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Previously: Thermophilic vs. Mesophilic Yogurt Making

I boiled a gallon of milk in an Instant Pot. I let it cool to about 98°F, and then added the filmjölk yogurt drink "culture" and stirred it. I poured 1 quart of that mixture into a mason jar, sealed it, and left it out at room temperature (around 75-77°F). The remaining 3 quarts were heated back to ~115°F. Both yogurts fermented for about 16 hours before going in the fridge.

Both yogurts seemed to have about the same thickness, but the mesophilic yogurt seemed smoother with less lumps. The big difference is in the taste. The thermophilic yogurt has a clear sour/tangy taste as usual, but the mesophilic yogurt is very mild by comparison. That seems to conflict with what this page says about filmjölk (that it has a mild tartness, which I didn't really detect), but it seems clear that the thermophilic strains put out a lot more lactic acid. Increasing the fermentation time would probably have had an effect as well. My taste tester preferred the thermophilic yogurt, but enjoyed both. You could see the sour yogurt as having more uses (such as replacing sour cream or buttermilk in recipes).

I think the next step here would be to try using random storebought yogurt to make mesophilic yogurt. The stuff I used had 10 strains in it, while most yogurts have just 2-3. However, the safe bet is to just make it using the thermophilic process, since almost all of them should have Lactobacillus bulgaricus or Streptococcus thermophilus.

How cheap can you find a gallon of milk? I've seen whole milk at $1-2, and that's basically how much the yogurt costs (maybe with half of a $0.25 cup of yogurt if you aren't back-slopping). The time spent is minimal when using the Instant Pot. Maybe 5-10 minutes in total to pour milk in, hit a button, set the pot aside so it can cool faster, check the temperature with an instant thermometer, stir starter in, hit another button, pour into jars/containers for the fridge, and rinse the pot out. It just takes a day for it all to go down.

Everyone makes mistakes. If a cashier makes a mistake, you usually bring it to their attention. If it's a mistake that shorts you, everyone brings it to the cashier's attention. If it's in your favor, many of us tell the cashier anyway, right?

But, what about the big corporation that does everything on a computer? The computer makes no mistakes, right?

I need (well, actually, the wife needs) a pet carrier. I've shopped around a little, and the things go by different names - pet carrier, pet crate, pet cage, etc. We will rarely need the thing, there's not much point in getting a high dollar cage. But, it's got to be big enough, so the little cheapo's are out of the question. That puts us squarely in the $75 to $100 range.

I had almost settled on a cage from Tractor Supply for $80, and planned to get it on the way home from work. But, I had to pick something up FOR work, before I could leave town to go home. Wandered by the pet supplies while I was in Wal-Mart, and there was a pet taxi for $64. Hmmmm - it meets all my requirements - guess I'll get it. Grabbed a couple other things while I was there, went to the counter, and ran into difficulties. The stupid card reader didn't like my card.

A bell had gone off in my head that the bill didn't look high enough for my purchases, but the card reader puking distracted me. By the time that was straightened out, I had forgotten the bell. Three minutes later, everything loaded into the Trailblazer, I remembered that the bill didn't seem quite right. Read it - and that pet taxi was listed at $19.

Weird. Neither the cashier nor I had any input - the bar code reader read the sticker, identified it properly, and charged me for it. Hmmmm - maybe I read the price wrong? Not hardly - I've been shopping for these things for the past three days. Screw it - I'm not going back inside to argue with the store manager that he shouldn't have given me about 60% off.

Got home, and looked this thing up on Walmart site. There, it is listed at $88, not the $64 that I read on the store shelf. That price shows that I got about a 75% discount, not the ~66% that the shelf price indicated.

So - ethics. This will kinda nag at me for a little while, at least. If this were a case where the cashier were at fault, and I knew that she would have to take the difference out of her pocket, I would definitely go back and make things right. But - on a computer? FFS, we've all talked about "on a computer" in regards to patents.

