Currently starting the process of making cultured soda

I have a mild-to-moderate DIY streak, which for the most part has brought me modest success and not too much trouble.  This may change with the advent of my discovery of cultured soda.

It's a multi-day, multi-step process.  The first several days involve the gentle fermentation of grated ginger and sugar in water (this is known as the "ginger bug").  After a while, you take 1/2 cup of ginger bug and add it to some sort of fruit juice.  I'm starting with pureed red grapes, though apparently apple juice works well too.  I'm curious to see if orange juice would be effective, because orange+ginger seems like it would be a tasty combo.

After that, you transfer the bug+juice to a clean empty soda bottle, and let it sit until the bottle feels like it's built some pressure up, at which point it can be refrigerated and enjoyed.

(I'm skipping all of the helpful tips about occasionally skimming off the mold, because for all I know my friends might be reading this and will subsequently refuse to taste-test.  Taste-testing and objective opinions will be key, because I don't drink soda.  I did mention that, didn't I?)

This is sort of what the ginger bug looks like

 

This is what the finished product will ostensibly look like

And these are among the first results you get when you Google Image search "fermentation explosions".  Fingers crossed...

 

Of journal clubs and starfish

So.  Graduate school begins again.  While I got a lot done this summer, it's amazing how leisurely it seems in retrospect.  Yes, those carefree, careless less-than-five-days-ago days...

I did get a break, thankfully.  I took a last-minute vacation at a friend's vacation home on Lake Michigan.  Much to my delight, I learned that the beaches in this area are basically covered in crinoids.  Crinoids are essentially starfish on stalks, and if you look carefully on this beach you would find tiny cylinders, the remnants of various stalk segments.

Starfish on stalks, Lovecraftian horror...potayto, potahto

And here we see a lovely selection of crinoid fossils, as well as a sample of the primitive form of currency used by their civilization

So here we are.  I'm taking four courses this semester.  It was going to be five, but my advisor's class got canceled due to underenrollment.

Benefits of taking your advisor's class: Easy A, brownie points, insight into your advisor's philosopy/priorities

Downsides of taking your advisor's class: An extra 9+ hours a week with your advisor, which, in this particular case, was almost certainly going to be a thrice-weekly journal club.  

Journal club: A meeting in which people who have not read a journal article desperately pretend to have read a journal article.  In the event that someone has read the article (or even if they have not), the discussion will almost always devolve into a snoot-fest in which the paper is excoriated, the authors are scoffed at, and the journal is derided for having accepted such an utter piece of crap.  Especially if the journal is Nature or Science.

Most exciting class: General Virology, taught by some absolutely fantastic professors.  It's going to be a lot of self-directed study, but it's stuff I need to know for my thesis.  And we're watching a video about Ebola on Friday. 

True story: I credit the Hot Zone as significant motivation for putting me on the MD/PhD path.  I blithely picked it up while staying at my grandparents' farm one summer.  I couldn't have been more than 9 or 10.  I don't remember anything about it except for the opening sequence, where Patient Zero gets sick and pukes up coffee ground vomit on the plane, and a description at the end of necrotic, exploded testicles caused by Marburg infection, I think.  My curiosity was piqued.  It was well worth the 5-10 years of wretched hypochondria induced by this literary discovery.

Most terrifying class: Statistics for Clinical Trials.  In theory, I am prepared for this class.  In reality, the prereqs for the course were horrifyingly insufficient, and I have no idea what the hypergeometric distribution* is.  But I need it for my PhD (and I do, I do want to be the kind of researcher who's not laughed at by statisticians), so I'm in for a semester of office hour visits and lots of work.  

*This also sounds vaguely Lovecraftian, but in fact refers to the situation in which you pull n balls out of a box that contains a certain number of black balls and a certain number of white balls.  

So there it is.  I'm still determined that this semester shall be better than the last.  Ganbatte, and IL-X out!

Unlike the crinoids and the function, this picture is explicitly Lovecraftian.  It is, in fact, Junji Ito's tribute to H.P. Lovecraft.  I am a huge Junji Ito fan.  I am also a huge H.P. Lovecraft fan, so this picture tickles me immensely.