Ciao Italia!

Being a scientist does have some advantages, one of which is traveling around the world to meet with other scientists. So I've decided to write a little about some of the places that I get to visit. Back in October of 2004 I had the pleasure of visiting our R&D and Production facility in Italy.

I'm Fresh off the plane and my hotel is located about 45 minutes from Rome, a place called Villa Degli Angeli (The city of Angels!). It sits on a volcanic lake, and as you can see from the photo, the view from my room was spectacular. The weather was absolutely beautiful too, mid to upper 80's during the day and cooling to the lower 70's at night.

Yes, I know, I can't believe that I have to work under these conditions either! It's a tough job, but someone has to do it!

Anyway, I don't speak Italian and it seems that out in the middle of nowhere Italy they don't speak English! Lucky for me the hotel staff is mainly college students who have been wanting to practice English, talk about luck! I recieve a crash course in conversational Italian so that I can at least be polite to the locals, and possibly survive the next few days!
Whenever I travel trough too many time zones (no I'm not going to get into time travel again, I got that out of my system!), as in going to Europe, I ususally try to arrive at least a day ahead of when I am supposed to be responsible for thinking, or responding with any intelligent thoughts. This trip was no different and I was able to adjust to the time change while finding out a little bit about the area. The hotel sits directly across the lake from Castelgandolfo, the Pope's summer home. The picture to the left was taken from my patio while I was testing my ability to hold still and utilize my 30x digital zoom!

After finding this out I immediately phoned the front desk and had word sent to the Pope to see if he would like to join me for coffee, or purhaps a beer later in the day. It turns out that the pope,at that time, was a wine drinker and refused to have audience with me. (Just kidding! But this may be one of the stories that my Grandson will hear more details about. Shhh! Dont't tell his Grandmother!)

The photo below was taken later that evening. It was really beatiful because from the angle that I was viewing, the sun sat directly behind Catelgandolfo! The next few days I spent working about another 45 mins drive, further from Rome, and returned "home" to my room each night to be greeted with this view. My daily ritual was to enjoy a cappacino while watching the sun rise, work all day, return to "home" to sit on my patio and watch the sunset whil enjoying either a cold biere (beer) or a glass of wine, then sample the finest Italian cuisine for dinner!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I did visit Trivi Fountain and tossed a coin over my shoulder, I will be returning to Rome one day!

Ciao Italia, for now!

Just a few more pictures of Newcastle, England

These are just a couple of castles that were within 2 miles of my hotel. The steps in the one shot lead up to the castle to the left (they made up nearly 1 of the 2 miles). The well was in a clearing about half way up those steps.

That day I definitely earned the Special Bitters that I sampled when I made it back down to the hotel pub!

Time Travel: Fact or Fiction? (or "Look out, the Nerd has a beer!")

So tell me, is "Time Travel" possible?

First off let me give credit where it is due. This post was inspired by my good friend "Florida Cracker" at http://pureflorida.blogspot.com/ from a recent post of his where he apprehended an alleged "Time Traveler". Further credit is due to Albert Einstein who's mathematical reasoning helped to explain what was, until his time, unexplainable. Einstein had a wonderful theory about relativity, which most of you have probably heard of but really didn't take the time to try to understand. It's really common sense once you have explored it, but I'm not going to bore you with too many details. Please feel free to read it if you have trouble sleeping at night (or happen to be a fellow "nerdy scientist")! By using my understanding of Einstein's theory, and a little imagnination, I hope to stimulate your thoughts enough to entertain the idea that "Time Travel" is more than just a plausible theory.

Please do not blame "Florida Cracker" or Albert Einstein for this post, they were merely inspiration and should not be held accountable in any way for the following! ;-)

Now to be clear I'm not talking about traveling through the centuries or visiting another dimension, (come on I admit to being nerdy, but I'm not insane) I'm merely stating my observations. I have the pleasure of working for a truly global company and in my current occupation I have the opportunity to work with some of the world's most innovative scientists. I don't mean for this to sound boastful, but hopefully it will help to explain my postion on this topic. Anyway, I myself work on teams of people that are in several different geographies. Each one of these locations are in different time zones. Because of this my work day can start as early as 6:00AM and end as late as 9:00PM depending upon individual situations.

