Atomic Nerds

…Two days no updates, fail, I know. Some of it is busy-ness (we’re preparing for fun guest times over the weekend, and there’s the box o’ pup), but most of it is just flat being tapped out for content and the internet either not being obliging in dropping things I have a concrete opinion about into my lap, or serving to demonstrate that ideas I thought would be good for content (“why are some proteins more allergenic than others?”) aren’t because the answer is far too long and complicated to distill into a blog post (“for reasons that require an advanced understanding of immunology and biochemistry to articulate”, it turns out).

So, the pupdate, because for one I have nothing else, and for two it’s a well-known fact that the internet loves cute fuzzy animals.

They are standing, walking, and playing, and getting steadily better and more developed at all three. Wonder Girl has taken to shouting a battle cry before pouncing on her brother, which remains more cute than annoying given she’s still not nearly good enough at sorting all four of her legs to stick the landing very well. Wonder Boy is more inclined to try and remove each of his sister’s limbs in turn; I think his strategy probably has better long-term potential, though it’s not nearly as entertaining to watch. They have both tried to get Kang involved in their rudimentary reindeer games, but she’s not interested; she is generally only in the whelping box to clean somebody or (grudgingly) feed them.

Their personalities are getting more distinct. Wonder Boy is quieter and mellower, and usually prefers to solve his problems either by waiting them through or finding some place or condition under which he can resolve the question by sleeping through it. He’s also quite ticklish- scratch his side and he thumps a hind leg, scratch his butt and he’ll shimmy. (And, often, fall over.) Sleep, food, petting, and the chance to bite his mother’s ear are his main joys in life. That’s him on the bottom up above- all things being equal he often prefers to sleep belly to the breeze.

Wonder Girl is opinionated and ambitious. She is not the slightest bit reluctant to share demands or opinions with the world in general, and is the most likely to be shouting the house down until you figure out what her issue is and help her fix it. She’s also the fastest to try new things- she was the first to try baby food when it was offered, the first to figure out the purpose of the potty pads, and if things progress as they are now will also be the first to escape the whelping box. (She spent some of this afternoon roaring furiously that such was still beyond her.) She is more likely to try and get the humans’ attention than her brother, though she usually has some aim in mind beyond just getting her bottom scritched, usually play.

They are cutting their milk teeth, so next step on the map will be the first steps at weaning. It took Wonder Girl awhile to figure out that she needed to lick the baby food off the plate rather than attempt to eat the plate itself, but once she did she was a big fan of the whole concept, and her brother picked it up quickly after he woke up. Kang will be so relieved.

They have toys, but have not yet figured out what they’re for. Hopefully this will be a next step, I suspect those sharp little baby teeth are no more comfortable for them than they are for us and Kang.

With my dignity still up for grabs* in Ambulance Driver’s Kilted to Kick Cancer drive, it’s time to pester you all for the day with more gratuitous kilt pictures from the weekend.

Being nice enough to root for his teammates by doing spotlight pieces on folks, AD was mayhaps a bit over-generous in his assessment of my beer. The only thing to do then is to make like every small-batch craftsman and up the bullshit quotient until something either breaks or works out. To do this, naturally the only thing possible was to incorporate old-world techniques to my production:

Just a tad shy of two cases of what was named “Firecrotch” by my adoptive sister’s crew for reasons still best defined as “Because.”

That’s right, just like they did it back in the old country.**
See? People have been brewing beer in kilts forever! I mean consider some of the quotes.

“I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer.”
-Homer Simpson

Wait, wrong source.

“….satisfy his spirit with beef and fowl, bread and beer”
-An old Egyptian tomb

See? The Egyptians used to wear dresses back when they were in the Impressive Tomb Building business. And that’s close enough for me!

Now if that isn’t enough to make you donate to the Prostate Cancer Foundation I don’t know what is.

Wait, yes I do. I have an unfair advantage over the other KTKC folks.

I have akita puppies.
Scientific fact: Laps with kilts are 7.62 times better for holding puppies than laps with pants.
If you didn’t donate to PCF, you should really consider donating via Livestrong. If you don’t, it could have serious repercussions for the number of puppy pictures on the internet. I mean, you should see them jaw-jousting! But if prostate cancer is still running rampant, I might be too upset to post the pictures. You know what to do.

*Remember, if I’m in 1st or 2nd place for overall donations earned, I’m liveblogging my own prostate exam.
**Albuquerque.