But, this IS the corporate world. Computers don't make mistakes, right? It would take ten or fifteen minutes to convince the store manager that there was a mistake. Then what? Do they even have accounting practices in place to make this kind of thing right? Chances are high that the manager would consider it too much of a headache to go through the motions, and tell me to get lost.

Then what? Write a letter to corporate offices?

And, is all of that time and effort worth it? It's a forty dollar mistake, and I'm going to spend a hundred dollars worth of my time and effort making it right?

Screw it. There ain't no minimum wage employee at risk of losing that forty bucks. The Waltons can eat the loss.

If anyone else happens to be searching for a 42" pet carrier/cage/whatever, visit Walmart, and check out the Pet Taxi, by Doskocil. Maybe you can get it for a twenty dollar bill!

Some guy was waxing fundamentalist with a megaphone as he carried a sign upon which he delivered The Christ's once-thought-lost lessons as for example "Gays Deserve AIDS".

Inspired by the bagpiper who got right in this gent's face when he was so very filled with G-d's love that he set out to save a few souls at Portland's Starlight Parade - held after dark with lit up floats, musicians and dancers - I myself walked right up to a perfectly legal and nonviolent distance then with the volume turned all the way up to eleven belted out such timeless hits as The Star Spangled Banner, You Are My Sunshine and Somewhere Over The Rainbow as my quarry struggled in vain to hand out religious tracts at the TriMet Pioneer Courthouse Square MAX Yellow Line Station.

But to my quite cheerful dismay I ultimately conceded he was a better man than I and so demonstrated my good sportsmanship by conceding his victory then suggesting he google "Michael David Crawford Baritone".

What people are saying about Michael David Crawford, Baritone:

"I Love You."

This from a lady who shot an iPhone video of me following Jesus Freak around all over Creation. (I didn't think to request she post it to YouTube.)

When again I take up my tip jar I'll come equipped with URL-bearing handbills that I'll mass produce at NedSpace. We all have the freedom to print a "reasonable" number of pages on a two-sided laser printer as well as the free use of my very favorite musical instrument:

A guillotine paper cutter. I own this particular one that I also use for the case inserts for my instrumental piano EP Geometric Visions: The Rough Draft. I shall soon take up handing them out Free As In Freedom when I sing on the street as well as at Open Mics.

Civilly And Disobediently,

Michael David Crawford, Baritone

PS: Coming Fall 2018: Michael David Crawford LIVE! On Broadway.

(...and Morrison in Downtown Portland, Oregon.)

AMD Threadripper 2990X leak suggests it'll be much cheaper than Intel's i9-7980XE chip

AN OVERLY-KEEN German retailer has potentially revealed how much AMD's upcoming Threadripper 2990X will cost.

Videocardz spotted the since-removed listing at Cyperport, which listed the 32-core CPU with a €1,509 (around £1,300) price-tag, making it roughly €500 more expensive than AMD's 16-core Threadripper 1950X at launch.

However, it also makes the CPU almost €500 cheaper than Intel's Core i9-7980XE flagship, despite the fact that AMD's 32-core chip will likely offer close to double the performance of the lesser-spec, 18-core chip.

$1,500 USD?

Previously: Intel Teases 28 Core Chip, AMD Announces Threadripper 2 With Up to 32 Cores

Creep travels half the world to harass online teen gamer… and gets shot by her mom – cops

Inside Tunisia's Shams Rad - the Arab world's 'only gay radio station'

Tonight i had a breakthrough with my son!

His norm is to ask for a drink by handing you his cup, or by pointing or by saying 'rink'.
Tonight, i was back at forcing words from him, but this time when getting him to say "I. Want. A. Drink", i moved my arm down and up with every word. Did this a couple times, then used his arm.
Each time i moved his arm down and up again, i said "I. want. a. rink." Then did it again without saying anything but the starting "I."
He then proceeded to finish with "I. want. a. drink."

BIG BREAKTHROUGH, as he usually has to have sentences dragged out of him slowly and prefers the one word answer (so do i: while i admit he gets through to you what he wants when he says "rink", getting him to repeat words and sentences is the next step in removing the tech we have to haul around).
So, it was nice to see this from him. Or...

