Dec 7, 2008: Beer Crystals
 

The guys at The Florida State University, have some very neat toys. Big expensive toys for taking pictures of itty bitty things, like Beest does.

They have a website where they post lots of great pictures, up close and personal, of animal, vegetable, and mineral structures.

On this page they explain how they tried Polarized light microscopy then differential interference contrast microscopy with limited results. Next they tried freezing a thin sample which led to tons of problems in the florida humidity.
After considerable effort, they end up with, "seed crystallization technique with semi-hydrophobic seed crystals", which I can hardly get my head around but it sure makes pretty pictures.

http://cellar.org/2008/beer1.jpg
http://cellar.org/2008/beer2.jpg

They not only have beers from 30 different countries, but birthstones, drugs, brains, buckyballs, and a host of other cool stuff. :thumb:

No wonder I don't like Bud. That looks as awful as it tastes!

Dude, that is so four years ago.
http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=6911

It's taken me four years to find out what the hell you were talking about. :p

In retrospect, I'm not sure I knew what I was talking about.:eek:

Drink enough of those purty beers and you won't care if you know what you're talking about. :)

Or care. :haha:

[insert image of Homer Simpson drooling here]

beest hasn't seen the images yet, but says he's "not impressed because they're artificially seeded" :rolleyes:

It's looks like Corona is made from peacocks, Bass from tar and Lucozade, and Beck's from acid.

Y'know, when I read the thread title I thought someone had invented 'instant beer' crystals that could be added to water like instant coffee.

There's a Nobel Prize waiting for the first guy to do it.;)

Bud is okay. The pic of Bud is that also, just okay. Corona...I love Corona. I love the pic of Corona. I've never tried Carlsberg, but based solely on it's pic, I'm gonna.:beer:

That there Carl's Berg beer shore nuff do be purty.

Reminds me of those drink molecule ties.

The technical page I linked explains they decided to go with seed crystallization technique, because it gave the greatest variety of pictures. The other methods provided little difference, and this being a fun project rather than a scientific one, they were after as many pretty pictures as possible. The rest of the site has plenty of scientifically accurate pictures.

Oh, and tell beest he's a microscopy snob. :lol2:

i did.


he told me to STFU because he'd suceeded in connecting his laptop to the record player. (yes, vinyl)

Bwahahaahaa

I love it when nerds fight.

Ho hum, been there done that. :juggle: Even started a couple of threads about it.

Turntable -> (cheap) preamp -> computer.

Not much geek cred to be had there, Beest. Sorry.

I just plugged it in and it worked, now I need to reord a clip longer than 60 seconds, I'll go and dig out some threads.

winter sport is trying to SEM a snowflake, for me it has to be a fresh fallen snowflake, it has been done, but i think they grew theirs :headshake .

Anyway the beer guys will be on the invite list for my next Microscopy Conference.

I once applied for a job doing microscopy on ice cream for Walls ( Good Humor) the size, shape and distribution of fat particles is what makes it taste creamy (fat in ice cream, who knew!), ice crytals affect the taste too.

X-ray Diffraction of Chocolate is also a career objective.

It's shareware ($40), but I can vouch for Wave Corrector.

It does everything I need:
Record a whole side of an album.
Split it into tracks.
Declick it.
And save the tracks to disk.

I used Amadeus on my Mac when I had to digitize 50+ tapes (of varying states of degradation) for my grandmother. It did a good job splitting up tracks, de-hissing, etc. $40 from Kagi.

I've also heard good things about Audacity (free, oss).

After of going to the trouble of figuring it out, my brother gave me a turntable that plugs into a USB port to record direct, for my birthday.

Audacity is fantastic. It's free and open source, and you can do it all. Digitize any analog signal, get rid of pops within songs and static between songs, and split it up into tracks. Using only Audacity and the CD burning application that came with my PC (Sonic, I think) I put all my old vinyl (at least the ones that I wanted to save) onto CDs and can play them now in my CD payer. Once you have learned the software in an afternoon, it takes about an hour and a half to give each album the full treatment. The only thing I had to buy was an RCA to 1/8th inch cable adapter at Radio Shack to get the signal into the back of the PC from my old turntable and amp setup. I'm a big Audacity fan.

Where's the fun in that?

Audacity rules! :devil:

Leaves more time for sex, drugs, and egg roll. :p

lol. Successfully connected the comp to the record player. lol! I wanna see that. It will be the first and last time I do! lol!

ok I miss the record player and my records. :(