If you’re a regular reader here, you probably stop by Ambulance Driver’s place fairly often too. If not, you should. He’s a hell of a guy, and won’t even knock you stupid for being a bad tow-driver if you’re dragging a wrecked Dakota inexpertly. More importantly, he’s running Kilted to Kick Cancer.

The goal here is to raise money to help battle prostate and testicular cancer, and to raise awareness of same because one in six guys are going to have their male g-spot turn up trying to kill them. One in six. That’s a sure bet that someone at your weekly poker game is gonna have a serious problem crop up out back, and it’s the biggest cancer based killer behind lung cancer for men.

My own dad had, and beat, prostate cancer. Between my tattoos and LabRat’s, he likes to joke that my mom is the only one in the family without ink. Know where he got his? Targeting marks for radiation to kill the cancer. Do you want someone to drill ink into you just so they know where to aim high energy beams which are actually designed to poison and kill, just because that’s better than dying? It’s a shitty process, and I wasn’t even the one getting zapped.

So I’m in. I’ve got my kilt, and I’ve got my goal. The prize list is pretty sweet, and c’mon, you all know you’d love to read me trying to be snarky about mall ninjas and Tactical Tommy’s spending all their free time and money on ninja-school while at the same time trying to actually take one of those classes, right?

You can donate to the Prostate Cancer Foundation here or to LiveStrong here.

The down side is I’m a bit late in starting, so I’m gonna ride you slackers on this to catch up. Sitemeter tells me there’s something like 500 of you that come check out our scribblings every day, a fact which blows my mind all on its own, especially considering how many of you Sitemeter doesn’t count, but that also means all it takes is a single dollar from each of you to throw me way into the lead. Though the gun school prize is for second place. Just sayin’.

What, this isn’t good enough? You say Jay and Ambo Driver his-self are piling on extra shenanigans? Oooooooohhhh they’re gonna wear a real dress after a month in a kilt! And a slightly self-depreciating t-shirt!

Pussies.

Here’s the deal. Y’all send me to gun school or full first prize, and I’ll go full Couric on this bitch. That’s right, I will schedule and liveblog my own prostate exam. Well, not *live* live. I’m not going to put up a video stream, you weirdos. And the doctor’s office might not have wifi, but I’ll haul the laptop in and record the full blow by blow for posterity. I may be a little young to need the check regularly, but that’s kinda not the point now, is it?

Everybody got it? All right. I got my kilt:

And y’all got donation links and money. We can make this work, and we can do some good for once instead of me just wasting pixels for the hell of it.

Besides, did y’all ever think I’d get a chance to use the My Furious Genitals tag?

On the subject of marriage laws and who is permitted to marry under such and who is not, an opinion I frequently run into among my general political cohort is that government ought not be in the business of marriage at all and it represents an intolerable overlap both between state and religion and general meddling in the private lives and arrangements of citizens. I have a couple of basic reactions to this.

1. On the premise and the basics thereof, I more or less agree. I’d be perfectly happy with government less entwined with the citizenry, and fewer civil issues being wrapped up in religious issues. I’d be happy to see it happen so long as the same benefits were met*, I just think it’s never ever going to, partly because both the people invested in “protecting” marriage and the people invested in gaining it themselves are both extremely invested in marriage as a concept, an institution, and a symbol, which is one reason so many of the arguments seem to be relatively petty compared to the amount of emotional zeal invested in the issue.

2. It very often seems to go along with a suggestion that this is somehow a unique and offensive entwining of government and private affairs, or of church and state, when in fact civil and religious authority being wrapped up with marriage almost certainly predates the concept of “state”, the concept of civil and religious authorities being two different things, and possibly also the concept of “church**”. It definitely predates the idea of limited government, and that local authorities don’t properly have any business meddling in the private lives of others.

Contrary to the assertions of some culture warriors that marriage was an unchanging bedrock social institution until gay people came along, marriage has had a lot of forms and a lot of numbers of participants depending on the point in history and the society- two people or many, marriage as legal ownership of one party by the other, marriage as an economic union between two families, marriage as a transfer of property rights, or the modern form of a man and a woman merging property rights. The common thread is legal recognition of jointly held households, and of legal definitions of proper lines of inheritance.

We’re a pair-bonding species; whatever you think of the details underlying that statement, in and of itself it’s an uncontroversial statement. Some sort of civil recognition of joint households and mergings is a cultural universal, though who actually holds the power and the property rights is not and doesn’t even always go straight along the lines of sexual bonds. The recognition of jointly formed households and some sort of civil legal system to handle them is the real universal- not as much “one man, one woman, raising their own children”. The concepts of both property and paternity/maternity make the utilitarian necessity of *some* kind of civil defining of households- the primary function civil marriage has even now- probably as old as societies themselves.

