9:26:53.58 – Happy π day.
It’s a chilly, drizzly day here. Barbara has some errands to run, and then we’ll be doing kit stuff. Once we get our current stock of empty bottles labeled and filled, I’ll be reordering so that we can get thousands and thousands more bottles labeled and ready to go for the summer rush.
I haven’t yet heard again from Jen. I’m assuming that she and her husband picked up their trailer load of supplies at Sam’s Club yesterday and are now sitting in their basement wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into. The canned stuff won’t be too bad; they can just stack cases. But they were planning ultimately to buy about 1.5 tons (1363 kilos) of rice, sugar, flour, and other dry staples in 50-pound bags. I’m not sure how much of that they came back with yesterday, but getting that stuff repackaged in 500 one-gallon Mylar bags is going to be a lot of work. I did warn her to get a hundred bags filled BEFORE she opens a 100-pack of oxygen absorbers, and THEN drop one into each bag and seal the bags as fast as possible. I did encourage her to buy a good impulse sealer rather than one of the $35 cheapies on Amazon.com, and to have a regular clothes iron in reserve just in case.
10:56 – One advantage I mentioned to Jen of packing your own dry staples in foil-laminate Mylar bags also holds true for home-canned goods: in a large scale emergency, the “authorities” are much less likely to confiscate them, as happens frequently in major emergencies. They want commercially-packaged products, and the food industry has spent a lot of money to brainwash people into believing that food past its best-by date has gone bad. You can make confiscation even less likely by labeling your home-packaged food properly. For example, the next time we repackage dry staples, instead of labeling them “Rice, 6 pounds, Packed March 2015”, I’ll label them “Rice, 6 pounds, Expires March 1985” and so on. Who would want food that “expired” 30 or more years ago?
14:27 – We just returned from a very quick visit to Sam’s Club. The only shelf-stable foods I picked up were three #10 cans of vegetables and two #10 cans of Bush’s Best Baked Beans. Call it 35 pounds of food.
Before we went to Sam’s, we ran over to pick up Mary’s and Paul’s mail and paper, thinking they weren’t due back from Iceland until late today. Turns out, they had just gotten home. As we turned onto their street, Barbara said their garage door had just gone down. I told her to pull into their drive, where I pushed the button and made it go up again. Paul said it made him jump. He and Mary hadn’t even made it out of the garage yet.
They enjoyed their trip, even though the main purpose was to see the Northern Lights and Iceland was clouded out the whole time they were there. That, and there were no Northern Lights anyway. As I said, at least the volcano didn’t choose this week to erupt and strand them there.
I mentioned that Barbara and I were watching Saving Grace, and both of them had nice things to say about it. I really put it in our queue for Barbara, since I had no desire to watch a series that co-stars an archangel. (Why is archangel pronounced as in ark, while archbishop et al. are pronounced as in arch?)
But Grace is a strong atheist who isn’t buying what the archangel is selling. I consider myself a pretty strong atheist–a 6 out of 7 on Dawkin’s scale–but even I would believe given the evidence that Grace sees. So I’m assuming that she must be a 7/7.
This is the first time either of us has seen Holly Hunter, who’s extraordinary. Hunter manages to make her character likable, despite the fact that Grace is a 50-ish dissolute cop who arrests people who’ve committed no crimes, drives drunk and killed someone while doing so, engages in frequent one-night stands, and has an ongoing affair with her married partner. Even Barbara likes her, which is saying something.
Curious what you recommend for a good impulse sealer, or how one uses an iron to seal bags.
I have a Foodsaver 2490 I’ve been using for years and I do NOT recommend one of the upright “automatic” models because of really dumb design. Bags aren’t that expensive if you hunt around, and the mason jar sealer is far handier than I would have expected.
You nailed it on “Saving Grace”. And Leon Rippy surprisingly makes a good angel. And I have always enjoyed Holly Hunter’s movies, especially “Always”.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096794/
BTW, I do think that Earl (Leon Rippy) in “Saving Grace” is just a regular angel. Archangels are angels such as Michael, Gabriel, and Lucifer.
No, Earl is an archangel. You can tell by the size of his wings. The lesser the rank of an angel, the smaller his wings. Earl’s are gigantic.
Lucifer warn’t no archangel.
They are:
Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel, Raguel, Remiel and Saraqael.
