The Homely Scientist

First this is one of my favourite songs:

Maybe it isn’t as easy as I make it out to be, but in honour of today’s SciHealth Theme day, which is being Green, here are some of the easiest ways to be Green(er):

1. Recycle
2. Use compact florescent bulbs
3. Turn off lights (even ones with CF bulbs) when not in use
4. Unplug cell phones, etc when they are done charging (they are still drawing current)
5. Use low-flow shower heads and sink aerators
6. Turn down your water heater
7. Change the oil in your car
8. Keep your tires inflated (yep this really does help to save fuel)
9. Walk/Bike more - drive less
10. By used from thrift stores (less in the landfills, saves manufacturing resources)
11. Compost (if you can)

See that’s not so hard.  It can be easy to be green.

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June is Men’s Health Month (it’s Father’s Day soon after all) and our theme is, well men’s health.  Here’s the problem with men and men’s health.  We take it for granted and often rather ignore things that are wrong with us.  I am not an exception to this rule, but I do try.

Here’s what we, as men, need to remember–people love us and want us to be around.  We need to make sure we get our exams as we get older (I’ve got a few I’ve been putting off).  We need to not ignore stuff like pain and such.

Don’t make your partner bug you until you go see a doctor.  Which reminds me, I need to call mine tomorrow.  What about you?

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May is Mental Health Month and today (technically it isn’t theme day yet, but it’s close enough) is Sci-Health Theme Day–so you can see where this is going.

Regular readers know that I suffer from depression and have for many years.  I do take medication for it so it’s well controlled at the moment.  I’m also a touch (no, not touched) ADD … it explains a lot doesn’t it.  Regardless I was really loathe to talk about me for this theme day, so I wracked my brain for a bit and then remembered one of my favourite movies (and since the poster is on my wall, I wonder why it took me so long to think of this): A Beautiful Mind.

For those of who haven’t heard of or seen the Oscar-winning movie, it’s about the brilliant mathematician and Nobel laureate John F. Nash (based on the book) who suffered from schizophrenia.  While his mental illness caused him great personal pain and turmoil, it is pretty clear from the movie that it is the very the nature of his brain that made him brilliant.  It was the “flaws” that gave him a unique perspective on the world that lead him to his game theories relating to economic such power.

When I’m frustrated by my own mind.  My own issues with my flaws, I remember John F. Nash, his struggles, and what he was able to accomplish both because of them and despite them

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Channel Theme Day again.  Pity, you see that the theme is an issue that is threatening the world.  I wrote about antibiotic resistance last week, which is a pretty big deal.  So I was stumped about what to write about.  Sure we have all the usual suspects.  Global Warming, malaria, HIV, war…then hit me.  We, humans and our human arrogance, is our biggest problem.

Okay this is pretty harsh isn’t it, but consider what we have wrought upon ourselves.  The question is, then, can we overcome our own self-destructive tendencies?  Can we tap into one of our other human traits, hope?

The answer is yes.  Yes we can use our collective hope to achieve something better.  Yes, we have a lot to do.  We have a lot to overcome.  We have many leaders and people in general who would rather perish than help the rest of the planet.  The vengent person in me says, let them perish.  The humanist in me hopes that a collective wisdom, a collective will for peace, justice, and humanity will overcome those who only know hate, injustice, and war.

So, yes to quote Pogo, I have seen the enemy, and he is us.  I have also seen the solution, and he is us as well.

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For this first pass, this is going to be more of a speed linking theme day post than deep, sage thoughts.  I promise I’m going to be more sage (with a little more thyme later) tonight.

In no particular order (okay it’s right to left in my IE7 tabs) …

Lively Women covers something that you don’t think about until it’s too late.  Who has the legal right to make decisions for you in an emergency?  Very important.  Usually a spouse can do this by default, but what if you live with a girlfriend or boyfriend?  Get the paperwork done!

Breastfeeding 1-2-3 talks about what both formula-feeding and breastfeeding mothers can do to safeguard infant feeding during an emergency and why breastfeeding mothers might want to keep a little expressed breast milk in the freezer.

Jul on Veggie Chic talks about the potential drama around being  vegetarian, but invited to a special meal, full of meat.  You know this kinda happened to me once (actually my ex).  Man that is a tough one.  What would you do?

