Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Jon Singer's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, July 11th, 2009
3:25 pm	Pass. Fail. (See also, Hami-gua.) So: I calculated an average of the two oilspot glazes, mixed a bucket of the stuff, and put too much water in it. (Sigh. I will let it settle for a while and then decant the excess.) I dipped a test tile and a small vase, and fired them last night, along with some other glaze tests that we can maybe get into later if they become interesting enough after I attempt to tweak them into submission. Here is the vase, slightly overexposed (my apologies). Despite the fact that there is really enough glaze only near the top, it is entirely okay by me... ...Well, almost entirely. Here’s the bottom: Grrrr. We hates it, we does. Still, the crack does not go all the way through, and the vase holds water. We Should Be Thankful For Small Favors. (...But We Are Not Very. Grrr.) [Just by the bye, in case anybody actually cares: “H” stands for Helios Porcelain; “JS” with 3 dots is me (am I slightly dotty? I guess maybe I am); and the date is the year and month during which I trimmed the footring. I can’t date them by when I expect to fire them, because it can be a while before I figure out the right glaze for a particular piece. This one, frex, was trimmed in March, and didn’t get fired until July.] In case you want a better look at the spots, here is a close-up. I really like the variegation in color. The long and short of it is that my “average”, which is tweaked to use only one type of Kaolin (one of the original versions used this type, the other used a different type), then normalized so that none of the amounts would be tighter than 1/10%, and finally normalized again (a gram here, a gram there, pretty soon you’re talking real ...uhhh, sorry; wrong quotation) to make it easy to mix 3 kg, works in a firing that is more or less equivalent to the firing I put the original test tile through. To put that a different way, this glaze is very pleasantly noncritical. _..··-^vWv^-··.._..··-^vWv^-··.._..··-^vWv^-··.._ I have previously mentioned the Hami melon of western China, and the fact that travel along the Silk Road seems to have guaranteed that the Persians would become aware of it. I went back to the Persian market the other day, and found a large bin of the things. Oddly, there were two distinct types. These: ...were reported to have come in last week, and some that were netted about like a cantaloupe and were even larger (those tiles are 8&½" square!) came in this week. I acquired only this one, and cannot provide a photo of the larger size, but the shape was about the same. I suspect that these are hybrids of some sort, and that there is more than one strain. Assuming that this one is like what I remember from my trip (I haven’t opened it yet) I will save seeds, and we’ll see what we get next year. If not, I will run back and buy one of the others. (Argh. Even at a reasonable per-pound price, they are not exactly cheap.) Cheers — jon (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
11:44 am	Oilspot Update -- As I mentioned in the previous posting, one of the things I would like to have is an oilspot glaze that makes bright, distinct silver spots. This is certainly possible, but it appears to be nontrivial to achieve if you don’t want to add a quantity of cobalt to your recipe. (Been there, done that, like it fairly well; but I want something different this time.) I thought about some things I’ve seen, including a photo of a teabowl that was reported to have been reduced accidentally. It is warped and slumped, and very silvery. This led me to conjecture that it might be useful to reduce the glaze late in the firing, after it has had a chance to form spots. (Early reduction tends to prevent the spots from forming.) The tile in this photo (which is covered with a 50-50 mixture of the two glazes from the previous posting) was reduced for a while, starting when the temperature in the kiln reached 1225° Celsius; and again for a few minutes shortly before the end of the firing, with the temperature a little above 1290: The stripe down the middle is a wash that I often use on high-iron glazes that I fire in reduction. I did not expect it to do anything exciting in a largely oxidizing firing, but I wanted to be entirely certain. The spots, while not silver in color, are significantly more distinct and a lot more reflective than the spots I got in the electric kiln, and they are sweetly variegated in color. In addition, the glaze smoothed out much better in this firing. This one is decidedly a keeper, and I will be making up a bucket of it. Cheers — jon (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
8:25 pm	Glazes, mostly... I continue to mess with glazes (in the broad sense), and I am currently pursuing at least 5 tracks: Low-melting glass (more about this in a later posting). Lead-free china paint. Two paths toward the Black Ding glaze, improving on my earlier copy. Aventurine. Oilspots. China Paint I have a couple friends who are china painters. Seems that china paint (which is essentially the lowest-melting ceramic glaze) was classically made with lots of lead oxide, which melts nicely at low temperatures. Also seems that lead has to go away, because everybody is kinda crazy on the subject. There are now some supposedly leadless china paints, but according to Paul Lewing, some lead shows up when those paints are tested. I could wonder about this; perhaps the tests are showing Bi as Pb? They shouldn’t, but that may not prevent them from doing so. I am working up some recipes that are seriously unlikely to contain any lead, and we’ll see how far I get. I am not a china painter, btw, and my test objects are very different from real china painting. Here is a recent one, painted onto an ordinary wall-tile that has little speckles, so I can see whether the plain clear version really is transparent (it isn’t, and I will have to reformulate it to obtain more complete melting) — Black Ding Ware I am reformulating my version of the Black Ding glaze, bringing it more closely into line with the original, and having the expectable problem: the Song dynasty folks fired their wares for several days; I fire mine for a few hours. My recent versions melt in my kiln; but they don’t have enough time to smooth out properly, and they come out of the firing with dimpled surface texture. I am messing with the formulation in order to make the melt more fluid. There are several possible approaches to this, and I will post about progress from time to time if and as there is any. The other side of this particular project is that I am also attempting to approximate or imitate the original ingredients. It appears likely that the Song potters made these glazes from dirt and ashes and maybe some rust. The dirt (which I think is described as “Glaze Earth” when it is used in ceramics) is decayed Loessic soil that seems to have blown in off the Taklamakan Desert a few millions of years ago, and blankets a huge area of northern China; in some places it is hundreds of meters deep. My first shot at imitating it is a fairly decent glaze all by itself, so I am feeling encouraged: The broad stripe down the middle is a mixture of Rutile and Gerstley Borate, which tells me that this tile was fired to cone 10 in reduction, in my little gas kiln. The narrow stripe is iron oxide. I think my next step is to try adding small amounts of wood ash, to see what happens. It is, I will admit, peevish-making that it takes me at least 10 ingredients to make a mediocre imitation of something the Chinese potters could (and still can) just dig up out of the ground, make into a slurry, and use. Sigh. Aventurine Aventurines (see the Lancastrian vase on this page if it is still there, or this piece by Lasse Östman) are crystal glazes, and they want the kind of firing cycle that gives the crystals a chance to grow. This involves (among other things) stalling the kiln for a while during cooling, at some appropriate temperature. Sometimes there are several such “holds”. For certain crystal types it gets even more complicated, but let’s not go there just now. A crystal firing is very different from my usual cycle, which involves a fairly long hold at peak temperature and no pause at all during cooldown. It is no surprise that I do not obtain great results from aventurine tests. I can, though, get some sense of the character of an aventurine test, and eventually I will get something that looks really promising, at which point I may ask a friend to put a test tile through a proper crystal firing. I fired two test aventurines last night. One of them did approximately what I expected it to, and would probably be fairly decent if I put it through the right kind of firing, but does not appear to be in any way exceptional. The other is quite possibly the most astonishing failure I have experienced in 13 years of glaze development. I was originally going to call this “DragonPox”, but have been gently guided in a different and more temperate direction; it currently stands as “Chocolate Toad”. (I suppose I can use whichever name is appropriate for a particular piece.) Either way it is definitely a keeper, and will probably end up on a few delicately distressing sculptural items. Oilspots Oilspot glazes have been around for quite a long time; they are high-iron formulations, generally fired in oxidation, so they are nicely adapted to electric kilns. The process by which the spots form is reasonably well understood, but the description is sufficiently geeky-tweaky and protracted that I would prefer not to go into it here; if you are interested, please send email. There seems, nowadays, to be a fashion for large spots, which are associated with very thick applications of glaze. I don’t really like that look, so I am working on glazes that are applied in ordinary thickness and develop small-to-medium-size spots, similar to the ones I’ve seen