From this point of view it is neither American government nor any church that screwed up the “institution of marriage”- let alone any modern interest group- but government and religion both growing over it and into it like ivy.

*I think of this as the “three a.m. in the ER” test. The value of a completely standardized and universally recognized contract that will give you an instant ability to make important decisions for your partner when he or she is too sick or hurt to do so often seems to be under-appreciated.

**Though not religion, which I strongly suspect appeared in some recognizable form as soon as we had robust abstract reasoning abilities.

Most of you know LabRat as your basic all-knowing font of biological type sciencey goodness. In a trait common to advanced-functioning robots such as her and Data from Star Trek, she sometimes feels the need to appear more human. Her ill-advised method this time is to badger me until I write a post about where the flavors in beer come from and how to identify what you’re tasting in a given bottle of suds, because clearly I have not just been getting my recipes from books in the format of “Put this in and do the usual shit to it.”

Just bear with me and we’ll try to muscle through this so she can go back to normal.

Before we can start figuring out flavor, we have to figure out what the possible sources of those flavors are. To that end, way back in the day, there was the Reinheitsgebot, or Bavarian Purity Law, which stated that the only allowable ingredients in beer were barley, hops, and water. That law is pretty stupid since it ignores the yeast that sort of has just a bit to do with turning it from cloying pine-scented sugar water into beer, but people were in general stupid back then and didn’t know about yeast or what it does. So really, not much has changed.

Ok, so water, barley, hops, and yeast. You want to know what the main flavor in your beer is? Well, by volume the dominating characteristic pretty well has to be the water. Taste whatever you’re brewing with- if it occasionally bursts into flame and tastes like the chassis of a ’49 Buick left in a field for 30 years, that’s what your beer will mostly taste of. Whatever flavor is in the water the beer is made from is the easiest to ignore. I mean, it’s water. Of course it’s in the beer. Who cares what water tastes like? Dassani, Arrowhead, et al thank you for your interest in that topic.

After the water, the next largest contribution would be, essentially, sugar. Malted barley is barley grains that have been allowed to start the process of germinating/growing in order to take advantage of the plant converting complicated starches in the grain into simpler sugars, and when the beer is made, those sugars are extracted either through a process that basically makes grain-tea (steep ~15lbs of various grains at 155F for an eternity or two, then collect the steep water), or by paying someone else to get all those sugars out and concentrate them into malt extract, either dry or liquid.

Extract is by far the easier to work with, and more consistent. Since it’s basically sugar, that’s where you get any sweetness in your beer’s flavor profile. Let us all now thank LabRat for badgering me into telling everybody that sugar makes things sweet. None of us could’ve seen that one coming, Counselor Troi! With extracts, there are various levels of darkness (light extract, amber extract, dark extract, etc) and the darker one goes, the more earthy and roast-y the malt flavors tend to be. Any grains used can contribute to this effect too, bringing flavors like chocolate or coffee or nuttiness into the mix. If words like “bright” or “crisp” spring to mind trying to describe a flavor, you’re not talking about something brought in by the malt. Bread-like flavors? Gosh, working with grain where on earth could those have come from? Wheat and rice are used in some recipes to shake things up from all-barley all the time, and they bring flavors to beer pretty well in line with the flavors they bring to anything else. Adding some rice won’t transform your beer into sake (well, if you go crazy overboard you can basically just make the sake, same as beer more or less), but it will give it a bit of the same sort of tang. If you really want to get into this for not a lot of cash, visit a beer making supply store, and just get a quarter pound or so of as many types of grains as they have that catch your eye, and have them crushed. Take them home, and do each one up like you’re trying to make oatmeal basically, and whatever that tastes like… well, that’s how it’d go into beer. You can probably get 10-15 types of grain to try for less than $20.

