I can do in my fat, safe, cushy civilian life is listen to some grown men break down on the radio from time to time.

Check out also Channeling Creativity, featuring My! #1! Favorite! Comic! Author!, Lynda Barry, writer of the amazing Ernie Pook Comeek, who is apparently now living in rural Wisconsin. Wow. Go fig. Anyway, she is awesome, and she will have a special place in my heart as one of the purest, most authentic voices of childhood.

I disapprove of apologizing-for-not-posting posts, so suffice it to say that I remember that I owe you an entry on yeast, and let’s pretend I didn’t start off this way. :)

Today was the inauguration of Beloit College’s new president, Scott Bierman—an Ithaca, NY native, incidentally. Any day when I get to dress up in my Cornell-red PhD robes and my poofy hat is a good day. It’s very silly, but I admit that like a little of the pomp, and a skosh of the circumstance.

I also get warm fuzzies from being part of a college with such a long history. Beloit College was established in 1846, before Wisconsin was even a state. (Cornell University? Meh, it’s okay… for one of your younger institutions.) Various speeches features lots of shout-outs to Andrew Chapin, Beloit’s first president, and Beloit’s crazy early days, when classes numbered around a dozen, and the faculty consisted of two professors. Hard to imagine how they conceived of a “liberal arts education,” vs. how we think of it today.

It was a very nice ceremony, quite in keeping with the air of anticipation on campus fostered by the new administration. And, the BSFFA kiddies and me were pleased by our new president’s allusions Terry Pratchett in his literate, history-conscious, warm, funny, and touching speech. (Now you wish you’d been there, don’t you?)

If that wasn’t enough, there was also an inauguration day 2.5-mile Fun Walk/Run starting at 7 AM. I managed a 12-minute pace in my Vibram 5-Fingers. (Yes, I changed shoes before the inauguration.)

Three lessons we have learned from the movie Taken:

1. Do not mess with Ninja Liam Neeson.
2. Do not give information to Ninja Liam Neeson.
3. Actually, you pretty much want to avoid the vicinity of Ninja Liam Neeson.

Bonus Lesson: There is always a bridge. Or a fjord.

Here endeth the lesson.

I’ve been enthusiastically rearing all sorts of unusual housepets—if by housepets one means creatures that one captures, enslaves to do one’s bidding, and finally devours.

Some of my favorite housepets are Lactobacillus delbrueckii subspecies bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, the primary bacteria used to make yogurt. After many years, I refined the yogurt-making into to a relatively efficient science. Most of the process involves just waiting around until something beeps.

1. Obtain 1 quart of skim milk, 1/2 cup non-fat dry milk, and somewhere between 2 tablespoons to a 1/4 cup of plain yogurt containing live cultures.
   

   Use whole or 2% milk if you like; I like to skip the saturated fat. Various yogurt recipes recommend different amounts of dry milk, up to an entire cup, but I find 1/2 cup works best. Less, and the yogurt comes out too thin (or the milk fails to become yogurt at all) and more, and your yogurt tastes like instant milk (bleh!).
   

   I’ve made yogurt with all different kinds of cultures, including blended fruit yogurt, which is a little dangerous, because the fruit and sugar can cause yeast to develop, but which worked out okay for me. Anything that says “contains live and active cultures” on the packaging will work. My favorite, though, is Dannon All Natural, because its only ingredients are milk and bacteria. Also, it comes in a full quart container, which is not typical since the yogurt industry en masse suddenly decided circa 2002 to reduce the standard serving from 8 oz to 6 oz because it made the yogurt look like it had fewer calories. (One was wearily unsurprised by the fact that they did not reduce their prices by 75%.) Of course, after you’ve made a batch of yogurt, you are freed from the oppressive yogurt industry, because you’ve already got the perfect incubation vessel, and you can just save a little as starter for the next batch.

2. In a large microwave-safe mixing bowl (preferably one with a spout for easy pouring), combine the cold skim milk with the dry milk.
   

   It’s counter-intuitive, but the dry milk dissolves much better in cold milk—probably because it’s designed to be dissolved in cold water.