on occasional Song dynasty pieces (for example, this one). My first test glaze fired out the wrong color but was otherwise pleasant, and went from version 0.1 to version 1.0 immediately when I took this test bowl out of the kiln and got a good look at it: (I only mixed up 100 grams of the test glaze, so I had to paint it onto the bowl with a brush. The thickness, needless to say, was somewhat uneven.) Because it is not what I was going for, the mere fact that it is a keeper did not stop me from continuing development. Version 0.2 did not fully melt, and I reformulated it; last night I fired tests of versions 0.3 (right side) and 0.4 (left side): What I think I want is probably about 90% v0.4 and 10% v0.3, applied fairly thinly. I think I will go ahead and mix up a large enough batch to dip things in, as there is a good chance I can make minor corrections on the fly if it becomes necessary. Once I get this type under control, the next step is to get spots that are more pronounced and are either silvery, like these, or perhaps iridescent if I can engineer that. Thinking about it... The one orchid I own, which I think is Neofinetia falcata ‘Tama Kongo’, is once again putting out flower buds. (The flowers are fragrant, mostly in the evening.) It does this every year now, despite the fact that I have no clue how to take care of it and no idea if/when it should be repotted or divided or whatever you do with these things. This plant has survived multiple frosts, and is either remarkably hardy or astonishingly stubborn. Maybe both. I took that with the camera in my phone; apologies for the image quality. Cheers — jon (28 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
12:00 pm	Digital Cameras: I think Sony screwed up. The reason why I was looking at digital camera reviews (see previous posting) is that my “car camera” is trashed. It was trashed before it went into the car (it’s the Canon G3 that was mashed by EMP from the big nitrogen laser I built a couple years back), and in fact that is why it went into the car; but I would like to have something half-decent, in case I happen to encounter something interesting or important and I don’t have time to take 3 or 4 shots of it in order to be sure of getting one good one. I have become rather tired of “Bad camera, no donut!” images, even though they can occasionally be amusing: .-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-. (Dunno what famous abstract artist to attribute this to, but I suspect that there is one.) .-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-. So, I went looking for possible cameras on eBay, and I went looking at reviews to find out whether the things I saw were any good. When I got to the Sample Photos pages, I kept seeing obvious noise and JPEG compression artifacts even when the review said that the photos were great, so I finally went back into the archives and dragged out the review of my good camera, a Sony DSC-R1. This machine was issued around 2005, and had already been discontinued by the time I bought it (used, on eBay). There were several reasons why I chose it, despite the fact that one of the comparable Canon SLRs had slightly better dynamic range and the fact that it doesn’t perform well at high ISO speeds (which, in any case, I refrain from using); one of them was reviewers’ comments on the order of “the lens alone is worth the entire price of the camera.” Sure enough, when I compare test photos from the DSC-R1 against test photos from recent cameras, what I find is that really great glass and a honking big sensor will get you through hard times better than an okay lens and a tiny sensor with zillions of tiny pixels, even if the lens has insane zoom capability. The DSC-R1, mind you, is a 10.3-Mp camera; but the sensor in it is 21.5 x 14.4 mm, gigantic compared with the sensors in non-SLR digital cameras. (In fact, it is larger than the sensor in the Olympus E-30 SLR.) The zoom, however, is only 5X, nothing like what you can get today. Part of the reason for this is the size of the sensor: you need a very good lens to get a decent image over that large an area, and it is difficult to achieve extreme zoom while maintaining the image quality. The pricepoint of the DSC-R1 was high ($1000 or so), and must have contributed to its demise. The poor thing got squashed between SLRs with decreasing prices and P&S cameras with improving performance. Unfortunately, the performance of the Point-&-Shoot devices didn’t improve enough, and decent SLRs are still fairly pricy, especially as you begin to add lenses to your collection. I wish Sony had brought out a DSC-R2, with image stabilization and one or two other minor tweaks. Instead, they discontinued the DSC-R1. Too bad; the R2 would have been an outstanding machine. (If you actually want to read a comprehensive review, try this one.) .-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-. Meanwhile, I continue my search for a reasonably decent car camera. I’ve about given up on the idea of a machine with RAW mode, which is sad, but they generally seem to be going for more money than I can spare for this. If I’m lucky, perhaps I’ll find something that has image stabilization. Cheers — jon (36 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
5:15 pm	Great Typos of Our Time, #537 From a review on Steve’s Digicams, a site I consult from time to time: “Playing the staring role on the FZ50 is an amazing Leica DC Vario-Elmarit 12x optical zoom lens....” I guess they got that one right... after a fashion. Cheers — jon (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
1:59 am	Bliss Courtesy my friend Josh, who handed me a ticket yesterday, I was privileged to attend a fortepiano concert at the Library of Congress this evening. The concert was introduced by Dr. Frank Bär, who gave a brief but very informative lecture, largely concerning pianofortes and their evolution. The performer, Ludwig Sémerjian, also spoke: before playing each piece he related the piece, the instruments that were available to its composer at the time it was written, and how those instruments shaped the music. (I wish I could detail this here, but I don’t have time, and I probably don’t remember it clearly enough to do it justice. Just as a brief gloss, if I’m remembering this correctly, the first concerto he played was written when Mozart had access to an instrument that was about 5 octaves wide, with sharp attack, a fairly metallic sound, and very little sustain; these instruments did not have triple strings in the treble, and it was easy for the bass to overpower the higher notes, so composers tended to write in a slightly restricted range. By the time Mozart wrote the second piece in the concert, about 2 years later, he had an instrument that I think was perhaps as wide as 6 octaves, with triple strings on its upper notes, a less-metallic sound, and longer sustain.) Please don’t take that as gospel, though, as my recollection of the words is still somewhat eclipsed by the music... I don’t really have the words to say how astonishing this performance was. Hearing Ludwig Sémerjian’s profound connection to and understanding of the music, while watching his hands, from less than twenty feet away, was nothing short of amazing. I’m not even a Mozart fan, and I am quite a bit more likely to be found listening to Handel than to Haydn, but it didn’t matter: this was just entrancing. They didn’t allow recording or photography during the performance, and I was too blown away to think of asking whether I could take pictures of it with my phone afterward; but there is a photo of one very much like it at the Website of R. J. Regier, its maker. It has pairs of strings for the lowest 8 (or so) notes, triples for the rest. The page about it has more information. I do not yet know whether audio-only recordings can capture a good fraction of what I heard and saw this evening, but I will assuredly be acquiring some CDs to try to find out. At the very least, I would guess that his recordings are likely to be superb. Best — j (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
10:32 am	Telephone EMF "data" (I use that term loosely) -- I just got a microwave leak detector for a project (more about that if and when I get anywhere with it; should be fun if it works), and because I’ve been hearing things about the emissions from telephones, I decided to use it to take a look at mine. The meter is rated to read from 0.01 to 9.99 mW/cm2, warns you if the level exceeds 5.00 (which they say is the danger threshold; frankly, I find it difficult to believe that there is a hard shelf at some specific number), and is broadband enough that they specifically state that it can be used to check “cell phones”. [We use different technology now, and I’m not sure there is even a cellular network in the US at this time.] A Mild Caution: This report is not, let me assure you, the least bit scientific. For one thing, I have not attempted to calibrate the meter. (The vendor claims that it never needs calibration, though there is a button that zeros it out if you need to.) For another, I did not take measurements from large numbers of positions around the phone, and I specifically did not take measurements from the “Put Your Brain Here” position. For a third, I am only going to show you 3 of the measurements I did succeed in taking; I actually got 5 or 6 photos, and I saw lots more numbers that I didn’t manage to photograph because they went by very rapidly. That said, here’s what I found. Most of the time, particularly between calls, the reading was quite low — between 0 and 0.15 or so. This is typical: When I made calls, however, it generally increased. Sometimes not by all that much, sometimes fairly considerably. It fluctuated quite a bit, so I can’t give you a firm sense of the levels, but I can say that readings like this were not particularly unusual: On three occasions, however (I think these may have been times when it was having trouble trying to connect), the meter flashed its red light and made its little warning sound. I saw a reading of more than 6 at one point, and I also saw this, which I was lucky enough to capture: Granted, it doesn’t do that very often; and it never does it for very long. Still, it’s not necessarily what I want to have right next to my head. I think I will be making somewhat more use of my hands-free. (2450 MHz is not likely to propagate any distance along a little wire.) Cheers — jon (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 17th, 2009