It.
was.
nice.

(Problem is, as it was with him saying "Butterfly" once and only once no matter how much I praised him and tried to get him to say it again, this may be a one time thing and he may never do it again...

...but will attempt it again tomorrow after he has time to sleep on it, lol.

Most of the regulars here probably know that I'm into the Bitcoin. I've been completely obsessed with it for just over 5 years now. I've mined, I've traded (usually unsuccessfully), I've held.

Bitcoin has changed, and not in a good way.

When I first got into bitcoin, there really wasn't much you could buy with it. There was that farm in Argentina(?) that would sell Alpaca socks, Bees Brothers Honey, Satoshi Dice (gambling), and that was pretty much it. The network was much smaller with less users and less transactions. 'Real' people still hadn't heard of bitcoin yet.

Back then, the energy was good. Communities valued differing opinions and being nerds, there was ample debate on every topic no matter how menial. Every time a new merchant accepted BTC, everyone was excited and would try to support that business. The motto wasn't 'HODL', but rather 'Spend and Replace'. Big business started accepting Bitcoin. Microsoft and Steam where huge victories. Buying games off steam with bitcoin was an amazing experience.

So what happened? Bitcoin stopped growing and started shrinking. Business that used to accept bitcoin stopped. Steam? They left. There are many other examples of companies that previously accepted bitcoin that no longer do.

***

In 2014, a number of the Bitcoin Core Developers created BlockStream. Blockstream was one of the early 'companies' to actually receive funding in bitcoinland. The initial announcement was generally well received (after all, if someone wants to spend money on dev work, that's great). Some people expressed concern about this new company. Blockstream's stated goal was to enhance the bitcoin ecosystem using something called sidechains. This concept was completely new at the time and everyone was pretty unsure what a sidechain even was and how it worked.

The basic idea of a sidechain is that you can send bitcoin to a script address that would lock up the bitcoin until a set of conditions are met. While the bitcoin is locked up in that script address, you can then reference the locked-up bitcoin in another blockchain and transact on this other blockchain referencing the 'value' of the locked up bitcoin. This new sidechain could offer additional functionality (like faster blocks, bigger blocks, additional scripting features, etc). When the transaction is complete, the sidechain could signal back to the original chain to release the funds (and possibly redistribute them if value was transferred on the sidechain).

One of the first examples (I think it actually /was/ the first) of a working sidechain was from a company called 21inc. This company received a pretty good chunk of cash to develop a little chip that was going to be installed everywhere. This chip was capable of mining as well as performing transactions. The idea was that one of these chips would be installed in pretty much every powered appliance. Your fridge, your washing machine, your cell phone, etc. All these devices would be mining and earning a small amount of bitcoin. 21inc would collect 75% and the 'owner' of the device would get the remaining 25% of mining revenue. So, your fridge would be mining away earning you a small amount of bitcoin. This bitcoin could then be used to pay for services. Your fridge could buy food or electricity or whatever. Your washing machine could buy water. Your phone could pay for stuff. There was a lot of excitement, but unfortunately 21inc never really went anywhere beyond a dev kit that you could purchase.

Back to Blockstream. While the initial response to Blockstream's incorporation and funding was positive, eventually people started to question their motives. Blockstream's stated business model was to create sidechains and profit off them. 6 months after Blockstreams founding, Lightning was announced. Lightning was kind of like a sidechain but not quite... The initial response to the announcement was overwhelmingly positive. Lightning promised quick, cheap transactions using bitcoin as the value backing the transaction.

Not everyone was a fan of Blockstream. Some people looked into where the funding had come from and found that AXA Venture Partners (a subsidvision of AXA insurance) was a major contributor to the initial seed funding. Many of the investors of Blockstream had some pretty heavy traditional banking background and that worried some people. Blockstream starting hiring Bitcoin Core developers in 2015. It wasn't long before ~50% of the core developers (the ones that actually committed code) where on Blockstream's payroll. And around this time, the narrative started changing.

