The yoghurt incident

Followers of this exceptional (albeit rarely updated) blog might remember my fil- and yoghurt experimentation, and how important it is to not x-ray the culture if wanting to grow it. The following scenario took place at the Trudeau airport in Montreal, after an excellent Sinterklaas weekend south of the city, visiting David's aunt and her family. They have a farm, with many cows, and the milk is simply divine. With such milk, you can also produce excellent yoghurt. They also have free-roaming, tame and completely adorable hens, here demonstrated by David:

Sound effects should be obvious... (or click the image to be brought to said sound effects...)

My mission was clear: Transport a small amount of the yoghurt back home to Winnipeg, and try to make more in my nowadays well-used yoghurt maker. Easy! I just needed a small container. Astrid had just the one - 1 dl. Or so I thought...

To add some spice to the story, I was also transporting 2 packages of energy-saving lightbulbs from ikea for my supervisor. I did check a suitcase, but it was of the soft kind, and I didn't want to have broken lightbulbs and poisonous gas over all my stuff. However, these lightbulbs not only look dangerous, I'm sure you can do dangerous things with them, if you have those kinds of inclinations. So I thought it best to ask security before I checked my bag. The security personnel turned the bulbs over and over while the creases in their foreheads turned deeper and deeper. Finally they had to call for a supervisor, who immediately said it was ok. Wow. I was impressed. Checked the bag, went back to security, showed my see-through ziplock bag with hand santizer and yoghurt. Uhoh. That container might just be too big. The girl at security looked very troubled, trying to find an indication of the size of the container. She eventually found a miniature text indicating a size of 120 ml. Well, that's out of the question. Gah! My Yoghurt! Desperate times!

"But I only neeed about 3 table spoons, can't we just take out half of it?" No, that doesn't work, it's the container that's the issue, not how much liquid is inside.

"Can I put 3 tablespoons of it in one of your ziplock bags then?" No, it had to be IN a container. David now enters the conversation - he has a red pass, which will grant him access to all Canadian airports. And pilots can bring as much liquid as they please. Would that be ok? No, only if he wears his uniform.

At this point David gets a little irritated too, and mutters something about picking up a uniform at the nearest masquerade store if that is what it takes. The lucrative store nearby sells a package of airline approved sizes, for the bargain price of 11 dollars. Grr. What to do? David comes up with the excellent idea to empty the hand sanitizer bottle and squeeze the yoghurt into it. Yey! So the next 15 minutes, I spend at the washroom cleaning and squeezing.

(yoghurt into a hand santizer bottle, that is). Good thing we had a lot of time.

Approved! Going through detectors. But then they find some suspicious coiled rectangular shapes in my backpack. Backpack is searched, lightbulbs found, turned over and over while creases in foreheads turn deeper and deeper. The superior is being paged again. But this time it's another one, who also develops forehead creases. But for crying out loud, people! I already asked. I agree, I would probably be cautious about poisonous lightbulbs myself, but what else could I have done? Well, they eventually approve them and I'm through.

Now, I'm all for following regulations. But are these regulations completely sane? I could have brought with me 3 times as much yoghurt, as long as it was divided up into 3 containers of 1 dl or less each. Personally, I'd have turned down the lightbulbs and let the yoghurt pass. I really would like to find out now - just how much harm can you do with 120 ml yoghurt (urhm, or really, with the container thereof)? It's certainly an adventure to fly, with all the excitement taking place on the ground...

Tomorrow it's time again. A trip, which at time of booking consisted of 2 quick legs to AMS (leaving at lunch time), but after no less than 4 changes (!!) now goes via both Chicago and Washington with a departure at 6 am. Granted, American customs have improved the last yeara, but I really expect anything to happen.

3D movies and awesomeness

I had high expectations, mixed with a few low ones, due to some reviews I had read. But nothing was even close to the experience I just had, watching Avatar!

I'll confess - I'm a 3D fantast, and ever since I saw the adventures of Antoine de St Exupery at Fututoscope in Poitiers about 15 years ago, I've been waiting for 3D movies to hit the theatres. And finally it's here! The two movies I've seen so far, were both among the best I've ever seen. I don't know if it's only due to the 3D technique - I doubt it actually, but I guess I can't prove it. The first one was Up. What a piece of geniousness. The big bird was of course my favourite - you can't get much closer to a Lunicrax than that!!!