1:27 am	Viable for Vigilant Vegans and Valiant Vegetarians... ...Maybe Mediocre for Militant Meat Maniacs. (They get theirs under “K”, below.) [Various other items as well, including a New Frontier (for me, anyway) in Mud, which is at the end of this post.] The other day I went to the store and got a nice big sheaf of Swiss chard, the kind with the really broad white rib down the middle of the leaf. (I like those types better than any of the others, but of course in the final analysis it’s up to you. I’m sure that Lacinato or regular kale would also work just fine, or turnip greens, or mustard greens, or tatsoi, or...) I chopped the chard fairly finely, sautéed it in EVOO, and when it was almost done I stirred in a quantity of babaghannouj (several Tbs), 2 or 3 Tbs of miso, and a cup or two of cooked rice. This did not require any other ingredients; the baba took care of things like lemon juice and garlic, and the miso took care of salt. (I might consider adding more lemon juice, maybe, if I were in that sort of mood.) You can substitute any number of things for the baba if it isn’t something you like, or perhaps just leave it out entirely. As to the miso, I used some outstanding 3-year barley stuff from South River; I’ve been buying their 3-year miso with brown rice for some time, and that would work just as well. Both of these are deep and rich, and I am really happy with them. -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- File under Laser Madness: I am working on something that may eventually become interesting if I can actually get anywhere with it. This is not novel, but by the same token it isn’t particularly common: What you are seeing is not frequency doubling. Rather, it is fluorescence by direct upconversion: two IR photons in from a laser that is below the bottom of the photo, focused by the lens that you can see part of; some lossage in the form of heat; one green photon out. This transition has been lased in several hosts; but it usually doesn’t work at room temperature, and I expect to be obliged to cool my samples to liquid-nitrogen temperature, if they will consent to lase at all. (We Shall See What We Shall See. I’m currently waiting for samples that I can use to build a test rig.) -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- Kurma Komix Kontinued This time, I mixed some mango pulp (the bottled stuff, rather liquidy) into the unsweetened soy yogurt along with the spices, which included allspice this time in honor of the mango, and a bit of salt. Marinated three chicken thighs in it, cooked them as usual, and served the resulting kurma with sautéed kale. This works pretty well; the mango adds a slightly different tang. -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- Brief NCECA Redux I attended the annual conference of the National Center on Education for the Ceramic Arts last week, in Phoenix. It was, as usual, terrific. This year, the Glaze Doctors and the Clay Doctors were the same folks: John Neely, Janet deBoos, Bill Carty, and Pete Pinnell. They didn’t bother with speeches after the brief introductions from Pete, just threw it open and took questions for the full hour and a half, both days. The questions were rich and varied, the people on the panel are all highly expert and extremely articulate. It was both interesting and enlightening to watch and listen to them thinking things through. I’m a member of a mailinglist called Clayart, which has a room at the conference every year, in which its members can hang out; this year there were two special things: AMOCA had a large exhibit, and Mel Jacobson (the “Mayor” of Clayart) organized some [extremely informal] tea ceremonies, which were performed by Reiko-san from the Urasenke school in Los Angeles, with two helpers from the Phoenix area. Even an informal tea ceremony is a very different headspace from what we typically encounter at a major professional conference, even a mud conference, and I was very happy to have the opportunity to participate. Besides, I like matcha. -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- Mud I have been asked to make a few confit pots. This is something of a challenge, as confit pots are far larger than anything I have previously thrown. (There are various images on the Web, if you are curious.) Most people seem to think that it’s a lot harder to throw porcelain than stoneware. In fact, many studios won’t even permit newbies to use porcelain. IMHO, this is mostly horsepucky; modern throwing porcelains are nearly as easy to throw as ordinary stoneware, and they feel a lot nicer on your hands. They also take glazes really sweetly. (There may be some justification for a few studios that don’t want students to use porcelain: if you are recycling your clay, and you want the composition to be uniform so that people can have a reasonable idea of what the studio glazes should look like on their pots, it is probably a good idea to have only one clay body in use. OTOH, however, at least according the the folks I’ve asked about it, up to about 25% porcelain mixed into stoneware generally doesn’t seem to change it very much.) But. So. Anyway: confit pots. I threw the parts of a first one today, using an entire bag of Helios porcelain. Here they are as thrown, and then as assembled, with the joint ribbed smooth on the outside and the top batt removed...             I’m pleased, but of course it remains to be seen whether I can finish shaping this without screwing it up. (Centering 12 or 13 lbs of clay is not easy, and I was maybe not as vigilant as I should have been when I made the upper section, so it is not as nicely centered as I’d like.) My glazing plan, if anyone is curious and assuming I get that far, is to pour my regular clear on the inside (unless I change my mind and do something silly), and dip the outside into my regular Rutile Blue. It’s impossible to avoid a few drips, but they will just run down the side and make it look a bit more funky, the way the real ones do. Cheers — jon (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
8:51 pm	...Into Which I Put Too Much Kimmel. Far too much kimmel: must have been the better part of a Tablespoon in there, not that I mind. Besides, that’s just me. You could easily leave it out. But I should maybe start at the beginning, or perhaps even before the beginning, some time in the late 19th century: at one point or another when my father’s father was a little kid in Przemyśl, he got sick. One guesses that it was what we might now refer to as “gut ’flu”, or maybe he just ate too many unripe plums; I don’t know — I never did get the full story. Kimmel soup being a sovereign remedy for a bad tummy in those parts, they seem to have fed him a quantity of it. This, uhh, didn’t help. In fact, he was so sick that for the rest of his life he hated the stuff with an absolute and unyielding passion. When we went to the deli to get rye bread, during my childhood, we had to get one loaf with seeds for us, and half a loaf without seeds for him. Later, probably some time around 1971, during a phonecall, I told my Grandma that I was making rye bread; she asked me if it was with seeds or not. (This was after she asked me why the hell I would do such a thing, but that’s a different story.) I asked her not to breathe a word of this to Grampa, and told her that I had used a rather large amount of kimmel because I really like it. She immediately turned from the phone and told him, whereupon I could hear him in the background making retching noises to indicate the depth of his feelings in the matter. He was in his early eighties at the time, assuming I have the year about right. [Those of you who have never encountered a Jewish deli rye bread may not be aware that such breads are filled with and also liberally anointed with caraway, which is kümmel in German and kimmel (or maybe kiml — transliteration is nonlinear and nontrivial) in Yiddish.] -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- At this point we come to the beginning, which was a frozen duck breast in my freezer. It sat there, stalwartly awaiting the call to action, for some time. Then, last Sunday, I found some unsweetened dried sour cherries at the Takoma Park/Silver Spring Co-op. Well, sez I, I b’lieve I know what to do with these. This evening I chopped up several Tbs of the cherries and mixed the bits into a like amount of brewed black tea. I used decaf because it is the evening, and I do not care to stay up until 4 or 5 AM; and I used Bigelow’s Constant Comment® because I had made a cup earlier and had not quite finished it. I probably would have used it anyway, though, as the flavor is highly compatible. To this starting set I added a large sprinkle of Summer Savory (we’ve already been through that saga), a bit of regular cinnamon, a bit of Sri Lanka cinnamon, a moderate sprinkle of marjoram, and a little salt. When I heated this proto-marinade in the microwave oven the cherries proceeded to sop up all of the tea, so I added some chicken stock. (I am currently aware of one [1] brand of chicken broth that contains neither yeast nor onions, and one [1] brand of stock likewise.) I sliced up the duck and put it in the marinade, ...and then I remembered the kimmel. I had replenished my stock at the Co-op, and there it was, in its new home, waiting for me to do something pleasant with it... so I put far too much of it through the burr mill, and mixed it into the marinade. After it sat for