At the time, there were two main communities that people would discuss Bitcoin: reddit/r/bitcoin and bitcointalk.com. Both of these communities were run be the same person, Michael Marquardt, who went by the handle 'Theymos'. Discussion was generally open and unmoderated until some time in 2015. The block size debate had resurfaced again. This debate had been going on for years and until this point it was pretty much assumed that when transaction volume warranted it, that there would be an update to increase the block size. There were several proposals on the table, but the proposal that had the most traction was an 8MB block size.

Gavin Andreson (former lead developer for Bitcoin and the man that Satoshi left in charge when he mysteriously left), coded up a fully functional bitcoin client that would accept these larger blocks. The client was called BitcoinXT and would enable a block size increase if 750 of the last 1000 blocks signaled for the increase (75% threshold).

Meanwhile, on reddit (where all the bitcoiners would congregate), Theymos was no longer taking a light handed approach to moderation. Any post that promoted BitconXT was 'offtopic' or 'alt-coin discussion' and those posts would be removed. Comments would be removed, and Theymos went so far as to modify the custom CSS for the bitcoin subreddit so that deleted comments wouldn't show up at all hiding the extent of moderation. It was around this time that I noticed that some threads would be sorted weirdly. Instead of the normal sort order of 'new' or 'best', many threads were being sorted by 'controversial'. Sorting in this way would allow Theymon to bury comments and mislead the discussion. This sorting manipulation was not just on a few threads, I would see quite a few examples of this every day and it was an obvious attempt to quell and mislead actual discussion.

As BitcoinXT started gaining support, someone or some group started attacking nodes running the XT nodes. THey would be DDoSed into oblivion. Core developers under the payroll of Blockstream even condoned these attackes and suggested other possible attack vectors, such as faking support to cross the activation threshold only to pull support at the last moment. Anyone that would publicly support a block size increase would be publicy smeared and attacked. Many people and companies continue to be smeared and attacked to this day. (One recent example is coinbase being removed from the bitcoin.org website because they added Bitcoin Cash support).

One day, during some 'Who is Satoshi?' drama, Gaven Andresen posted a tweet saying that he believed that Craig Wright was satoshi. This was after Gavin had met with Craig in person and had allegedly watched Craig sign a message with an original Satoshi private key. When Gavin posted this tweet, the Core developers claimed that was evidence that he had been hacked and revoked his commit access to the github bitcoin repo. That access was never reinstated. The original developer that was chosen by satoshi had been kicked out.

The scaling argument continued to rage on. Users of reddit/bitcoin that supported a block size increase would find themselves banned from the sub. These big blockers would find a new home in reddit/btc and stop posting in reddit/bitcoin. The community was split -- big blockers lived on reddit/btc and small blockers lived on reddit/bitcoin.

More proposals would be offered. Bitcoin Unlimited was released sometime around early 2017, again with the goal of increasing block sizes using a new signaling technique. Another idea was 'SegWit'. In the spring of 2017 segwit had ~30% support while Bitcoin Unlimited was at times approaching 50%. However, bitcoin was at a stalemate.

Some bitcoin industry leaders met in NY to create what would become the New York Agreement. This agreement would accept SegWit, and a block size would be enabled 90 (?) days after that. The block size would be 2MB, the smallest increase possible, but an increase nonetheless. As per the agreement, miners started signaling, and Segwit was enabled on mainnet. However, after Segwit was enabled, a massive campaign was launched called NO2x. This campaign was ultimately successful, and is why Bitcoin only has 1MB blocks.

Since then, bitcoin hasn't been growing like it did prior to that time. Instead of features being added, features were being removed. Things were getting more complex instead of simpler and more accessable. Bitcoin used to be 'Build it and they Will Come', but now bitcoin actually discourages people from using it. That is not the bitcoin I signed up for.