For example: I am on Eastern Time(ET), but I might need to have a teleconference with someone on Central Time(CT), here in the US, along with someone from Europe, and someone else from Asia. So, (stay with me here) it's 6AM for me, 5AM for CT, Noon for Europe, and 6PM for Asia (based on 24 hour day, standard 12 hr clock). No, this isn't the time travel part, but I needed to explain this to get there.

So let's say that we need to meet in person to have a discussion. So we decide to meet in Europe, because it is as close to a central point as we can get.
(Alright, I will boast a little here. This is the awesome part of my job! I get to travel a bit, and the frequency is just about right. It seems like a trip always comes along about the same time Lightnin asks: "Don't you have someplace to go for a few days?!"; This is also one of the secrets to a good marriage, but that's for another post).
Ok, where was I before I almost bored myself to sleep. Oh yeah, so here comes the math lesson (not really, but it might seem like it). So we meet in Europe at 8AM, that's 1AM to CT, 2AM to me, and 1PM to Asia.

Hang with me here, I'll get to the point in a minute. Get ready though beacause this is where it gets wierd!

I just got off of an 8hr flight, but I'm now 6 hours in the future! Think about that for a minute!
Now try this one: my colleague from Asia just traveled 6hrs into the past, yet we're now in the same place in time! I call my lovely wife to let her know that I have arrived safely. (Hopefully you're keeping up with me) She's 6hrs in the past and I have already traveled through those 6 hours!

If your head is starting to hurt, please take a break and maybe sit down and have a beer, hey that's how all this thinking started anyway!

With business concluded a few days later, I board a flight to return home. This is an 8 hour flight, that will take me to 6hours into the past, but when I arrive it's only 7 hours later (flight left at 10AM and arrived 5PM)! Don't even think about the fact that I have just lived 6 hours twice! (I said, don't think about that).

So, you tell me. Is "Time Travel" possible? Doesn't it happen every day? Maybe I just gave you a reason to read more about the theory of relativity! (OK, but it was worth a try!).

I think the key here is to remember that Time is a man made measurement. This measurement is relative to the distance between sunrise and sunrise, at one particular place on the earth. Once you move to a different place on the earth the original measurement, time in this case, is no longer relative. To say another way: once you leave your timezone that time no loger exists, at least for you, because you are now in a different time!

So again, you tell me Is "Time Travel" possible?

I say: "It's all relative"!



Ok, this is the prize for actually reading the ramblings above. This is a picture of Newcastle, England that I took on one of my trips. There are actually four bridges in the photo.

Beer, Not Just for Breakfast Anymore (or This isn't your Father's Budweiser)

I thought that it was fitting to begin with a couple of commercials that you may or may not remember, depending on your age. The title is a parody of the old Florida Orange Juice commercials by Anita Bryant (I believe she was Miss America, from Florida, back in the late 60's or early 70's), and the alternate is a parody of the Oldsmobile commercials in the 90's.

Anyway surprisingly enough this posting is about beer. Not so much the drinking of it, but the brewing. I do however need to provide you with a little background to get you up to pace with me. I am a registered beer judge and I enjoy the opportunity to help out my fellow brewers by examining their wares and providing helpful tips whenever possible. I was scheduled to do just that on this past Saturday, at a local competition that I like to attend annually. However, sometime during this past week my beloved Lightnin some how broke her foot (again, possibly the subject of a series of posts in the future). Not bad and just above the toes but painful just the same, so I decided that I should saty home to make sure she kept her foot elevated. This was no real problem, as I had already secured my official judging points for the year that are required to keep my license. So I was happy to stay at home and "be of use" to my spouse. Aha, I thought to myself, I can stay home and brew while keeping an eye on her. This is where the real story begins!