a while I put the duck into the pan, got it fairly well along, and then added the marinade to form a sauce for it and finish cooking it. -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- Please note: if I were not allergic to various things I would have sautéed garlic and shallots in the pan before I put the duck in, and I would have put some kind of pleasant red wine or a Tokaji Szamorodni Száraz [dry] into the sauce; but although I can eat little bits of garlic now and then without ill effect, and although my onion allergy appears to be at low ebb just now, I do not have those things here. As to wine, my yeast allergy is not at low ebb, and I do not need to spend the next day or two lying in bed moaning, thankew. OTOH, that shouldn’t prevent anyone else from putting those things in. I should think they’d be very welcome. If you don’t have or don’t like unsweetened sour cherries you could use sweetened ones, Morello cherries if you can find them, dried apricots, or for that matter whatever strikes your fancy. If you don’t want it quite so tart and tangy you could maybe try fresh pears, or guava, or ripe jakfruit. (Even if the jakfruit is only available frozen, that should be very pleasant.) Speaking of apricots, later in the year I will endeavor to make this dish with ripe fresh ume, assuming that my friend with the tree gets any: last year, the flowers were frozen. (I have said this before, and I will happily say it again: it is totally ridiculous to describe ume as a Japanese “plum”. Plums are not fuzzy, plums are not habitually bright yellow-orange, and plums do not taste like apricots. I have tasted ripe ume, and they ain’t plums, nohow. Just as Malus sylvestris is a crab-apple,Prunus mume is a crab-apricot.) Ahem. I will certainly be making this dish again, one way or the other, because my dinner vanished so quickly I thought somebody else was helping me eat it. Inasmuch as there is nobody else here, that seems unlikely; nonetheless, it was gone much too soon, and I want more. Cheers — jon (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
1:46 am	New nitrogen laser: a definite yes. Also an answer. The nitrogen laser I’ve been building is now more or less complete. I say more or less because I am using a preliminary version of some of the high-voltage circuitry, including a switch that can handle only up to 20,000 Volts. Here is the discharge, which is quite clean: Although you can see vague indications of streamers, there are no really bright ones; and there are no bright arcs or sparks except at the very ends of the electrodes. (The brightness at the right edge of the image is from such a spark. They don’t appear to be interfering with lasing, so for the moment, at least, I am ignoring them.) The obstructions are the small capacitors that power the discharge channel, and part of the sheet of brass shim stock that connects them to the switch and to one of the electrodes. There are 20 of the small capacitors in this laser. They are, in turn, fed by a considerably larger capacitor that is off to the left, outside the photo. Here’s what happens when I focus the beam (which is ultraviolet, and thus invisible) onto the front of a crude homebrew cuvette into which I have put a solution of a dye that lases a deep indigo color: The dye is lasing happily in that photo; here is what the output looks like when it reaches a piece of paper that is about a foot away: There are definitely some issues with this laser. For one thing, I am seeing a certain amount of weirdness with the switch. Sometimes the laser runs, and sometimes it just makes a small “tik” sound; I am not entirely sure why, but I suspect that the switch I’m using, a commercial spark gap, is nearing the end of its usable lifetime. On the other hand, the performance is highly acceptable, especially considering the relatively low operating voltage. I designed this laser to run at 30-35 kV, though, and I am thinking about changing out the switch so I can bring it up to that level. Because the stored energy scales with the square of the applied voltage, charging the main storage capacitor up to 30 kV instead of 20 will give me more than twice as much stored energy. There is, however, only one real way to find out whether the output will increase similarly, and that’s to try it. -._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.- Here is one of the items from last time: Here is what it looks like when you cook it (which doesn’t change the color much) and cut it open: Like most organic materials, it is modestly fluorescent: (“Figure 37: We understood this organ to be the creature’s liver. The surface or rind is of a beige color similar to those of several other organs, and is slightly scarred. The cortex, however, shown in this Figure, is quite dark, and is moreover highly fibrous. A single great vessel enters at the anterior end, and numerous though much smaller vessels exit, primarily from the inferior aspect.”) This is almost certainly the purple Okinawan sweet potato. I have eaten two of them so far, and I can tell you from personal experience that they taste very nice. I have not yet found the taxonomic name for it, which I would otherwise give. Do not mistake this item, btw, for ube or ubi, the purple Filipino yam. That’s a whole ’nother story, Dioscorea alata. (Spuds that are not members of Dioscorea are not, properly speaking, yams, though that word is used in common parlance to describe many of them.) Cheers — jon (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
2:07 am	Textural Pleasantry, with update (more photos) -- Yesterday evening and again this evening I found some interesting things at one of the local supermarkets. It’s a large East Asian market, and because of the composition of the local population it also has a big Latino section and some Indian things. I saw frozen whole guanabana [soursop] last night, first time I ever laid eyes on one. Not fresh, but hey, can’t expect to have have everything. They did have fresh persimmons from Israel; pomelos from California and from Florida, the two types being rather different in form; and sweet limes, something you just don’t encounter every day. They are maybe the size of a smallish orange, and they look about like this: I bought one, in hopes that it would prove to be like the other one I tasted, some years ago, rather than the utterly boring sweet lemons I’ve encountered since. (The poor thing seems to have been frosted while it was ripening, which fairly thoroughly wrecked it, but it did have at least some flavor, and parts of the peel are quite brightly fluorescent. I bought another one tonight, hoping that it may not have been frozen; we’ll see.) While I was wandering about the produce department I encountered some visual textures that I thought were nifty, and I photographed several. Not that any of these is horrendously exotic, but if you can unhesitatingly identify all ten of them (the second and third images are of the same item) you are quite certainly some kind of crazed foodie. (You are probably some kind of foodie even if you can’t; otherwise, why would you bother to try?) (Please note, btw: if you want to send a guess, it would be best to email it to me so you don’t muddy the waters for others. You will find my email address on my userinfo page here, and at the bottom of almost every page at Joss Research. Several folks commented and guessed before I added that note; I have screened those responses, so it should probably be safe to look at comments, provided any of them are visible, even if you want to play with identification.)                                                                                 (I have camouflaged the filenames a bit so they won’t instantly give away the identities of the items; it’s safe to click the little images if you want to see larger versions. The ones I took with the iPhone are 600x800 px, and the ones I took with the Canon G6 are 958x1280 px.) There were also some items that should be a bit more familiar, though I confess that I would have trouble myself with the third of these:                                 The lighting was provided by mercury arc lamps, and even though they were the kind with a phosphor that improves the CRI (“Color Rendering Index”), I still had to tweak most of yesterday’s photos slightly to get them to look right. Couldn’t do it in the camera last night, because the only camera I had with me was the one in my telephone. (I took tonight’s photos with the flash on the Canon, and only made small adjustments to the white balance.) I should also apologize for the slight fuzziness in some areas. Cheers — jon (Comment on this)
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
