Tcepsa's Thoughts

I will do Science to it! BD

From the first couple of transition batches, where I used molasses, the kefir grains got very dark brown. This batch, with the secret ingredient, is much lighter and doesn't really have nearly as much stain/dye for them to absorb. I'll get back to why this is relevant in a moment ^_^

I wanted to bring the batch with me to VA for the weekend, so I put them in the car and left them there all day. When I got back to the car they had all sunk to the bottom (I don't remember if I mentioned this last time, but it's a good sign if all/most of them are floating because it means they're doing the conversion from sugars to CO2 and the gas is making them float) so I was concerned that perhaps I had inadvertently killed them. However, I was pretty sure that getting a little chilly wouldn't do them any lasting harm, so I figured I would let them come back up to the upper 60's and see whether that helped.

It did. So I think it was either a combination of the densities changing when things got cold, or the grains going dormant-ish, or both. They are happily sitting on the counter now, and have even produced enough gas to build up a little bit of pressure inside the jar.

Not only that, but I noticed that some of them are developing little white bumps (kind of like when a potato eye starts to sprout), which means that not only are they not dead, they're actually growing! Given that many of the other accounts I saw of this sort of thing said that they didn't have much luck getting milk kefir to grow in water, this is incredibly encouraging ^_^

It's certainly too small to be called microbrewing: I'm doing one-off batches of milk kefir and milk-kefir-adapted-to-eat-sugar-in-water. So far it's been going pretty well, especially since gipsieee and I are reasonably certain that the months-old jar in her fridge (milk kefir) is, surprisingly enough, still food (at least, neither of us suffered any noticeable ill effects from a few mouthfuls of it).

( Cut because I anticipate this getting longish )

[After conversation in which I described making biscuits and adding garlic, using a different type of fat, and sprinkling cheese on top and then not being terribly fond of them but not being able to say what it was about them that I wasn't so keen on. I then described making eggs by mixing together a couple of eggs with rosemary, thyme, salt, pepper, and milk and heating the whole thing in the microwave for a couple of minutes. I wasn't particularly sold on them either, but again I couldn't tell which of the ingredients was the problem child, or whether it was because I had microwaved them. After that, while we'd been on the phone, I had grumbled about how cold it was upstairs and proceeded to close the door and hang a polar fleece blanket over the windows. After a bit I observed that it had gotten measurably (as in about 4 tenths of a degree) warmer throughout the conversation, but that I wasn't sure whether it was the blanket or the door or both that were responsible for the change, whereupon we had the following exchange]:

gipsieee: You're just having a bad day with the scientific method, hon.

Me: Why do you say that?

gipsieee: Because you keep changing more than one variable!!

If a bar magnet is oriented near a current-carrying wire so that the magnet's field lines cross perpendicularly to the direction that the current is flowing, and they are motionless relative to each other, the magnet will experience a net force of zero from the current in the wire.

(feel free to present examples to the contrary--if this statement is incorrect, I'd rather find out sooner than later ;)

[Technically, I think that the net force is still zero even if the magnet is moving relative to the wire as long as its distance from the wire remains constant and the magnetic field lines remain perpendicular to the wire. However, this should not strictly be necessary for this project, so it's more a point of trivia than anything really pertinent]