As to an impulse sealer, I’d go with something that does at least a 5mm wide seal, and 12.5mm or more is better. Most of the cheap ones put down a 2mm seal. You can use an iron (non-stick) on its highest setting to seal the LDS Mylar bags, although they specifically say not to. I’ve heard good things about the $400 sealers that LDS store sells, but I’ve never used one. I’ll have to check with our LDS store. Some of them lend/rent equipment, including canners that seal #10 cans. They may also lend/rent impulse sealers. The sealers that come with Food Savers and similar products are worthless for the LDS bags, which are simply too thick for them to deal with. I have a low-end sealer that’s supposedly good up to 7 mil, but I don’t really trust it. I need to test it by sealing a bag full of air, weighing it, and then putting a brick or concrete block on it for several days. If it doesn’t lose any mass I’ll assume that the little bitty 2mm seal is good.
“…a 50-ish dissolute cop who arrests people who’ve committed no crimes, drives drunk and killed someone while doing so, engages in frequent one-night stands, and has an ongoing affair with her married partner.”
Unless she actually brutalizes those innocent people she arrests, she does not quite yet meet our currently high standards of police officers here in North Murka. But that DUI vehicular homicide counts for a lot. There’s hope for her still.
Lucifer warn’t no archangel.
They are:
Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel, Raguel, Remiel and Saraqael.
Source? I have never even heard of five of those. Wait, I see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Archangels
Doesn’t the Bible say somewhere that Lucifer was the most beautiful of all the angels but had evil in his heart? I had presumed that he was an archangel before he led 1/3rd??? of the angels in a revolution. Of course, seven is one of the good numbers.
One of my programmers brought in a huge apple pie from Costco yesterday and I ate three pieces. Does that count?
“B&M Brown Bread Original, 16 Ounce Cans (Pack of 12)”
http://www.amazon.com/Brown-Bread-Original-Ounce-Cans/dp/B0025UCI94/
Very interesting once I got the bread out of the can. It had a strong smell of molasses and a strong taste. The taste got weaker over a day and was better then. My cans are dated best by Oct 16, 2017 so I am not sure that this is a good prepper food.
The procedure to get the bread out of the can is:
1. cut the end off the can using a can opener
2. use a knife to separate the bread from the sides of the can
3. cut the other end off the can using a can opener
4. use the can lid to push the bread out of the can
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (136 reviews)
Yeah, I have a case or two of B&M in stock, mainly for situations where it’s impossible to heat food. I wouldn’t worry too much about the best by date. My guess is that the stuff will still be as good in ten years as it is now. Ignore best by dates on canned stuff. They’re imaginary.
“Doesn’t the Bible say somewhere that Lucifer was the most beautiful of all the angels but had evil in his heart? I had presumed that he was an archangel…”
The most beautiful, and the bringer of light. But not an archangel.
“Very interesting once I got the bread out of the can.”
Haha, yeah, it’s always a PITA messing with brown bread, whether you get it in the B&M can or make it yourself from scratch. I’m kinda surprised they have it in TX as it’s a New England Yankee specialty, as is Anadama Bread, both using molasses. We can get the plain kind up here or the kind with raisins. I usually just push it out of the can once both lids are off, without having to slide a knife in there. Bake it for a while in the oven, but not too long, or it gets tough. Toasted slices are good, too. Slather that unsalted buttuh on there, pilgrim!
If you wanna make it from scratch you gotta stuff the dough into a greased coffee can with both ends open, fuss with aluminum foil, and then steam it in a hot water bath.
Mrs. OFD just made some fairly decent banana-cranberry bread, which we are both scarfing down today. Ham and beans later, with sweet potato and broccoli.
Overcast, temps in the high 30s, no wind, and usual cretins out on the bay ice in their multiple vehicles clustered together, after several days earlier with temps in the 40s.
76 F here in the Land of Sugar and we have this bright yellow thing in the sky. Haven’t seen it in over a week. Some call it a star but I think it is a massive fusion reactor. In fact, probably the only working fusion reactor this star system will ever see.
html5 internet speed test:
http://speedof.me/
The old speed test is flash dependent:
http://www.speedtest.net/
I am trying to get away from flash due to the crash problems.
Rated my home AT&T DSL line as 25 Mbps down / 2 Mps up.
58.8/8.25 for me on speedof.me I don’t know what other net stuff was running.
“I need to test it by sealing a bag full of air, weighing it, and then putting a brick or concrete block on it for several days. If it doesn’t lose any mass I’ll assume that the little bitty 2mm seal is good.”
I read that that morning and thought, “That’s a good idea!”. Described the idea to a non-technical friend who said, “That’s nonsense”, and my poor old head went into a tailspin with gedankenexperiments trying to figure out how to explain how she was wrong and I was right. The Jim Beam probably didn’t help.
