Charcoal Filter Charcoal

Our drip coffee maker has a little water filter inside which needs to be changed occasionally. We changed it for the first time in about 6 years this past weekend. I had bought the wrong filter though (the Keurig one looked like it would fit our Cuisinart!!!!) and the new filter needed to be, uh, drained of some of its charcoal in order to fit.

So, here's how these things work: Water goes through meshy fabric, water goes through charcoal, water comes out pure and not full of chlorine and minerals.

I snipped open the old filter too, so we could see what used filter charcoal looks like. These photos are of charcoal grains about the size of sand grains, maybe a little bigger. In these examples, the new charcoal (photos 1 and 2 where the grains are dry) looks exactly the same as the old charcoal (photo 3 where the charcoal is wet) which had been in service for 6 years. I had thought maybe there would be some discernible difference in the look of the charcoals, but I can't see any.

At the bottom of this post is a closeup of the fabric of the container that makes up this charcoal filter. Looks like a synthetic fiber to me, but I don't know for sure. You can see some crud has become trapped in the fibers. So, REMINDER, change your cruddy old water filters. They're gross!

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A Green Spongy Foam Forest

While this looks like an overgrown lichen or bizarre moss, it is actually squishy green packing foam. I yanked a piece from one of the boxes while packing away Christmas ornaments.

I was most intrigued by the prismatic rainbows sparkling in the thinnest membranes of the foam. We've looked at foam before here, and it too was full of rainbows.

I like how this one looks like an alien forest, and am happy to add it to my collection of alien forests,  farms, and seed pods.

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LED Christmas Lights

Here are the best microphotos I can get right now of the light-emitting diode (LED) inside an energy-efficient LED Christmas light. You can see that the electronics inside are different than the glowing tungsten filament in a standard incandescent mini Christmas light, which we've looked at before.

LEDs work differently than incandescent lights, use far less energy, and generate far less heat. To get these photos, I actually had to shoot many frames because of the way LEDs work. They strobe very fast, blinking on and off many times a second. This aspect of their function meant that about half the photos I took of the diode came out completely black.

I also found it interesting that the blue diode appeared to have two attaching wires at the top as opposed to the single lead on the orange diode above. While I don't know why they are different in this way, I do know that there are differences in the ways different colored diodes function. Getting the right light frequency is apparently part art and part science.

Another LED tidbit is that white LED lights are actually not white. Rather, they are made from one of the other LED colors tuned to a very desaturated color within its frequency.

I'm gonna say I'm about 98% right on that bit of cocktail party knowledge. It's knowledge for a geek cocktail party, but a cocktail party nonetheless.

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Christmas Light Filaments

These are the glowing hot filaments inside of an incandescent mini Christmas light. These are typically made of tungsten. I haven't figured out how to get a good shot of one of our LED Christmas lights yet.

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PureVia, Purple Sugar, and Demerara Sugar

We've already seen several sugar substitutes up close. Above is PureVia, a newer one derived from the zero-calorie sweetener rebaudioside A (rebiana). More lumpy crystals that look white at normal size.

Below is a photo of good ol' regular sugar crystals-- purple ones! These are for cookie and cake decorating. The girls used bales of this stuff for decorating our holiday treats.

Further down is a shot of demerera sugar. In this photo, the sugar crystals look like the giant stones of a sunken Atlantis roadway. I am surprised how un-sugar-like they look, rounded corners and all. I wonder if it is due to the natural impurities present in this type of unprocessed sugar.

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Art Installation at String Theory

Here are a few photos of the large (60"x90") pieces I've installed in the offices of New York design boutique, String Theory. Studio owner, John, chose two of my ice bubble images, one of which has been published here at Morning Macro, to hang on his walls.

Thanks to John Vondracek for the photos, he is the owner of these images and I am stealing them for my use. You, however, may not also steal them for your use.

Cranberry Skins

Here are the skins of cranberries Sarah strained from the mix while making cranberry curd for a Thanksgiving tart. I like how they look like cellophane or vinyl. I've done nothing to these photos except minor adjustments for the color of the light from my flash and any variance in their exposure. These skins were shot on a piece of plexiglass with the light coming from below at the side, in order to highlight their translucent character.

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Sweet & Low, Equal, Splenda, and Sugar

Sweet & Low crystals.

I've been complaining about the shortage of sugar at the office, which I use in my coffee and oatmeal in the morning. And I've been forced by this situation to use sugar substitutes.

In my taste tests, I've found the Sweet & Low to be the most awful-tasting of the sugar substitutes. So bad that it gives the other sugar substitutes a bad rap. Above is a photo of the Sweet & Low product, which appears to be composed of irregular gnarly crystals.

Equal nubs.

I found Equal to be the second worst in my taste tests. Actually, the difference in sweetness and aftertaste between Equal and Sweet & Low is quite dramatic, with Equal being the far better of the two. Its sweetness, however, is still lacking in comparison to real sugar, and it does still leave a slightly bitter aftertaste.

Splenda nubby crystals.

Splenda, one of the newer kids in the artificial sweetener world, is the best of the three fakers I tasted. It leaves the least bitter aftertaste and has the sweetest flavor of the three in this taste test. I believe it would still be very easy, however, to discern the difference between Splenda and real sugar in a blind taste test (which I did not conduct).

Raw cane sugar crystals.

Above is some good old raw cane sugar. Yum. The best in my taste test. Sweet and warm and a touch of caramel flavor.

Since I believe a naturally-occurring food product to be better for my health than a manufactured one, I'll be sticking with the classic sugar, thankyouverymuch.

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