7:15 pm	Brief Addenda to Moldiness and Leakiness -- When I poured that second set of petri dishes, I didn’t get all of them out of the package, and I didn’t use up all of what was in the jar. I was busy doing things with the dishes I did succeed in filling, and the jar just sat in the glovebox for a while. Once or twice, the lid came off it. (You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to be clumsy inside a glovebox unless you’ve tried it.) I was doing something laserish in there yesterday, and decided that as long as the medium in the jar was moldy (which it is), I should get it out of there and pitch it. ...But when I took it out and examined it, I saw this: Please to note the luscious orangeness at and above the top of the agar. I can verify that it fluoresces in the usual happy manner. ...So the jar is sealed again, and is in the fridge until I can figure out how to get a good start of this stuff on another dish, possibly even without the mold that surrounds it. -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- Meanwhile, I finally gave in and dunked the ends of the big nitrogen laser head in water, while blowing into it gently. This produced bubbles at both ends, after which I patted it dry and applied modest amounts of aquarium caulk. In a little while I will go down and do the test again, to see whether I have succeeded in plugging those leaks, and whether there are any others that I can find this way. (Mere minutes later...) Looks good. No bubbles at all at one end, and reduced bubbling (apparently from the same location) at the other. I have applied a bit more aquarium caulk. When it has had a few hours to harden I will try the vacuum pump, as things now appear to be getting fairly close to where I want them. (...And mere minutes after that...) Couldn’t stand it — went down and pulled just a wee tiny bit of vacuum on the head, in hopes that it would help suck the aquarium glop down into whatever tiny crack I’m trying to fill with it. The results looked very good, with the pressure remaining fairly steady even though the pump was no longer running. I let some air in, and left the head with just slightly less than atmospheric pressure in it. I now revert to my earlier statement, to the effect that I will check this again with the vacuum pump in a few hours. ...Which I did, with the following results — 10 pm: I turned on the vacuum pump, opened the valves, and watched the gauge go down from about 759.4 Torr (nominal atmospheric pressure is given as 760 Torr, but of course it varies with altitude and weather) to an indicated 0.7 Torr. Then I shut the valves and turned off the pump; it probably took about 15 seconds for the gauge to reach 1 Torr. In a high-vacuum system, a pressure increase that large in such a brief interval would be evidence of a severe leak, but nitrogen lasers are pretty crude, as vacuum systems go, and it’s just fine. 0030 am: the pressure in the head was 77.3 Torr, just over 1/10 of normal atmospheric pressure. This is the way we like it. I can now build and install the high-voltage electrical parts, and we’ll see what kind of laser this device is. Cheers — jon (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
7:23 pm	Comets, Pumpkins, and Other Things (Sorry, no sealing-wax this time.) Three nights in a row I dragged out the 8" Dobsonian and managed to find Saturn quite quickly, so I know I was looking in approximately the correct region of the sky; but I couldn’t find Comet Lulin with it. If I’d had more time I might have done better, but it has been so cold outside that my hands about froze during the few minutes I had the scope out. (Yeah, yeah, I know, it isn’t really cold until branches start breaking off trees without any snow load. I just don’t handle it particularly well.) The first night I thought I saw the comet with a little spotting scope I built a few months ago, but now I really doubt that: I couldn’t see any trace of it last night, even though it should have been quite easy to find. -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- Dept. of Terminology, Center for Manipulation and Distortion, Definitions Section: The grumpy stupid ranting produced by someone who has had too much beer is bockbluster. (I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with that, but I don’t recall seeing it before.) -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- When I made up the pumpkin-and-malt-extract agar for my attempts at culturing the orange fluorescent mold (at least, that’s what I thought it was at the time), I bought canned pumpkin for the purpose. After I opened each can and used some of the pumpkin from it I left the remainder in the fridge, in hopes that more of the magic glop would somehow contrive to sprout on it. Late last week I checked with my little longwave UV flashlight, and there was indeed some orange fluorescence from the first can. A few evenings back I made an initial attempt at inoculating agar with this material. It looked much more bacterial than fungal: the surface was quite smooth, and when I tried to take the culture starts it seemed like a rubbery membrane over semiliquid goo. (I’d been wondering whether the cultures I started a few weeks ago could be mixed, and this tends to support that idea.) It begins to look like the new culture will succeed. What little there is of it at this point appears to be bacteria or perhaps some kind of yeast, and is definitely fluorescent. I am particularly pleased because there doesn’t seem to be any mold on or around these new starts so far. There is a large amount of gray-green mold on the pumpkin in that can, and I was afraid that I was picking up spores from it along with whatever the fluorescent stuff turns out to be. At some point I may want to go back to my original starts and try separating my pet whatever-it-is from the fungi it appears to be mixed with. This could be a bit tricky, but there must be ways to accomplish it. Of course, there is always the possibility that a mixture of organisms is necessary for the development of the fluorescence, but now that I have an apparently unmixed fluorescent culture that seems unlikely. There is, btw, no orange fluorescence from the things that are growing on the pumpkin in the second can, but I did see some blue fluorescence from the edge of one of the mold spots. I will probably attempt to transfer that at some point, in case it proves to be interesting. -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- It has been difficult to find all of the vacuum leaks in the nitrogen laser head I recently constructed, and I am setting up to try a mildly advanced technique. It turns out that just as largish leaks make an audible rushing noise, smaller ones also tend to roar; but they do so at about 40 kHz, which is decidedly not audible unless you’re a bat. (Yeah, I know, other things can also hear frequencies in that range. I just wanted a nice quick example.) There are various ways to make use of this, the most common of which involves downshifting the frequencies so that 40 kHz is transformed into something audible. I’ve been building an “ultrasonic sniffer” circuit for this purpose, and I regret to say that the process has not been entirely without challenges. The last time I checked my circuit, not only was the first stage picking up a local radio station, it also oscillated like crazy. I will be taking a long hard peevish look at it when I get a chance. In the meanwhile, I have dropped a very small capacitor across the input, in an effort to suppress the radio station. (“Suppress that guinea-pig!”) I will probably post more about this if and when I get anywhere useful with it. -._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.-°\v/°-._/^\_.- I bought a recording application for my iPhone (“Record”). I have been capturing sounds with it, emailing them to myself, editing them, and making them into ringtones. This is advantageous in that I am not likely to mistake anyone else’s phone for mine, and of course it’s also fun. Here’s a brief example. Not something I am actually using as a ringtone, but the sort of thing I might consider, especially if it were a bit longer. The sound, in case anyone actually cares, is my teacher playing a short ornamentation pattern called a sekaran on one of the instruments of the central Javanese gamelan at the Indonesian Embassy, in Washington, DC. Cheers — jon (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 6th, 2009
5:09 pm	Duck "Curry" with Jakfruit; More Sausages; Mold; Not quite a laser yet... A few days ago I found some frozen Jakfruit at the large Asian market here. This is a no-brainer, though of course I prefer it fresh. It’s just that I very rarely see it fresh. (I do have one seedling from the last time, which was a few months ago.) Frozen is generally nicer than tinned, though I like Jakfruit enough that I will occasionally buy it even when it is having a protracted conversation with Prince Albert. Ahem. The Jakfruit being at hand, I got a container of plain coconut-milk "yogurt" (in this case, “plain” actually means sugar-flavored; I wish to hell they’d get their act together and bring out an unsweetened version) and proceeded to make something with duck in it that resembled the recent Kurmas, but was much closer to what we (Americans) would call “curry”. I used an excess of cinnamon and cloves and coriander seed, which go nicely with the sweetness and perfume of the Jakfruit. Perfume is the right word, too — the kitchen smelled absolutely amazing by the time the thing was finished. It (the dish, not the kitchen) tasted very good, too, though it probably could have stood considerably more hotness. (I would have wanted ‘Aji Limon’ or ‘Lemon Drop’ peppers, because of their fragrance — they smell somewhat like marigolds to me [Tagetes, not Calendula], but on the sweet side rather than the turpentiny/harsh side, and with a bit of citrus mixed in. I may try this in the summer, when I’ve had a chance to grow more of them.) In any case I couldn’t complain, especially to the chef. ..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-.. lisajulie and I made sausage patties again yesterday. This time I cooked them, so I could use them at breakfast with a minimum of fuss and delay. These were both done with lamb; the first variant used fennel seeds and barberries and marjoram, all softened and plumped in hot water for a while before I incorporated them into the mix, and a little bit of salt. I did the second version with coriander seed, caraway seed (not enough, but the bottle was nearly empty), cinnamon, rather a lot of turmeric, summer savory, barberries, a moderate amount of potato (frozen home-fries, cooked and rather vaguely mashed), and again a little bit of salt. As before, I soaked the seeds and berries &c in hot water for a while. I cooked a small patty from each set, to be sure I was on a viable track before cooking the whole batch; they were both fine. Again, particularly with the second set, I would not have minded some chiles; but they certainly aren’t necessary. ..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-.. I am pleased to report that The Mold appears to be taking quite well to its new home. In a week or so I should be able to tell whether the fluorescence is enhanced on the new agar, which contains quite a bit more pumpkin than the first set. ..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-..-'\|/'-.. I continue to find and plug leaks in the laser head, and I’ve started testing the preionization system. So far, so good. Meanwhile, I have observed a cute electrostatic effect while rubbing my hand on the glass wall (“frictional electricity”, which Does Things to rarefied gases); but it isn’t very bright, and would probably be difficult to photograph. I may try anyway, and if I get anything decent I’ll post it. The device continues slaunching toward Byzantium, and with some luck I could see first light from it within a few days, though of course these things never go as quickly as one would like. I will make loud hooting noises here when it lases, at least if it develops a decent amount of output energy & power. Cheers — jon (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
