Britt's Blog

But why’s that big rock in the way?

Asteroids… vermin of the skies. *grumble grumble*

I’m working through a backlog of old Point of Inquiry podcasts, and just listened to this episode:

Greg Craven – What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

It’s an interview with high school science teacher Greg Craven, who created a massively viral YouTube video which presents a somewhat different way of looking at the global warming debate, which is to acknowledge that science will never provide THE TRUTH, or an absolutely certain answer to whether global warming is happening, whether it’s anthropogenic, etc. and so deftly side-step the “yeah-but-als” of the climate-change denialists.

So, consider both sides: What if it’s right? What if it’s wrong? Moreover, consider both responses: What if we do nothing? What if we make the drastic changes required to reduce our atmospheric carbon output?

Which response carries the greatest risk?

And remember, we’re already running the experiment by doing little to nothing to reduce our carbon output.

The first video is pretty simplistic (you can skip it without missing much):

This followup (which responds to criticisms) is better:

I’m struck by the fact that he considers only the possible negative outcomes. A lot of the kicking and screaming about carbon reform makes me think of this cartoon:

I’m not saying Craven’s argument is as bulletproof as he seems to think it is, but I like how he urges you to gather your own information, make your own assesements and come to your own conclusions. I also respect a guy who’s willing to put something up on YouTube and actually read and respond to the comments.

I’m going to subscribe to his newsletter check out his book, which, it is claimed, is about how to make big decisions with limited information. As suggested in the interview, this could be a great part of a freshman seminar course.

Mauna Kea has kept popping onto my radar for some reason. I’ve never been… Maybe I should start proposing for IRTF or Keck time.

I just listened to this old ep: Aloha Astronomy from Are We Alone, the SETI podcast.

And saw this on Facebook. It really captures the flavor life on an observing run. “You can close the dome any time you like, but you can never leave…”

I now know what I want done with my remains.

I want to be made into a box of pencils. Distribute these pencils to my colleagues.

Derive away, ladies and gentlemen. Derive away.

Also, feel free to give them to your students to use when taking the Physics GRE.

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.

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…

Boston.com’s Big Picture has a really cool set of Cassini images.

And I say this as someone who stares at a lot of Cassini images.

Okay, I’ll admit, compared to these Cassini ISS (Imaging Sub-System) images from the WAC and NAC (that’s Wide- and Narrow- Angle Camera), the VIMS images I work with are like a kindergardener’s drawings: blurry, difficult to interpret, and made with every single Crayola in the box.

Nonetheless, I end up looking at lots of ISS images for fun and lecture fodder, and this collection is exceptional: each and every one of these is mindblowing in one or more ways.

Here’s a sample image of the F ring, which is my personal scientific obsession. It is distorted by interactions with the moon Prometheus (the Solar System’s most badly behaved “shepherd moon.”) Be sure to click through to the bigger version. So, so, very pretty—and it’s not even the most excellent one there. (I’d love to hear in comments which images you thought were neatest!)

I am slightly radioactive!

I have a tummy ache that isn’t going away, which has led to an Exciting Battery of Tests.

My gluten-free friends will be disappointed to hear, incidentally, that I officially do not have celiac disease. Bummer.

Today I had a gastric emptying study, which is to find out whether my stomach is, uh, emptying right, i.e. not too fast, or, particularly, too slow, a condition called gastroparesis which, I gather, can lead to tummy aches, and sounds much cooler than gastritis, which is the term for a plain old persistent tummy ache caused by inflammation of the stomach lining.

The upshot is that I ate a plate of radioactive scrambled eggs and then laid in a machine that measured gamma rays for two hours.

Yes.

The eggs were laced with technetium, which, at an atomic number of 43, is the lightest artificial element. It has no stable isotopes, so if it is created in nature, it doesn’t live for very long.

^99mTc is produced artificially for use in nuclear medicine. It’s a good isotope to use for radiological imaging because it produces beta rays (which are electrons) at fairly low energies, plus gamma rays at 140 keV. The beta rays don’t go far, but gamma rays can travel fairly well through body tissues. ^99mTc also has a half life of about 6 hours, so within 24 hours, only 6% of the original dose remains.

Gamma ray images of the body can then be used to locate the technetium in the body. In my case, we got lots of purty pictures of eggs getting squished up in my stomach and then proceeding to my small intestine. Awesomely enough, I was able to watch this in real time on the screen of the imager. It was very cool and scintillation-y. It was super awesome to feel my stomach rumble and watch a glob of technetium omelet get injected into my duodenum. According to the screen there were something like a 3000 photons recorded by the imager each second.

My stomach seemed to be mostly, but not entirely emptied by the end. I have no idea if that’s normal; I guess the results are going to be interpreted for my benefit by a radiologist and/or my gastroenterologist.

