Thursday January 10, 2002
Riddling homemade Champagne

I spend a few seconds each day riddling. My current science experiment is these two bottles of homemade champagne. Champagne starts with fully fermented wine, before it's bottled and before you put in chemicals (potassium metabisulphite) to stop the fermentation for good. Put the wine in a sturdy Champagne bottle, a little sugar (the dosage), a little yeast, then seal it up and set aside for in-bottle fermentation. After the yeast has done it's stuff (made lots of carbon dioxide for bubbles) you begin the task of riddling. Riddling involves storing the bottle at a downward angle (a plastic bucket in this case) and giving it a small turn each day. The goal is to get the yeast sediment to all slide down into the neck of the bottle.

Stay tuned: next month, disgorgement!



Here's a new design for cars with a single pedal for braking AND accelerating. Tilt the top of the pedal to accelerate, push the whole pedal to brake. This will make it even easier for "boolean drivers." You've seen them in the rearview mirror: either full on or full off, no coasting and no patience. Not to be confused with "bungee drivers": the second and third car at a stop sign that somehow get bungeed along (despite oncoming traffic) when the first car pulls out.


Chemists accidentally discover new explosive computer chips which will aid in many scientific applications. That's the mark of a true scientist, me thinks, someone who has a batch of silicon blow up in their face and instead of (or maybe in addition to) swearing and screaming thinks "my, that was a very clean burning flame, what can I make with it?"
A fellow electronics technician from back in my days at the FAA used to tell everyone that electronic circuits actually worked by shuttling around small packets of smoke. As proof, when you short something on the circuit board it "let's the smoke out" and the thing doesn't work anymore.


Anaerobic Plug-flow Digester

A story from Spectrum covers new steps taken by farmers stateside (it's already being used in other countries) to turn livestock waste into fuel. Methane, that is.