You know what’s really boring? Beer without hops. Straight malt liquor. Go dump that 40 and we’ll move on to where you will find words like bright and crisp in the description of the flavor. Hops are a rhizome, Humulus Lupus, that is for trivia’s sake very remotely related to weed. It’s a vine that produces little pine-cone lookin’ things like this:

What happens here is you boil those little buggers (or you get them processed into a form that looks like hamster food) and that moves alpha acids and oils from them into your beer. Those particular hops taste of lemons and grass, but the category overall ranges from pine, to citrus, to pepper, to fruit. Covering what every particular type of hops brings to beer flavors is a work more suited to something book-length, but there are some rough guides floating around without too much work at google. This one covers a good whack of the more commonly used hops in homebrewing. Some of the oils and acids are more volatile than others, and they’re used to bring beer much of its aroma. Since smell is so tied up with taste, the flavors translate pretty directly, you’re just tasting it through a different sensor for a bit before those volatiles finish vaporizing and wafting away. This is why a freshly opened beer is so much better than one that’s been sitting out for a while. The lack of carbonization in the old beer is related, since all that foamy fizz is carrying more of that hops addition up your nose in the fresh.

The last contributor, and by far the trickiest to nail down, is the yeast. There are as many strains of yeast that can produce beer practically as there are people who like beer. What flavor they contribute ranges even more widely than the contributions of hops, because the temperature at which the yeast does its work fermenting the wort (the cloying sugar water mentioned before) affects what byproducts the yeast produces other than alcohol and carbon dioxide. These are the strains offered just in one format from just one producer, and while I can’t take a sip and say “Why yes, this was made with the Belgian Saison strain!” the differences range from subtle to “holy shit.”

To over-simplify, there are two basic types of yeast, top fermenting, a.k.a. ale yeasts, and bottom fermenting lager yeasts. The difference is exactly what it says on the label. Using an ale yeast, if you do your fermenting in a glass container letting you see the action, you will see a foamy raft floating on top of the concoction. Using a lager yeast, there’ll be a pile-up at the bottom of the jug. From there, it breaks down basically into what you’re feeding your yeast and the temperature you’re working them at. Alcohol and carbon dioxide are obviously the main products, but it’s the other byproducts that give different strains their flavor profiles. Esters are the most common, and arguably important, compound produced, and they lend themselves to descriptions such as fruity. They’re also fairly volatile and affect the aroma quite a bit. Diacetyl and 2,3-Pentanedione ketones chip in, and mostly affect the difference in how a “new” beer feels in your mouth vs. an older, aged beer (not the stale one sitting out from the hops example). Think buttery mouthfeel when you think of those compounds. Fusel alcohols come in from the yeast, and those aren’t necessarily good things. Too high a concentration of them leads to descriptions like “solvent.” Guess why. Smaller doses can help open up the palate, but it still goes back to what type of yeast you have, and what you fed it. Some people think more visually, so maybe this’ll help:

(Courtesy of Salamander via Alabev)
Alternately:

Again, a thorough and fully correct examination of how yeast affects beer flavor is a book-length subject better left to someone who didn’t just barely squeak through chemistry because he had a copy of “Alice in Quantumland” hidden behind his textbook. Atoms are easy. Fuck molecules.

And now, having spent in excess of 1400 words vaguely waving my hands about a subject described better and at greater length and clarity by many people who are not me, I can confidently extend my middle finger to LabRat’s latest attempt to look slightly less awesome, secure in the knowledge that I have muddied the waters for all. And now I’m going to drink a beer.

Us: We’re OK. Still grieving. Eight pounds of cat can leave a huge, huge void, as most of you already know. We very much appreciate the sympathy even if we haven’t said much in return.

Pups: Growing like weeds and driving their mother crazy; I just ordered some sort of nipple soothing product endorsed by the La Leche League because, for just two pups, they are beating up her belly pretty good and I think it’s turning her off nursing. In any case she cannot *wait* for weaning and I have the suspicion will mostly turn them over to the rest of the family as that happens. Here, have a pic.

Damp towels are apparently completely essential to their whelping box happiness. (Thanks for the suggestion, Jess.)

- Further content: Upcoming! We’ve just been busy, in addition to being not in a fantastic mood for obvious reasons. We are gearing up for our fall blogger Bacchanalia, brewing lots of beer, having visitors, and arranging for puppysitting. Among those posts planned where the time’s just not been there: Anatomy of a Beer.

- Current events: Our hearts go out to those in Bastrop Texas, who are living through what we escaped when a combination of good fortune and really dedicated firefighters managed to head off Las Conchas before Los Alamos burned, again. Wildfire can be a terrifying and uncontrollable thing, and Texas is really taking this year’s drought in the teeth.

It was osteosarcoma under the infection after all. He was in a lot of pain and there was absolutely nothing we could do to fix it, and the fight was ebbing out of him, so we have just returned from euthanizing my oldest friend.

Rest in peace, my little warrior. Better yet, find Valhalla. You belong there.

*Comments re-opened. We appreciate the sympathy, but we needed a bit of time. - Stingray