11:40 pm	Pie again: Here is the petri dish with the fluorescent mold on it, just before I transferred two starts to dishes of the new agar (with more pumpkin) and another two to the second pie: (Illumination provided by a 21-LED flashlight, output centered at 385 nm, but with a filter to remove as much of the visible output as possible. My apologies for the condensation on the underside of the lid, which partly obscures your view of the happy dancing mold people in their traditional folk costumes...) Fingers crossed. I need to be able to propagate this stuff, and I need to be able to grow enough of it to do something useful with it, like attempt to extract whatever makes it fluorescent. My hope, of course, is that the mold is getting some precursor material from the pumpkin, and that the fluorescence will therefore be brighter on the agar with higher pumpkin content. As my old man useta say, “We Shall See What We Shall See.” ..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-..-'v'-.. On other fronts: the laser head is now on the bench, and I am finding and plugging the vacuum leaks so I can get on with the final electrical construction and start testing the thing. Also on other fronts: here is what I saw when I arrived at the Indonesian Embassy earlier this evening for my Indonesian Language class: Cheers — jon (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
1:37 am	Veeraswamy Rising (and Other Tales of Gothic Horror) -- ...So I made the kurma stuff again, with plain (actually plain, no sugar added) soy yogurt (from Wild Wood). It was bland. Boring, even. I thought about that for a while, and decided to do something daring: overspice the snot out of it, in case the soy stuff was eating the spices before I had a chance to do so. I also bought a lime, because his original recipe says you can sprinkle salt and lemon juice over it to taste when it is served, and I had not previously tried that. I started the process last night, let the stuff marinate in the fridge, and cooked it when I got back from Indonesian Language class this evening. Accidentally left the burner slightly high during the simmer phase, and was obliged to deglaze the pan with some chicken stock, but that did not seem to hurt the dish. Sprinkling lime juice [but not salt] over it also didn’t hurt it. All in all, despite the fact that I completely forgot the cardamom in my hunger and haste it was quite nice, and I am now greatly encouraged. (Ingredients of the masala this time: coriander and cumin [quite a bit of each], regular cinnamon and Sri Lanka cinnamon, dried ginger, a wee bit of dried galanga because it came to hand, rather a lot of turmeric, some cloves, and some allspice. Yes, I know, not a proper kurma, but there is no reason why I couldn’t do it up correctly. I’m fairly sure it would work just fine. One of these times, I may even try adding the ground almonds that Veeraswamy calls for.) For Our Next Trick we may try Tandoori Chicken, something I have not been able to eat for many years and have missed quite a bit. Like the above, it won’t be right, because I still can’t eat onions and because I do not [yet] make ceramic objects the size of Tandoors; but even an approximation beats nothing. If I like it enough, maybe I will start making miniature Tandoors for home use; you never know. (Welcome to The Joss Research Tandoor & Samovar Manufactory...) Knives, comma, continued: Probably about every third or fourth time I use one of my knives I clean up its edge on a big old steel (just over 18" overall length) that I acquired at an antique store in Seattle about 15 years ago. This steel is blandly featureless. That is, it has no ridges and is not (!) a file. [I loathe and despise the usual steels, which are trashy files that rip the crap out of edges instead of smoothing them. Avoid, avoid!] It looks like this:             As a result of its frequent use, I mostly just don’t sharpen my knives. Granted, I am not doing tons of cooking day in and day out, so you can probably figure that the three years or so since I last did anything significant to any of my knives really amounts to 3 or 4 months of moderately heavy home-kitchen use. It will still be a while before they require anything beyond the steel, though, so that figure is not even really a lower bound. (My current set includes one fairly nice Henckels, which I use most of the time; two slightly smaller Sabatiers that I use somewhat less often; a thin cleaver that I have just started to become accustomed to; and a little old Sabatier paring knife that gets moderately frequent use.) Just by the bye: because I like my fingers, I never run a knife toward myself on the steel. Instead, I stand the steel up with its point in a notch in a bench or table, and run the knife down it a few times, alternating sides. This gives me reasonable control over the angle at which the edge meets the steel, along with reasonable peace of mind. So far, I have not had any luck in my attempts at culturing the fluorescent mold I mentioned, a couple postings back, though I will admit that I haven’t checked lately to see whether anything has changed. I did, however, buy another pie, which currently sits in state in my fridge, taking visitors by appointment only. I removed and ate a piece, in case my tender ministrations were the source of the spores last time. We Shall See What We Shall See, ...but probably not for a few weeks yet. Note, added the following evening: Hoo-wee, was that wrong! I just checked, and my attempts on pumpkin malt agar are mostly rousing successes. The fluorescence is not as pronounced on the agar as it is (or was) on the original pie, but the correct mold is clearly present, and most of the cultures (I tried 6 starts) appear to be uncontaminated. Now I get to try growing actual quantity of the stuff, probably on a mixture with higher pumpkin content. It remains to be seen whether the fluorescent material is soluble in anything reasonable and, if so, how stable it is in solution; ...and all of that has to happen before I can even begin to worry about how fluorescent it really is. We Shall, I trust, See. Nitrogen laser progress: As of today I have the main part of the head constructed, and it seems to be reasonably straight. Now I have to build the endpieces and attach the windows to them, after which I can proceed to the next stage, in which I attempt to find and fix the vacuum leaks. Here is a view down the length of the head, in case anyone cares: The far end is more than four feet from the camera; as nitrogen lasers go, this is a largish device. Again, if anyone actually gives a hoot, I am writing a page about this project. Cheers — jon (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 10th, 2009
11:34 am	Fraud, Mycological Culture, Kurma, Laser, Teacups... I was going to title this one “What a Way to Start Your Day”, but that would only cover the initial bit... On January 1st I went to pay my phone bill, and noticed that my available bank balance was significantly lower than it should be. I figured that perhaps something hadn’t shown up yet because of the holiday, and in a sense I was right: though I didn’t know it yet, on December 30th someone had used my phone number and my debit card number to buy an unlocked cell phone and have it sent to somewhere in Texas. That someone or possibly another someone had committed two more fraudulent purchases on the 31st, and those pending debits, which I was also unaware of, were being withheld from my balance. On January 2nd I went to pay my phone bill and found that my balance was still cockeyed, so I looked carefully down through the list of transactions. Found something that didn’t look right, which had taken place on the 30th and posted on the 31st. I called the vendor and asked whether they sent out email confirmations of orders, and they said yes, so I inquired about this particular item. (I didn’t have any email from them.) They looked through their records, and sure enough, although the phone number and card number were mine, the email address was not. I asked them what the order was for, and they told me about the phone, whereupon I told them that we had a little problem. They sent me to my bank. Net result: I have a new debit card with a different number. I have a new bank account as well, for reasons having to do with the fact that I opened my original account in a different state, and it’s hard for the people here to see details about it on their system. Life is more complicated. Argh. _.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._ My mold starts on the new pie have not done much, and I despair of seeing anything from them, so last night I made up and autoclaved a batch of malt agar with pumpkin in it, poured a bunch of petri dishes, and took 6 more culture starts from the original erstwhile pie. I should not have waited so long, as the other molds are growing and sporulating and it looks like some bacteria or yeasts are also having a bit of a field day, but there is at least a chance that I got uncontaminated material. Whether it is alive and will grow, well, we’; just have to see. I can say that even if I have killed my first attempts at starting cultures (the ones on the new pie), the largest one is still very obviously fluorescent, so the material, whatever it is, has at least fair stability. This is good. _.