Fortunately, just prior to Segwit activating on mainnet, Bitcoin ABC was created to split the bitcoin chain, and on August 1, 2017 Bitcon Cash was born. Unlike bitcoin, Bitcoin cash is growing. Bitcoin cash has many of the 'old-timer' working on it. These people helped make bitcoin what it was, but many now fight for Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash has nearly caught up with Bitcoin in terms of acceptance in less than one year.

This is really just the very, very tip of the iceburg. There is so much more that I have left out. In short, I feel that Bitcoin has been hijacked and no longer represents the bitcoin described in the whitepaper. It no longer follows the formula that made it successful initially. Bitcoin Cash is now the closest thing to the original vision, and that's why I am a Bitcoin Cash Supporter.

I got a really bad case of the shits last night as well as excruciating abdominal pain.

Once I convinced myself that I would not piss out my asshole until after a hearty meal, I walked to the Emergency Room. Of all the toetullie kewal things I was the _only_ ER patient between 2:00 and 5:00 AM so I got the Red Carpet treatment.

They were concerned about my abdominal pain so they gave me a CT scan.

This is point at which the Roffle Copters start up their engines, their blades turning slow at first then whirling faster and faster:

The scan and some blood tests turned up that I have a garden variety case of the shits that the doc said would "resolve itself" with the aid of such over-the-counter remedies as Imodium. Too bad that I'm busted so flat that I can't buy any yet.

LOLCATS:

That same CT scan turned up a "mass" on my right kidney. The diagnostic radiologist and my ER doc both said it's most likely cancer.

But the ER doc said "It's not going to kill you as it's quite treatable. They'll just surgically remove your kidney then prescribe a course of chemotherapy."

I'm down with that as I've always hoped that the day would come that I might be completely overcome with vomiting while at the same time receiving an IV drip of Fenergin, Arnold Schwarzenegger-like anti-nausea medication.

I'll book an appointment with my Primary Care Physician just after I post this. Their scheduling people always ask _why_ I want to see her. The worse my complaint is the sooner I get seen.

I'll need a referral most likely to a Nephrologist, then that same kidney doc will give me a biopsy. I'll know from my Pathologist's report how likely I am to fulfill you sorry lot's heart's desires by perishing in indescribable agony, as well as what the best course of treatment would be.

Wish Me A Long And Happy Life!

Dying,

Mischa

Normally when I want to make yogurt, I use a thermophilic process:

1. Heat/boil a gallon of milk to kill (reduce) whatever is in it.
2. Let it cool down to about 115-120°F (45-50°C).
3. Stir in a few tablespoons of store-bought yogurt, or "back-slopped" yogurt from the previous batch.
4. Hold it at 115°F/45°C for 8 - 16 hours.
5. Store in fridge.

You can use a yogurt maker, but some Instant Pots come with a yogurt function and if your oven can keep the temperature at 115°F/45°C, then you can just put a covered pot of it in there.

I got a couple of these on clearance with the intention of using one as a starter culture. It supposedly contains these active cultures:

L. lactis subsp. lactis, L. lactis subsp. cremoris, L. lactis subsp. lactis biovar diacetylactis, Leuconostoc subsp. cremoris, S. thermophilus, L. bulgaricus, L. rhamnosus, L. casei, L. acidophilus, Bifidobacterium sp.

My bottle is almost identical (some of the names are reformatted):

L. lactis subsp. lactis, L. lactis subsp. cremoris, L. lactis subsp. lactis biovar diacetylactis, Leuconostoc spp., S. thermophilus, L. delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus, L. rhamnosus, L. paracasei, L. acidophilus, Bifidobacterium spp.

Filmjölk is described as a mesophilic yogurt - with the strains added to cold milk, not boiled, and fermented at room temperature, i.e. 70-78°F (21-26°C). However, some of the strains listed above, such as thermophilus and bulgaricus, are clearly found in thermophilic process yogurts.

So should I just make it the thermophilic way like usual, do it at room temperature, or try to do each version? Is there a middle ground (such as keeping it warm for 4 hours, and then letting it drop to room temperature)?

Blood Moon 2018 prophecy: What is the Blood Moon prophecy and will the world end?

Nibiru is just so passé.