A Dozen Steps Mark’s post is related to Jul’s.  What do you do as an alcoholic going to a social function (like a wedding) where drinking is just part of the fun.  Yeah good advice there.

Our new blogger on Cancer Commentary Robin (welcome Robin!) talks about dealing with all the stuff around cancer.  The information, the paperwork.  Keep a notebook!  Good one.

Kristina, always the uber-blogger at Autism Vox, gives us tips for being out in public with your autistic child.  Heck being prepared when out with any child is a good idea!

I nudged Laura at CFS Squared to look into having a disaster kit ready.  Hmm, maybe I should take my own advice.

(tick, tock … my time is running short!  Too many good posts!)

Hey you know Mom’s get sick too! Grace at Flu Patrol reminds us of this, and what to do.

Okay … out of time … gotta run … link o’ rama time.

Astronomy Buff

Genetics and Health and Hearty Life (go boss go!)

And our new blogger for Diabetes Notes

Christina …MRSA Notes

That’s it for now!

Well, about 13 hours later I’m back home and can add the post from Alzheimer’s Notes.   Mary Emma reminds us all about Living Wills (do you have one?) and safety measures you might want to take for your loved ones (ID bracelets, unplugging stoves).

I want to apologize to my friends for not doing a more thorough job this morning.  Man if you only knew about my day …

 It’s the day after Theme Day and Cory has his post ready: Baldness is not a disaster.  Beyond that this post is a “reality-check” post for people living with hair loss, I liked his call out to the Red Cross.  My mom was a disaster nurse for the Red Cross for a loooong time.  I remember in the Blizzard of ‘78 in the Boston area the National Guard or Army coming to the house to get my mom out so she could work in a shelter.  They had to walk out to the main road because the jeep couldn’t make it.  I remember her talking about getting nuclear disaster training.  Let’s not forget the Red Cross this month too.  And all of our emergency workers.  I have applied to the local volunteer fire department here on Pender to be a first responder.  Essentially first-aid person a step below a paramedic.

It’s just something I had to do.

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It’s another channel theme day here in the old SciHealth Channel.  Since it’s February the theme is, you guessed it, love.

I was thinking about looking into the biochemistry of love.  Then there is always chocolate.  Lots of good science there.  Yeah I know chocolate doesn’t have all the magic properties we once thought (hey I still feel better after a nice KitKat), although dark chocolate is now considered to be teaming with antioxidants.  Really though, as un scientific as this sounds, there are some things that should remain a little mysterious.

Attraction.  You can talk about like seeking like and pheromones, but that’s no fun.  You can link love to the desire to reproduce the species and improve the gene pool.  Boring.  Love is just something that, while it fascinates scientists, is something to just savour in life.

Like most folks my age, I’ve loved, and lost.  Girlfriends, a spouse (soon to be ex), a new partner.  No matter what those first months of “love” are exciting and mysterious.  As love matures, I think it becomes even more mysterious.  How do we stay in love?  How is it that a person becomes intertwined into our souls?

Of course this doesn’t even get into the love we feel for our children.  Something that just is.

Yep, love is something that is mysterious, but I really don’t want to study or explain it.  I like mystery.

BTW … check out the rest of the SciHealth posts on this month’s host … Lively Women.  And leave a comment … exercise for comments … hmm.

tags: SciHealth Theme Day, Love

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It wouldn’t be early in the month if there wasn’t a SciHealth Theme day now would it?  January is no different.  Yeah a little later in the month than usual, but I think we can be allowed a little break.  Regardless, our theme this month is looking back at 2006 (best posts, summary, whatever).  Angela at Breastfeeding 1-2-3 is hosting this shin dig this month, lots of my fellow SciHealth bloggers already have their posts up.  Since I like to blog in the moment, and my little battle (losing) with insomnia has me up late and sleeping in a bit, my post is coming now.

I decided to pick a few of my favourite posts (it was hard, because I like a lot of them) to highlight.  The first up is the post that still holds the record for the most comments on any one post, a discussion of gravity and the centre of the Earth.  Never would have thought that a discussion of traveling through the centre of the Earth would generate such an interesting comment flow.

