This weekend I made a batch of my world famous ginger beer. I say world famous only because the article has generated emails from around the world, almost as many as our EV conversion site. This time of year the emails are from the northern hemisphere while during the winter, well, our winter, the email comes from the folks enjoying summer in Australia and New Zealand.

While waiting for the spices to boil and infuse I marveled at how fast the bread yeast had kicked into action. It's sprinkled into a small measuring cup over a little warm, sugary water. In about five or ten minutes it was frothy on top, at least a quarter inch of the stuff.

Out comes the camera, reversed lens and camera flash. Onto a little black dish I put a single yeast granule (this is basic bread yeast) followed by a couple drops of sugar water. At first I was doing the experiment outside but it was too warm (80's!) and sunny, causing the water to evaporate.

Moved it inside, messed around a bit, finally got a few shots going (still need to work on lighting). The picture above shows the yeast granule about five minutes into the experiment. The air bubbles are generated by enzymes converting glucose to carbon dioxide, the same action that provides all of the great bubbles in the ginger beer and in bread.

Here's an interesting yeast experiment that involves hydrogen peroxide, released oxygen, and flaming balloons. Yeehaw!

Still need to rig up an AC power adaptor for the camera and hook it up to the powerbook so I can do longer time lapse photos. I was thinking about playing with time lapse the other night while looking at the moons around Jupiter. Mostly to see if I can capture the movement and how many of them can be identified.

The moons of Jupiter were once thought to be the key to determining longitude. At the time it was pretty easy to figure out latitude, how far north or south you were, but to determine your position along the other axis was nearly impossible once away from landmarks. Clocks weren't accurate or reliable enough, especially in the rough seas and extreme weather onboard sailing ships.

After years of careful observation the movement of the moons of Jupiter were charted such that you could cross-reference your sighting against a table and determine the local time. This sounds fantastical: can you imagine trying to look through a telescope while on a boat in rolling seas? I have a tough enough time of it on our back deck when the dog walks across the planks.

It's an interesting book, covering a number of the techniques attempted at the time. Another book, if you like the genre, is The Mapmakers. I've almost read The Mapmakers a couple of times. The first copy was accidentally left in a hotel in the south of France, nearly three quarters read. The current copy sits on the night-stand without a bookmark, an unplanned mental game which requires re-navigating the pages each time I revisit it.

None of which has a thing to do with yeast and I hope that you weren't expecting it to. Other than, uh, rising yeast and rising moons of Jupiter?