I am what you might refer to as a contemporary brewer. I have brewed the classic styles and have awards to attest that I do this very well, but I like to work out in the fringes of what is possible. This time of the year is a good time to brew a hearty drink, a stout for instance, so that is what I decided to do. Not just an ordinary Irish variety that you can find on tap at any respectable pub, but a Chocolate Cranberry Oatmeal Stout. An Oatmeal stout is typically a bit smoother than the standard dry stout that one might be used to and going a bit heavier on the chocolate malt (not the kind that is served at the soda fountain) would give it a nice flavor to go with the berries. This would go well with a Thanksgiving meal and should be ready to serve by then. So I searched through my records, aha I brewed one back in 2001 I'll use that recipe, but make a double batch (one for actual Thanksgiving, and the other to have on hand when people drop by)!

Now, to step back again for a minute, I should explain that my brewing equipment is about as manual as you can get and yet perform an all-grain process. And I have doubled up on recipes before with great success. I did however forget the physical characteristics of one, make that two, of the ingredients in this recipe. I typically use flaked barely in my stouts, to add some body and head retention (foaming). In this particular recipe I used both flaked barely and flaked oats (basically oat meal), to get a really nice creamy rich texture. Worked great on a single batch!

"Aw man, a stuck sparge!" Some brewing terminology: Sparge is to rinse the grains, keeping the run-off to be boiled and eventually becomes beer. A lautertun is used to set the mash (grains steeped in warm water to convert starches to sugars) in to perfrom the sparge. Well, my lautertun was definitey plugged and there was no sparge occuring! It seems that when you double the amount of flaked grains the percentage of oatmeal (the glumpy looking breakfast food) to cracked grains (usually form a natural filter bed and allows liquids to flow), was high enough to form a rather gelatenous structure that could be used to stop the flow of the Ohio River!

What do I do now? I've got over 20lbs of grain that was mashed in a little over 6 gallons of water, and I have my 10gal of sparge water ready to go. Well, nothing to do but go back to the oldest method of filtering the grains that I could think of. I pulled out the wire mesh straininer and started rinsing sparging the grains by hand. Thereby turning what should have been an enjoyable 6hr brewing session into a 13hr labor intensive mess! So about five hours later I have a brew pot full of good wort (the runn-off from the "sparge"), and a kitchen that looks like a tornado hit it (normally the kitchen is left in tact because I brew all grain outside).

Well from there the rest went according to plans, sort of. There was the extra 4 gallons of wort that was created because sparging through the hand held stainer was less efficient and required more sparge water. This of course had to be boiled down on the stove while the rest of the wort was boiling in my real brew pot. The boiling wort smelled wonderful, especially when the hops are added. Thank goodness Lightnin likes brewing too, she actually appreciated the aroma of the boiling wort and hop mixture in the house, of course she hadn't seen the kitchen yet because she was laying in the other room with her foot elevated (at least for now).

"Oh man, look at the time!" It's already 7:00PM, I've got another couple of hours to go before I'm done. "I hope lightnin isn't starving yet!" Too late! I hear the step-drag, step-drag of an approaching orthopedic damage control boot wearer! Luckily I had thought ahead and grilled out both lunch and dinner meats earlier in the day, but the side dishes would still need to be prepared. She enters the kitchen, smiles and asks "When do you think dinner will be ready?" I responded with "Weeelll, I've got a couple of more hours of brewing,and then theres this mess. Your'e not starving are you?" Then it happened, the worst blow of the day. She says "No, but it looks like you could use some help!" (probably thinking: in more ways then one). She continues "Really, I don't mind getting some of these pots rinsed out and then starting on the vegetables". "After laying around all day with my foot up I was getting a little bit of cabin fever, and needed to get up and move around for awhile".

So admitting defeat, I finished the brewing, Lightnin finished the dinner (and cleaned up part of my mess), and I failed to do what I had originally set out to do! Well , not completely, the beer is fermenting just fine and should be ready for the cranberries by next Saturday. If everything goes as planned the beer should be ready for Thanksgiving.

Sorry there weren't any photos of the operation on this posting, but next weekend I'm planning to brew a Rauchbier (a traditional Bavarian style smoked malt lager) and I'll try to get some pictures of that! It should be more colorful, and possibly more interesting!