Coming through in waves (day 169)

bacterial update:  The kombucha is ready to bottle.  I tested the pH and it's perfect but I found the sweetness still a little too high.  I left some for Steve to try and he loved it.  He had me fill one bottle for him.  He put it in the fridge and I later tasted it.  For some reason it didn't taste as sweet when chilled.  This is a bit puzzling but familiar too -- warm fruit juice also tastes sweeter.  Anyway, I think it'll be a nice compromise to bottle it tomorrow.
I fed some of the extra Kefir grains to my cat, and threw away the rest.  They are just multiplying so quickly.  Steve was starting to compare me to an old lady with 50 cats.  I got ruthless.
My friend Tara pointed me to this podcast about fermenters.  It's a good listen.

Today was a boring chore day.  The most exciting thing I did is try Kefir with Muesli (delicious).  But not wanting to spread the boredom I'll resurrect a piece of research that I find interesting, especially for the Breath I/O project, and perhaps for interface designers too.  

Apparently our awareness can be entrained to a rhythm.  Researchers at the University of Illinois discovered that you could induce awareness of otherwise masked stimulus by entraining with a regular rhythm and letting the masked stimulus fall where a beat would have been (details).  I'm now thinking that breathing rhythms may be something to exploit in this way.  Perhaps having usually undetectable visuals appear at a particular interval related to the breath.  I'm not sure of the limits of this study (they were using very fast rhythmic patterns, to the tune of 12Hz).  It's possible what I'm describing would be beyond the range of the effect they observed.  I'm also wondering about trance music.  Might we become more aware in a rhythmic trance?  Castanada can only be around the corner.

A song for this post.