An inflated balloon will obviously get heavier. A rigid container that loses air will obviously get lighter. I’ve been thinking about a merely flexible container that loses or gains air and getting nowhere.
My most sensitive scale claims a 0.01 gram sensitivity. Is there a practical way for me to test this?
“Happy π day”
Happy (ln (-1) / i) Day, y’all… 🙂
“I consider myself a pretty strong atheist–a 6 out of 7 on Dawkin’s scale…”
Last time you mentioned the Dawkins scale you were 6.9999999/7, so OFD and I are making progress… 🙂
Gabriel and Michael are mentioned in the Bible, the others only in the Apocrypha, which is non-canonical – unless you’re Catholic.
Greg is correct about where those guys appear.
What is this Dawkins Scale you speak of? Oh, I see; I guess I’m at “1” on that. Or maybe .5.
Off to the airport this morning; Mrs. OFD flies to San Antonio, where Ozzy peed on the Alamo. And OFD hisself spent a few days here and there during the various interminable sentences he served in the great Lone Star State. Next week, the capital of Pennsylvania, with a week off, and then a week in Greensboro, NC, back in Dr. Bob’s neck of the woods.
As someone who adores pianos and piano music I find this very sad:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-15/piano-sales-plunge-in-united-states/6248428
OFD,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_theistic_probability
At STP, one mole of a gas has a volume of 22.4 liters. Nitrogen makes up about 80% of the atmosphere and oxygen most of the other 20%. The molar mass of nitrogen is about 28 g and of oxygen 32 g, so using back of the envelope calculations one liter of air masses about [(0.8 * 28) + (0.2 * 32)] / 22.4 = (22.4 + 6.4) / 22.4 = 1.3 g. A full one-gallon (3.8 L) bag thus has 4.9 g of air in it.
Your centigram balance could thus detect a loss of one part in 490, or about 0.2%. My milligram balance could detect a loss of 0.02%.
Of course, that doesn’t take into account volume and displacement. In effect, my inflated bag is floating on the sea of air like a boat is floating on water.
Yup, and that’s why you should expect the null result no matter how good your scale is (and no matter how much the bag leaks). That’s easy to test, if one finds the theory confusing: weigh a new, flat bag with no air; then fill with air, seal, and reweigh, getting the same number. (I don’t find the theory confusing, and thus am comfortable just flatly stating that if you don’t get the same number you’ve done something wrong.)
Fill the bag with helium, on the other hand, or CO2, and you’d have something to measure. (But then you’d be measuring the diffusion rate of helium or CO2, rather than the diffusion rate of oxygen, which is the main thing of interest. And short-term tests may not be good anyway, since diffusion may start into the barrier but not finish getting through before the test is up.)
Yep, which is why I’m actually going to fill the bag with water, which also obviates the need for a scale.
The issue isn’t molecules penetrating the Mylar foil-laminate bag. It’s whether the seal is reliable, and for that testing with water is as good as anything else. I’m much more comfortable with a wide seal for obvious reasons. Commercial products in foil-laminate bags use wide seals for good reason. A 2mm seal offers too little barrier to leaks. One ten times that width brings the potential leakage paths to nearly zero.
The $400 LDS impulse sealer does a 5mm seal, which is much better than 2mm, but still not nearly as wide as I’d like. For our own stuff, I’ll do an initial seal at the top edge of the bag with a narrow sealer and then go back and do a wide seal with a clothes iron.
Actually, water-tightness is a lot easier to achieve than air-tightness. I think that’s partly a matter of surface tension (there are holes water won’t go into) and partly a matter of viscosity.
I think that diffusion through the plastic inner layer is why they specify the wide seal: oxygen doesn’t diffuse through the aluminum, but it does diffuse through plastic; and even though that’s a thin, long diffusion path, a significant amount gets through when compared to what gets through the aluminum. But if you have an oxygen absorber inside the bag, the amount of oxygen that gets through is still probably negligible compared to the amount that the absorber can absorb. (There are probably enough permeability constants readily available that I could make a reasonably quick estimate, but I’m feeling lazy at the moment.)
In any case, in practical terms the main obstacles to getting a good seal (on the level of ‘will it hold air’?) are contamination and overfilling. Overfilling gives you wrinkles across the seal, which kill it. And if you test a new, clean bag, you’ll be wasting your time; the interesting question is how good the seal will be when the inside of the bag is coated with flour or whatever — or when it was coated with flour, and then you tried to wipe off the inside of the mouth, pushing the residue into the ends of the mouth where it formed air channels. A wider seal gives you more of a chance of avoiding these problems (though I’ve always just used multiple 2mm seals).