3. Microwave the milk until it reaches a temperature of 190° F.
   

   You can do this on the stovetop, too, but you’ll need to stand at the stove to stir the milk and prevent scorching. When you use the microwave, though, you can (through trial and error) figure out exactly how long it takes to nuke the milk to 190° (for me, 10 minutes 30 seconds) and once you know, you can just put the milk in, enter the time, and walk away. Alton Brown suggests that you just heat to 120°F, but other recipes go higher, perhaps to kill all the other non-yogurt-making organisms that might be lurking in the milk. I’m not quite sure why 190° is the magic number, but my experiments with lesser temperatures did not end in yogurt. Experiment at your own risk.

4. Cool the milk to 120° F.
   

   A thermometer with a low temperature alarm makes this step much easier, since you can walk away and ignore it until it beeps. Otherwise, just check the temperature regularly as the yogurt cools. The amount of time will vary depending on the type of container and the temperature in your kitchen.

5. Add the yogurt.
   

   In order to distribute the yogurt culture throughout the milk, I pour a little of the warm milk into the yogurt and mix it well to make a nice slurry, and pour that back into the bowl.

6. Pour into the clean incubation container.
   

   This is where the 1-quart Dannon container comes in handy. If you get one of those dinky 24-oz containers, you’re not going to be able to use your full quart of skim milk, and as a non-milk-drinker who lives with a dedicated 2%-milk user, I find it most convenient to buy and use an entire quart of skim for yogurt.
   

   Back in the day, I used to just re-use individual 8-oz yogurt cups, but this is pretty much impossible nowadays, because 1) all the yogurt cups are 6 oz now (see above rant) which wouldn’t be so bad, but also 2) They all come with peel-off foil lids instead of reusable plastic lids, which is probably a good thing overall in a reduction-of-waste sense, but a blow to the home yogurt-maker. I have my eye out for something that would work as well as the good ol’ yogurt cups, but I haven’t had much luck yet.
   

   Of course, you can use any container that is big enough to hold the yogurt with a little head space. Whatever you use, clean it thoroughly. For a while, I sterilized containers with boiling water, but, strangely, I ended up with more contamination problems, not fewer! So I stopped doing that and cleaned the containers with hot water and dish soap. If the yogurt gets contaminated, you’ll be able to tell—it will taste moldy or otherwise gross.

7. Keep the yogurt at a temperature between 100 and 120°F for a few hours (mine usually averages around 4-5 hours), checking occassionally, until you find that you have yogurt.
   

   While you do other things, your housepets are hard at work, growing, dividing, consuming the sugar lactose (which is why some lactose-intolerant people can eat yogurt), and excreting lactic acid (which provides the tart taste and curdles the milk to thicken the yogurt). I use a heating-pad-and-towel-in-a-stockpot incubator á la Alton Brown [yogurt incubator starts around 8:00] . (Bonus: I also have the ability to make turkey stock, dry my hair, or ease various aches and pains with theraputic heat, although admittedly I cannot do these things at the same time as making yogurt).
   

   To monitor temperature, a thermometer with both a high and low alarm is ideal, though these seem to be produced mainly for the catering industry, with the requisite level of accuracy and reliability, so they are rather expensive. Thermometers with a high alarm are easy to find, and they’ll keep you from killing the yogurt bacteria, which is the key thing, and you’ll just have to keep half an eye on the temp at 100+ where the bacteria are most happy. I happened to find a thermometer that has can do a high or low alarm, but not both at the same time, so I use it with the low-alarm set at 100° and a separate thermometer with the high alarm at 120°. The thermometers don’t have to be in the yogurt, just alongside the container is fine.
   

   Of course, you don’t need to mess with thermometers if you have an actual yogurt making machine, available from many fine retailers.

8. Enjoy or refrigerate and enjoy later.
   

   You now have a quart of plain yogurt. You can stir in fresh fruit, honey, jam, or whatever else you like. But don’t forget to save some to start the next batch.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about “the Critter,” which spends most of its life snoozing in the fridge, but sometimes comes out to feed…

(Via.)

_{For sticklers: No, this is not the actual TORNADO! event card. Some liberties were taken.}