The second one I just finished watching, all 2h and 45 minutes of it. Not a minute too long... I know there are lots of cynical comments out there, but in my book, it's a piece of art. The message might be old and used, but judging from behaviour of humanity, we're in constant need of reminders. Oooh, there was just so much I loved in it - visually, it's simply astonishing. The nature, the ideas behind it, the flying scenes, all the little details. A favourite was the dialogue between the scientist (Sigourney Weaver) and the man behind the operations (whatever his name was) when she's trying to describe the research they've done and what amazing indications they've found. The guy doesn't understand what she's talking about, and obviously thinks the scientist is nuts. It's funny how often that happens, eh? Why should I try to learn something new, when I already know everything worth knowing? Down with the trees. Go on polluting the atmosphere. Scientists just follow their own agenda, and do it for the money (?! mighty wrong career to pursue if it's for the money, I'd say...). Well, I digress slightly... :) That's really for another post, if I ever get around to writing it.

Anyways, do go and see the movie, and let me know what you think...

The music was awesome too... I'm still totally in heaven!

And tomorrow is julafton! I wonder whether there's time to make a card... While the rest of the world is getting dumped upon, there's a minimal amount of snow in Winnipeg, despite forecasts promising the opposite.

Light

Yey! Here's a cool text written in one of the blogs I follow. I think it would be interesting to everyone - for those not religiously minded for its poetic-ness and for those that are - just for all of it.

Read - slowly - the words are so beautiful... :)

'What is light?' Grandy's The speed of light - constancy and cosmos

Horror indeed

Perhaps I should go as a physicist this halloween...
I just attended a colloquium of three graduate students giving talks on their research in magnetism. Two of them were brilliant Chinese students, and the last speaker talked on the Hall effect, which with the accent came out as "Horror" effect. This student had just handed in a draft of his thesis (PhD) to his proud supervisor, who introduced him - after 2.5 years. He had also published 11 papers. The effect on my already fragile self esteem was pretty horrendous...
Other halloweenish features were invented in my dreams of last night. Imagine mutated bedbugs, taking on the characteristics of ticks, in very detailed and credible dreams. Yep. I didn't have a hard time jumping out of my bed this morning. After the fumigation, life has been glorious for a few weeks, but the morning David jumped the ocean to surprise his mum on her birthday, I accidentally created a bridge to the bed by leaning the backpack to it, allowing a small bedbug to get a last supper off of my finger, before being trapped in a trap and killed with a hairdryer (no, I'm not evil, that is the quickest way of killing them!). Hence the nightmares...
Now going back to face the first horror. I don't know which is worse - finishing a PhD or bedbugs, but right now the PhD wins. IF my nightmare turns true, it might change later on...

(good thing the rest of my life is so beautiful... :)

Thesis update

My life, as most of you know, has one major component, which has grown bigger and bigger the last year. I don't want to be as asocial as I am, I'd like to have people over for dinners etc (the latter has another reason though - upstairs neighbour saw fit to acquire "new" furniture, that apparently was bedbug infested. Gravity and the nature of bedbugs did its thing and yes - we got a few new pets as well. We barely had noticed it until our truly sweet and awesome caretaker called us about a spraying, but since it was just precautionary, I'm not sure if they were as thorough as they could have been. We had an intense week of vacuuming, freezing bedding, scratching, sleeplessness, and searching, combined with finding the darn bugs a little here and a little there as they were affected by the poison along the walls. Then I discovered that despite the metal bedframe, some bugs had managed to make themselves comfortable in the bed slats (wood underneath mattress). 2 rolls of duct tape later, we're now bite free, and haven't seen a bug for quite some time. van Vliets vs bed bugs 2-0 (as far as we know...). One thing is for sure - we have the most spacey bed slats I've ever seen... end of longest parenthesis I've ever written).

The thesis is getting substance, and substantial as well. I've written an introduction draft, a chapter on classification (chapter 5) and a chapter on modelling (chapter 4). I've received feedback on chapter 5, and am now back to it. But today, I started writing the data and reductions chapter (2) for some reason. Might as well, as long as I get stuff done. With these 2.5 chapters I'm already at 100 pages. I am however about 1 week behind schedule (a schedule that has already been revised twice). Some tension is the result of that, I can assure you. I am so much looking forward to the weekend's general conference to relieve some of that tension. It would be so much nicer if all the research and analysis was already done, but there is SO much to do in parallel with the writing. Some days I wonder if I'm ever going to get done. And other days I'm sure I'm going to go nuts...

At the time of writing, the smell of a banana cake, Swedish version, is filling the apartment. It smells rather divine (a new recipe I had never tried before). If it tastes half as good as it smells it's going on the recipe blog.

Now dear readers, I would like to invite you to make comments on my previous entry. I am intrigued and really would want to know what people feel about the topics presented therein. Be frank. Write anonymously if that feels better.