As we all know, radiation causes superpowers, so what with the beta rays and the gamma rays (HULK SMASH!!!) my digestive tract must be getting totally min-maxed. Here are some powers I expect to develop any time now:

1. The beta radiation injects chicken DNA from the scrambled eggs into the cells of my stomach wall, creating a muscular pouch where I can store small pebbles. I now have the power to digest whole kernels of corn and unground flax seeds.
2. My duodenum can see into the future. Sadly, there are not a lot of exciting events going on in the duodenum, and its ability to communicate about future events is limited.
3. My jejunum is now invisible. This will certainly come in handy should my small intestine ever need to employ stealth.

Ultimate verdict: This was the best medical test I’ve had this year, next to the CT scan of my head^*.

Because, dude, three-dimensional computer model of my skull.

^* Nothing scary, folks, just checking whether a sinus infection was cleared up.

An interesting article on interruptions in the NY Times.

Turns out that interruptions in a pleasant activity (like commercials during a TV program) actually enhance your pleasure. ( I suspect that part of the reason why may be that TV writers deliberately use commercial breaks as part of the pacing of the show. I also have a bare-brained theory that you should wait a week between watching episodes of, say, Babylon 5 or Lost so that you have a week to mull over and savor the episodes, which is how the writers have intended you to appreciate the show. )

Also, note the continuing theme: We don’t know what actually makes us happy. Nobody says, “Having my programs interrupted every 8 minutes so that Pizza Hut can try to sell me something with more mozzarella and saturated fat in general than I normally eat in a 6 month period really enhances my viewing pleasure.” But, yet, we are happier people when our enjoyment of a fine situation comedy, satiric current events show, or quirky alternate reality drama is disrupted by that guy from Fuccillo Auto Malls telling us that “it” is “huuuuuuuuuu-juh.”

Anyway, the article on interruption says that an annoying experience that is interrupted only becomes more annoying.

Interestingly enough, I read this article while taking a “break” in the middle of a pile of papers that I was grading…

Hmm…

If you’re not listening to the Moth podcast, like Dan and me, you really should be.

The Moth consists of true stories, told on stage, without notes, from famous as well as regular people.

An excellent recent episode which would be of interest to my Gentle Ithacan Readers is Alternate Ithaca Tom.

Tom ruminates about mid-life crisis and wonders about what might have been, specifically if he had studied Animal Behavior at Cornell University. He conflates Ithaca’s town and gown community and seems a little unclear on academic life in general, but nonetheless it’s a lovely piece about Ithaca and mid-life crises in general.

I felt an eerie sense of resonance as I listened.

One reason is that I am doing the typical holy-crap-I’m-on-the-tenure-track-do-I-really-want-to-do-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life thing. (This probably doesn’t qualify as a mid-life crisis, unless, heavens forfend, I die at the age of 66.)

The other reason is that I’ve often thought about the fact that according to the Many-Worlds Interpretation (which Tom explains quite well) there is a universe (many of them, in fact) where I went to Caltech, the other grad school I was accepted to.

In our Universe, I visited campus, got a somewhat creepy desperate vibe off the grad students, and decided I would probably be really, really unhappy living in southern California. But of course one still wonders.

Unlike Alternate Ithaca Tom, who springs, it seems, fully realized into Tom Weiser’s mind, Alternate Pasadena Britt is a mystery to me. I bumbled into planetary astronomy more or less by accident, so what does Alternate Pasadena Britt study? Did she end up doing planetary anyway, or follow Unbranched Undergraduate Britt’s passion for space and plasma physics, or does she do solar physics, or is she a radio astronomer, or what? Did Alternate Pasadena Jason marry her? Was she academically successful, or did she burn out and punt on grad school? Did she realize that she liked teaching and wanted to do that, or did she go on to do research postdocs instead?

How many million weird little things happened to me in Ithaca, things that would be impossible in Pasadena, to make me the person I am today? How many snowfalls and long, gray, Ithacating days, how many moments of stunning beauty looking over Lake Cayuga or lingering in a gorge, how many chance encounters at Wegmans, how many idle thoughts while waiting for the TCAT or for the elevator in Space Sciences… let alone the friendships made, the mentors met, the students taught, the miles and miles on the Stairmaster at the Ithaca College faculty gym…

How many versions of us had the courage that we lacked to do the brave thing at a critical juncture, or the wisdom and foresight to make the non-obvious lateral move that makes all the difference?

How many versions of us out there died in car crashes, got cancer, ruined their careers with bad decisions, went broke from poor financial management, or suffered all the other fates we worry about?

Is it at all comforting to think that there is a person out there who zigged where you zagged?