In the realm of just plain cool geekiness, there is the speed of light and melting chocolate chips post and the extremely cool Sony superball commercial.  Don’t know if the superball one is my absolute favs, but I should watch it more often to just mellow out—it’s just that cool.

Finally in the realm of geekiness, science, and hot chicks (three things that are too often lacking in science news), is my final word on Mentos—Diet Coke geysers.  Why?  Because they are cool, messy, and completely safe for the kids to do (and more fun than watching bananas turn yellow).  Oh and because I get to put the picture of Keri Byron back up for old times sake.

There you have it.  2006 on Homely Scientist.  Good old geeky science fun.

Oh and if you’ve been wondering why there have been so few posts this week, I’ve been covering CES for PodTech this week on the PodTech Blog.  No, I wasn’t at CES, but I was giving everyone a bird’s eye view of what was going on.

Tags: Homely Scientist, Keri Byron, Coke geyers, 2006 review, SciHealth Theme Day

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Science and food.  Food science.  Science food.  There are so many things I could write about.  We’ve got the science of making beer, wine, and spirits (the science and study of the origins of beers is very interesting).  Then there is stuff like what happens to a turkey when you brine it (that’s a salt, sugar, water mixture that the bird is immersed in).  But what I really want to talk about is bread.  Specifically pizza.  I’ve been making pizza from scratch for as long as I can remember (yes, even as a kid).  Hey I even did the opening shifts at Pizza Hut and made all the dough for the day.  So, I think I have some experience under my belt on this one.

I’m going to give you my pizza dough recipe here.  I’ve been working on finding the best dough recipe for ten years.  I’m still tweaking, but this basic recipe is one that works great and is very versatile (it can be pizza .. thick or thin … foccacia … bread … whatever).

• 3 1/2 c white flour
• 1/4 c wheat flour
• 1 2/3 c warm water
• package of yeast (or 2 1/4 tsp of yeast from a jar … my fav)
• 2 tsp sugar
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 1/4 tsp black pepper

Now is where we get down to the science.  First we have the yeast.  Yeast is a living thing after all.  When you get it out of the jar or package it is in something like hibernation, so you have to wake it up.  This is done with warm water.  But, when the yeast wakes up, it’s hungry so that’s where the sugar comes in.  The sugar is food for the wee beasties.  Now yeasts are a little gross when it comes for food.  As they eat they give off carbon dioxide (I guess you could say yeast farts, but it isn’t really like that), but this is a good thing because that CO2 is what makes the dough rise.

The other thing we have to deal with is gluten.  Gluten (which some people can’t eat … like lactose) is make up of chains of molecules and the longer the chains, the better the bread (generally, unless you want cracker like breads or biscuits, then small gluten is better).  How, pray tell, do you get long gluten chains?  Two ways, stirring and kneading.  I used to really only employ the kneading technique, but after making some wheat bread a while back, I’ve started stirring too, so this is what I do to make my dough (lots of good science here) …

First we have warm, not hot, water.  Water that is too hot will kill the wee yeasties … this is bad.  Water goes into a big bowl, then the yeast, then the sugar.  A lot of people stop here to let the yeast "proof", that is get all happy, alive, and giving off CO2 (the top gets all foamy and smells awesome).  I used to do this too (unless I was using instant yeast, but that’s a different story), but now I add a cup or two of flour and start stirring.  Yep, it’s goopy.  Stir for about 5 mins.  Yes, 5.  You should get to a point where it is really goopy.  That’s the gluten forming nice, long chains.

Now is when you add the rest of the stuff.  Science note about salt and oil.  These ingredients hamper (or control) yeast growth.  This is why they are added with the other stuff, not during the proofing time.  I stir with my favourite wooden spoon until I can stir no more, then I knead.  This is when you might have to add more flour to get the dough to where you want it.  This dough works, and will give you different kinds of pizza crust, depending on the wetness of the dough.  That’s the balance of water to flour.  wetter doughs make for tender pizza, very dry, thin cracker, crust.  I go for something a little on the wet side, but not sticky but also not smooth.