Yep, but we’re talking about air under whatever the minor difference is in outer versus inner pressure versus water under the pressure of a brick or concrete block. Even with an oxygen absorber, the internal pressure is about 80% of the external pressure.
Yes, avoiding contamination is important. That’s why, when I’m filling something fluffy like flour, I wipe the inner surfaces near the edge to be sealed with a slightly tacky cloth. Again, width of seal makes a big difference. Consider the mean/SD particle size of what’s in the bag versus the width of the seal.
As to multiple 2mm seals, that really doesn’t do you much good. The only one that matters is the one nearest the material in the bag. If it leaks, the other seals are immaterial. If it holds, the other seals are also immaterial.
Don’t underestimate atmospheric pressure; 20% of 15 psi (one atmosphere) is somewhat more than a 5-lb brick exerts on any of its faces. Not that it matters here — unless the seal is good, the pressures inside and outside will be close to equal after the initial leakage (in which the oxygen in the flow will get sopped up by the absorber), and what will matter in the long run is diffusion through the leakage hole, boosted a bit by whatever flow there is due to pressure variation from weather (except not to exceed the pressure needed to inflate the bag a bit). So I agree that we’re talking minimal pressure with air versus brick pressure with water, but I think the air versus water difference could easily be more important than the pressure difference, especially given that the ‘minimal pressure with air’ scenario is to last for perhaps a decade while the water scenario is a one-day experiment.
If you did the water test and used a sensitive scale, that’d be better, since you’d detect water emitted as vapor, not just liquid leakage. Best would be to test a bag filled as per normal procedure, to cover contamination issues; but I can’t see an easy way to do so.
As for the multiple seals business, I’m using oxygen absorbers. If the innermost seal leaks, that’ll just let in a bit of oxygen from the interseal gaps, which will get absorbed. All the seals have to leak for there to be a real problem.
Yep, which is why I’m actually going to fill the bag with water, which also obviates the need for a scale.
Hydrostatic testing is the basis of all vessel testing in the engineering world. Decide what your maximum allowable operating pressure is and then figure out some way to test the vessel using water pressurized to 1.5 times that MAOP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_allowable_operating_pressure
The sealers that come with Food Savers and similar products are worthless for the LDS bags > E.g. >2 mm?
Good to know. Without spending $400 for an LDS machine, perhaps one could hack one together on his own? If anyone would like to investigate, I have a link for a nichrome wire dealer on one of these damn computers.
Gads, I’d forgotten about B&W Brown Bread. Use to love that with baked beans as a kid.
Boston Brown Bread w/Raisins, from-scratch Boston Baked Beans w/chunk of salt pork, and as kids we also had hot dogs w/mustard and relish. Now I’d more likely have kielbasa w/spicy mustard. My grandpa, dad and I used to snag the salt pork but my mom and wife find it disgusting.
Mrs. OFD safely touched down in San Antonio tonight after a rocky start out of Vermont early this morning with snow flurries, sleet and wind. I took her down on the interstate and drove home after and it was slick out there, no sanding/salting trucks anywhere in sight, naturally, with tire tracks of vehicles gone off the road. Also one SUV piled backwards into a rock cliff on the northbound lane, crumpled like an accordion.
I slow down to 40 in those conditions, with or without snow tires, and yet, once again, morons, cretins and suicidal/homicidal fools flew by me like I was standing still, no change at all in their speed, as if it was a bright sunny day with blue skies and dry road surface. Assholes.
This week starts my 18 weeks of 6-8 hours a day, five days a week, of web dev training, and IT security stuff. CSS3, HTML5, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Google Analytics, and WordPress. Nuts and bolts through finished products by the end. Increased firearms practice and training throughout and on the weekends.
Just can’t keep an old dawg down…
Canned bread? I like Westfalian “Pumpernickel”. It is made of wholemeal rye, with a heavy texture (slice it thinly!), dark colour and rather sweet molasses-like taste. I know from personal experience that canned Pumpernickel lasts very well, and certainly for years beyond the “use by” date on the package. It also makes a nice base for appetisers / zakuski / hors d’oeuvres / smoked salmon / caviar, for those more upmarket TEOWAWKI occassions!
I just looked at the LDS church online store. Here, I can buy a 220V version of their bag sealer unit and spare parts therefor, but practically nothing else – no bags, no oxygen absorbers and no food…