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._ I acquired some plain unsweetened (“Wild Wood”) cultured soy “yogurt”, and made kurma again last night. Even though I used more spices than Veeraswamy calls for in his original, and put the cardamom and cloves and cinnamon into the oil this time, also as he calls for (and as both von_krag and lisajulie suggested), it came out very mild. I would even say bland. Part of this is the fact that I omitted chillies (except for some tiny shreds) and black pepper, but part of it is clearly something else. Perhaps the soy stuff absorbs spice flavors in some mysterious way, or perhaps sugar brings them out a whole lot; I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t bad, just lacked a certain degree of oomph (for lack of a better term). _.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._ Having achieved my goal with the commercial nitrogen laser I mentioned last time, I have set about rebuilding one of my own nitrogen lasers, about the largest one I’ve ever designed. This is being something of a challenge, as the innards have to be literally laser-straight and parallel for over a meter. (You would not believe how flexible real-world things are unless you’ve tried something similar.) The aluminum angle extrusions are warped, and if I don’t correct them the laser channel will be about 2 mm wider in the middle than at the ends; the bench is warped, and if I don’t switch over to something else for assembly, the middle of the laser will be a millimeter or two lower than the ends (which would prevent it from making a decent beam); and so on. I am on hold with this for a bit, while I figure out ways to work around these issues. I have some of them sussed out (assemble on a nice flat firm surface, for example), and I have ideas about others, but I want to be fairly sure of my ground with the whole scenario before I leap into final gluing. If anyone cares, here is a quick mockup, looking into the end of the channel. I have put one capacitor in place to show the layout better, but various parts are still not present. Once I get this thing glued together, I need to make and install end fittings with fused silica windows, plug any vacuum leaks (probably a painful and protracted process), and then do the final electrical assembly so I can begin testing. If anyone wants to see the entire megillah on this, I have a Web page about it. _.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._.·-v-·._ My friend Pete Pinnell is a professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and I am willing to bet that he’s an outstanding teacher. He’s also a columnist for Clay Times Magazine, a fine potter, and a treat to take tea with. In connection with a show that he juried a while back, Pete delivers an excellent talk about teacup aesthetics and art on Google. (The video runs a little over half an hour.) Cheers — jon (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 26th, 2008
9:58 pm	Ultraviolet Sausage Kurma I hope you didn’t think that was one item; it is actually an extremely brief essay on The Necessity of Proper Punctuation. (I am reminded of the barbecue place in Woodinville, Washington, which had, for a brief and shining moment, a sign painted across its three huge windows that said, “Fish Butt Kabobs”. Alas, I didn’t manage to get there with my camera before they removed it.) Kurma: A very long time ago, a chap named Edward Palmer, writing as “E. P. Veeraswamy”, published an Indian cookbook. It has gone through various editions from several publishers, and his name is spelled “Veerasawmy” on some of them. (I am convinced, btw, that this is a typo; in my response to one of the comments, I have a link to a photo or scan of the cover of one of his menus, on which it is spelled the first way.) A couple weeks back, lisajulie read one of the recipes to me, and it seemed pretty interesting. I had to do some tweaking, though, as it called for onions and milk products. [Note, added later: lisajulie reminds me that one of the big reasons why she thought to read me the recipe was the fact that it calls for ground almonds. I had forgotten that.] My first attempt used soy “yogurt”, and was merely okay. I didn’t have any ground almonds on hand, so I left them out, figuring I could try crushing some pecans, which I do have, for a later version. Then I saw some So Delicious cultured coconut milk, and figured I should give that a try. I managed to mix the spices into it and toss the chicken thighs in it, and then I had to run down to DC for a rehearsal, so it sat in the fridge for about 6 hours before I had a chance to cook it. This was clearly A Good Thing, and it turned out really well. The original recipe calls for putting some of the spices into the yogurt and some into the cooking oil, but I tossed them all into the coconut stuff (which was flavored with cinnamon), partly because I was in a bit of a rush and didn’t want to take the time to dig up the recipe to see which spices went where. I also forgot the pecans, largely because I was in a rush. “Veeraswamy’s Ghost” Chicken Kurma [version 2] involved the following: 4 or 5 chicken thighs 1 small container cultured coconut milk sumak (could regrind this; I didn't) summer savory (probably unnecessary) seeds of 2 cardamoms (should have ground these) 2 or 3 cloves ground coriander seed ground cumin seed ground turmeric ground dried ginger (just a little) 1 "maizy pinch" of salt (as Rafih Benjelloun would say) I used somewhat more spice than the original calls for; I’m not giving quantities here because this is just an off-the-top-of-the-head description, and because there is no guarantee that your taste matches mine; use what seems right to you. I should also mention the fact that I used up the last of my Agrumato olive oil (pressed with tangerines) cooking this, and that worked really well. The sumak is an attempt to counterbalance the sweetness of the fake yogurt. It seemed to help, but an unsweetened version of the cultured glop would probably be a lot nicer. (I have seen unsweetened cultured soy stuff, and I definitely intend to try it.) I liked this enough that I decided to try again. For my third attempt, I got some supposedly Plain cultured coconut milk, which is actually Cane Juice flavor (argh); near as I could tell, it is even sweeter than the cinnamon version. My take on this, however, is complicated by the fact that I coarse-ground some pecans and put them into the third batch. I also made the third batch with duck instead of chicken, and I remembered to put the pecans into it. (Crushed them in a thick-walled plastic bag by rolling a glass bottle over them several times.) This version was too rich, but quite yummy. Slightly different spicing; think I left out the cloves. For the fourth batch I went back to cultured soy. Found it in “Cinnamon Bbun” flavor, which was again too sweet, but which worked okay otherwise. This time, however, I made a mistake: Veeraswamy suggests cooking in an open pan until things are well along, and then covering the pan and allowing the kurma to simmer for perhaps 20 minutes. He is clearly correct. I started this batch covered, and had to reduce the sauce later. Today I found some cultured rice milk... Sausages: For some time, there has been this plan to take a day and make some sausage patties that I can freeze, so I’ll have something I can cook quickly if I need to eat and don’t have time for complicated preparations. We finally did this thing yesterday, and the results were very encouraging. Two versions with lamb, two versions with pork: Lamb 1 (about 3/4 lb) Barberries Sage Small amounts of regular and Ceylon cinnamon Caraway seeds Fennel seeds Marjoram Summer Savory (fairly large amount) I ground the seeds with the herbs (in a burr mill intended for coffee), but kept the barberries separate. :._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.: Lamb 2 (again, about 3/4 lb) Seeds from 3 cardamoms 2 Allspice Caraway seeds Coriander seeds Turmeric (ground dried) Ginger (ground dried) Cinnamon As before I ground the spices, indiscriminately mixing the pre-ground ones with the whole ones. :._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.: Pork 1 (about 1 lb) Fennel seeds Caraway seeds Summer savory 2 small fennel bulbs & some stems I ran the fennel through the grinder along with the pork. This was a bit difficult, but worked nicely. As before, herbs and seeds went into the burr mill together. This is slightly harder to form into patties than the others, but not hugely so. I suppose you could add some breadcrumbs or other sticky material if it becomes an issue. :._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.:._.: Pork 2 (also about 1 lb) 1 tsp Sichuan Flower Pepper ½ tsp dried Galanga, or perhaps a bit more ¼ tsp dried Ginger ½ tsp Khmeli Suneli (a Georgian spice mixture) 8 or 10 fresh water chestnuts, peeled Note: The amounts I’ve given here are extremely loose approximations! I include them against my better judgement; I didn’t actually measure anything, just heaved stuff into the burr mill and let fly. Note: I ground the water chestnuts with the pork. This was probably a mistake; only the slightest hint of their texture remained. Note: This could almost certainly stand some fresh ginger in addition to dried, and maybe some chillies as well. :.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.:.x^x.: All of these were eminently satisfactory, despite the fact that I forgot to put any salt in any of them. The fennel one takes longer to cook, because it is very wet. Ultraviolet: Two postings back, I mentioned the fact that I was redoing the drive circuitry of an old commercial nitrogen laser head that we acquired some years ago. The laser is now up and running, and it performs very nicely. I’m particularly pleased because it was abundantly clear, when we acquired this head, that it had come out of a dumpster: it was nastily damaged. We have given it a whole new lease on life (as it were) since then. (This was the laser I used when I first lased laundry detergent, in fact, back in early 2000.) Here is a photo showing the beam more or less focused onto the front of a small homebrew cuvette, in which is a solution of fabric whitener in Everclear. The fabric whitener, which is probably the best laser dye for do-it-yourselfers that I have ever found, is extremely concentrated; I put two very small drops into the cuvette. The dye laser beam, which is a lovely violet color, looks really weird on the paper in this photo. I’m not entirely sure why that is. If you care to see the whole megillah, try my page about this rebuild. If you just want to cut to the chase and see more photos that involve the laser actually running, they’re here. Cheers — jon (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