Now we want those wee yeasties to keep doing their thing and make the dough rise.  I warm up the oven a tad and turn the light on.  The dough goes into an oiled bowl with plastic wrap on top (you can use a damp towel too … the idea is to keep moisture in).  Why warm?  Well, yeast is kind picky.  They don’t like to grow and be happy if they are cold.  Too warm and they die, too cold and they just slow down and be lazy.  This is why I use the light in the oven.  It’s just right.

Okay, the dough needs to rise for about an hour (the usual doubling thing).

At this point … a punch down, knead, and you’re ready for pizza!  The recipe makes two pizzas.  I bake on a pizza stone at 500 degrees … perfect crust every time.

So there you go.  My little bit of food science.  Yeah, maybe I’ll talk about beer later (because, as you might know, beer and bread share the basic core ingredients).

Enjoy!  And no, you don’t get my recipe for pizza sauce.

Tags: channel theme day, food science, pizza, pizza dough recipe

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If it’s the first Thursday of the month you can bet it’s channel theme day here on SciHealth.  LivelyWomen is hosting the round up today (just how do you round up bloggers … worse than herding cats, IMHO) … I think I’m in a less than pithy mood today (which I will explain in another post), but let’s have at it with the mission statement.

Mission: Make science fun, interesting, and accessible to to everyone.  Answer your questions with respect and real information.

That’s it.  I thought it as I wrote it.  I’m not a huge fan of missions statements, too much time in corporate America team building sessions (okay, let’s all break into our groups and make our mission and vision statements for why we are playing volleyball today).

The second half of this theme day (btw, we’ve managed to do this for 6 months now.  I missed one for probably bad reasons, but it’s pretty darn cool, IMHO … see herding cats) is asking for reader feedback.  Funny thing, before I was reminded of the theme for today I was going to do just that … ask what you want to read here.

So that’s the asking part.  But I think you might be wondering what the frock has been up with me lately.  Posts few and far between, didn’t even obsessively track the space tourist (no matter how cute she was supposed to be) or the work in the ISS.  Not even the Nobel prizes (most of which have gone to Americans, btw).

What’s up?  I’ve hit a blog rut.  Okay that and my SSRI isn’t working as well as it once was (yes, I’m going to make a switch soon).  Last time I checked, I’m still human (which is a shame cause I’ve always wanted to be a cyborg or an X-Man … Wolverine, of course) and part of my humanity is the inherent frailty of our beings (yes, I took ethics and philosophy in school) and my frailty has been particularly frail lately.  One part has been it’s been really hard to stay focused and post on the five blogs I’m supposed to post on.  The other stuff … well let’s just say it hasn’t been a fun summer and fall.

Okay, enough kvetching.  Time to post this sucker … just wait to the next post today …

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It’s the 7th of the month so it must but channel theme day here on Sci-Health..  Our uber-blogger Christina has the list up already.  Now being the only Sci-Health blogging who lives on the West Coast and didn’t write their post ahead of time, I’m a little behind.  I did start this last night.  I got three down before my brain called it quits. … in no particular order (read: this is the order they came out of my head), The Top 10 Things I love about science:

1. The world is an amazing place
2. Ockham’s Razor is usually true
3. Rocks are cool (thanks Dr. Bob!)
4. One word: Experiments
5. Two words: messy experiments
6. Getting to hang out in warm, interesting, fun places and getting to call it "field work"
7. My rock hammer (soft rock aka mason’s hammer).  Yes, my rock hammer is engraved with my name (it was a graduation gift from Dr. Bob).
8. Being able to criticize CSI, Bones, and other Sci heavy shows … because you know when they are totally wrong (side note: about two years ago there was an article in the Victoria, BC paper talking with the real forensics team around here.  They said it would take several lifetimes for people to gather enough random knowledge that the CSI folks just casually mention).
9. Books.  I have some really cool books.  Okay I’m the only one who thinks Process Geomorphology is cool.
10. While this is #10 … this is the best for me.  Going to the beach, checking out the tide pools and stuff with the kids and having almost as much fun as they are discovering things.  Then being able to tell the kids all the cool things about the critter they just found.

So there is my list.  I don’t think I meant for this to be a funny post at first.  I guess it’s the early morning mood.  That and I read Rob’s diabetes top ten list and I was inspired.

Tags: Sci-Health, top ten list, science fun, geekery

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