3:08 am	Postscript to Previous Posting I just inoculated the pie. I guess that sounds a wee bit peculiar; one imagines the following exchange: “What did you do on Christmas Eve?” “I, uhh, hmmm. Geez...” “I see.” [Furrows brow, turns to go.] “Wait, I can explain.” “Oh, don’t bother.” [Exits, looking like there is a not-very-nice smell in the air.] Ahem. [It has been my nerdly fate to misjudge other people’s reactions to things, and probably to be misjudged by them, altogether too many times. It is to grit the teeth. But that is neither here nor there, and we have other pies to fry tonight.] After cleaning out the venerable cardboard glovebox and taping the upper half of a new plastic-wrap window to it, I put both pies inside. Then I completed the window, sprayed rather strong hydrogen peroxide on the outsides of both pie containers, covered the source container with opaque paper to protect the existing molds, and surface-sterilized (I hope) the destination pie by exposing it for some minutes to an ancient Mineralight® shortwave UV lamp. I wore blue nitrile gloves on both hands, and I also wore a woolen glove [schpritzed with peroxide to make at least a pretense of sterilizing it] on the hand that was holding the UV lamp. Those things are dangerous, and I probably should have found a covering for my hand that was even more opaque. [The lamp, btw, was joyously trash-picked and then given to me, years ago, by chakaal and lisajulie. I had wanted one ever since I first found out about them, when I was a kid, and this one appears to date from an era only slightly more recent. Still haven’t figured out why anybody would trash suck a thing, as they are uncommon & viciously pricy.] Once I had what I hoped was a reasonably clean surface to drop bits of mold on, I performed the usual culture-transfer maneuver, using an X-Acto® blade held in a small pair of long-nose Vise-Grips. (I think I originally tried the Vise-Grips instead of the usual X-Acto handle because I am quite clumsy when I’m wearing rubber gloves.) Before attempting each transfer, I sterilized the blade in the flame of a small candle that sits in a little round glass holder. (I think you’re sposeta use an alcohol lamp, but the Djinni took that away.) I got about 5 samples from the brightest area and one from another very bright area, and arrayed them on the new pie. Fingers crossed; it will probably be several days before I can tell whether the cultures will take, and about as long before I know whether I got relatively uncontaminated starts. I was, happily, able to verify that several of them are still fluorescent. This suggests that I let the X-Acto blade cool down long enough after sterilizing it, which I faithfully did each time I took a sample because I don’t really know whether the surface of the destination pie is sterile, and I didn’t want to risk back-contaminating the source pie — it has enough problems already, without that. In fact, I think I’m going to stuff it back in the fridge, in the morning. Meanwhile, I have a pressure cooker, a can of pumpkin, some glass jars, and a nice bottle of powdered malt-extract agar that I got from Fungi Perfecti. When I have a little time I will make up some pumpkin malt agar and fill a few petri dishes with it. We Shall See whether I can get the mold to grow on that, and whether it remains fluorescent if it does grow. (Fungi Perfecti is Paul Stamets’s organization; I’ve seen Paul’s growing rooms and heard his description of the technique he used to start cultures of Bridgeoporus nobilissimus, and I trust him.) Cheers... jon (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 19th, 2008
11:23 pm	On the Importance of Being Open to Things: Let me set some background here. 1) Back around 1929, a fella named Fleming was doing some work with bacterial cultures. One of his petri dishes became contaminated, as happens from time to time, and when he examined it he noticed that there was an empty band around the contaminant (some sort of Penicillium mold), where the bacteria were unable to grow. He found this rather interesting, and decided that it was worth taking the time to investigate. (Of this was begat Penicillin, which begat Many Things, which begat Antibiotic Abuse, which begat MRSA and other horrors; but that’s not where I’m going today.) [PS, See comments: I appear to be wrong about MRSA.] 2) When I was much younger than I am now, I saw an ad in Scientific American. I think it was from one of the oil companies, but don’t quote me — it has been a very long time, and I don’t remember for certain. The substance of the ad was that a couple of scientists at this company were trying to find a way to get rid of unwanted oil. I think this was about the oil tanker compartment issue, preventing oil slicks when the holds are cleaned out, but again you shouldn’t quote me. Why they wanted to get rid of excess oil isn’t important; what matters is that a method was wanted, so this guy asked his small daughter if she’d go out to the creek and bring him a cup of mud, which she did. In that mud was a bacterium that happily ate hydrocarbons. At least, that’s how I remember it. 3) When I was somewhat younger than I am now, I saw a comic, as I recall it just a frame or two. It features a nerdish person (clearly One Of Us), who [unwisely] opens the refrigerator, whereupon the things inside all scream “Helkurg Woogies!!!”... So. A few weeks back, I bought a pumpkin pie. It was devoid of the things I’m allergic to, so I could eat it; but frankly it lacked a certain something, and I didn’t like it all that much. Thus, it languished in my refrigerator, unloved and largely unconsumed, for rather too long, and became a Biology Experiment. That term is not usually to be taken literally, but perhaps in this case it is: when I took “The Late Hon. Erstwhile” out of the fridge, earlier today, I found it variously colonized, mostly by molds. Rather than simply toss it, however, I bethought myself of the items above (mostly the first two, as I already had the helkurg woogies in my trembling grasp   ;o), and concluded that I should first take a look at it with my violet laser pointer. What I saw was intriguing enough that I dug out the filtered 385-nm LED flashlight for a better look... It is difficult to balance these things, but the colors are actually not too far off. (The grayish/bluish flakes, btw, are coconut; the molds, other than the glowing orange ones, were largely ignorable.) [For those who don’t mind such things and who care to see it in more normal light, here it is. (“Hello, bad pie.” Ahem.)] There is no guarantee that I can culture the orange glowy glop. There is no guarantee that I can extract the orange glowy stuff from it. There is no guarantee that the orange glowy stuff, once extracted, will be reasonably stable. Even if all of these things come up affirmative, there is no guarantee that the material will dissolve in any reasonable solvent, or that it will lase if I try pumping it. Still, the temptation is there, and I think maybe I will give it a whirl. The first step, unfortunately, is to acquire another pumpkin pie, because I have no clue whether this particular glop will grow on anything else. I say unfortunately because the store where I got the pie had none today, and I am rather uncertain as to when they will be able to get more. (Actually, I will probably try it on a few other things just in case, the first of which is plain cooked pumpkin, which they did have.) As my old man useta say, “We Shall See What We Shall See.” It probably comes to nothing in the end, but you never know if you don’t try. In the meanwhile I have been rebuilding our ancient and venerable Avco-Everett C5000 nitrogen laser head, so I should have a suitable pump source if and when I get enough of this stuff to test. I’m building a Web page about that, but it is far from complete, and is probably of rather limited interest in any case. Cheers — jon Bit of a postscript: If you look carefully at the main photo you will notice, at the left edge and just about halfway up, another fluorescent culture. In ordinary light, this looks about the same as the bright one[s], as you can see in the roomlight photo; but it doesn’t fluoresce nearly as well, which tends to suggest either that there are several species involved, or at least that different strains make different amounts of the fluorescent material. In addition, if you check the roomlight version of the photo, you will see that while most of the bright fluorescence comes from orange regions of the mold, some of the brightest glow comes from a ruby red portion of the mold (lower edge of glow, near the center of the photo). I fervently hope that the fluorescent material is stable and extractable, because it is going to be fun even if it won’t lase. (54 Comments |Comment on this)