Double Dutch

Right, let's have another go at this:

Yay.
Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/3E1dT . This is the first of a number of videos planned on the chakras. The Sanskrit word "cakra" means "wheel", and represents a centre of energy. At first this sounds like it has a lot of metaphysical overheads but in fact chakras are potentially natural kinds like species, elements or different kinds of digit such as fingers, thumbs and toes. They can be considered as at least points where the spine changes direction associated with endocrine glands.

A lot can be said about chakras, but i'll keep it very simple. There are seven major chakras, each associated in the West with a colour of the rainbow:
Muladhar - where the kundalini lies sleeping. Associated with the anus and gonads - ovaries or testes. Red. Animal energy.
Svadhisthan - gonads again (testicles or ovaries) - orange. Fertility.
Manipur - pancreas or adrenals. The solar plexus chakra - yellow.
Anahat - thymus. The "heart" chakra.
Vishuddha - thyroids and parathyroids - communication - blue.
Ajna - third eye - pituitary.
Sahasrara - crown chakra - pineal.

There will be a lot more on chakras on here. It's a big subject. For now, though, there's just this.

I realise i could've said a whole lot more about chakras than this and i'm rather embarrassed about the mistakes, particularly the one about the adrenals.  However, this video, i think, is chiefly remarkable for the following two scenes:

In the upper picture, i think my abdomen is more distended than usual, at least i hope it is - it may not be.  In the lower - well, tell me what you think if you're reading this.  Suffice it to say that my abdomen is not my only concern in that picture.

This is a good illustration of why naturism would be in no way sexy.  These two flabby specimens are typical of the kind of thing you'd see, except that my own body is probably in a bit of a state compared to most people's.  It also illustrates body dysmorphia, or at least the great difficulty i have perceiving my own body as i would perceive others', which kind of relates to the subject of the video.

I also did the pregnancy vlog today and demonstrated a technique i use during it.

Nightswimming

Apparently you read my blog, so hello!  I'll tell you how i do the belly thing in a bit.

Anyway, i had virtually abandoned this, but i'm back.  In about two days' time, the Other Channel will reach half a million views, which is nice-ish.  In the meantime, i've uploaded three videos to the pregnancy vlog and also plan to make a slideshow about how it might be achieved.  Also, i've had plenty of new video ideas for the "main" channel, one of which i've just finished off:

Actually, i haven't just finished this off because for some reason blogger went all weird and wouldn't let me post any of my own videos, so it's now been several days.  Here's the doobly-do:


Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/cam7P .  Humans are unusually hairless and fat for apes.  This and a number of other features led Elaine Morgan to hold that in the relatively recent past our ancestors were partly aquatic.  There's a whole list of features which suggest this:

* Like aquatic mammals, we lack hair - seals, whales, elephants, hippos, manatees and dugongs for example.
* We stand upright, like other apes when they enter the water.
* Our bodies are insulated using fat rather than hair, which is also true of aquatic mammals, where it also provides buoyancy.
* We have breasts like dugongs, which are aquatic mammals.
* Unlike other land mammals, we have a diving reflex where our respiration and heart rate slow down when we are underwater.
* We have good breath control, which enables us to speak.
* Our nostrils face downwards, like the Proboscis Monkey which is semi-aquatic.
* We have a hymen which protects the reproductive system from debris - this is a less popular idea than the others.
* We make love face to face, like aquatic mammals, for instance whales.
* Our genome lacks an endogenous retrovirus which entered all other African primate genomes several million years ago, suggesting that we were not in Africa at the time.
* The oldest hominin fossils are found nearest the coast and newer ones gradually move inland.
* The oldest stone tools are made of pebbles rather than the irregular stones more likely to be found away from water.

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (or theory - the endogenous retrovirus is good evidence that we were at least not in Africa when that happened, and we weren't in Asia either so the possibilities are very limited) is not widely accepted among palaeoanthropologists for various reasons.  It is seen as feminist, it is not published widely in peer-reviewed journals and it is seen as an individual explanation for a wide variety of phenomena.  However, taking a Kuhnian and pro-feminist view, this reflects the tendency for established academics to hold on to power with respect to beliefs and accepted practices in the scientific community.  This reflects my experience in academia.

Desmond Morris and David Attenborough are both proponents of this theory and it is difficult to break into publishing in any area, including academia.

In fact, i think i'll add to some of the others.  This:

won't post, apparently.  There's also a great long rambling video on the periodic table which i've divided into two.  See if that posts:

Yep.  Right, now this gets me where i want to be since i want to add stuff which is new, namely on the Etruscan language.  The claim that Etruscan used "el-em-en" to mean "letter" as in letter of the alphabet, as it was LMN, like ABC, seems to have no historical basis at all.  There was at some point an idea that the Etruscan alphabet split down the middle.  In fact, it runs as follows:

This would split the Etruscan LMN at N.  Incidentally, the English alphabet, which is descended from the Etruscan, is divided into three groups of eight, so it's not entirely unfeasible, but it seems not to be true.

Etruscan fascinates me.  It's close to being a linguistic isolate like Basque is.  However, it now turns out that it was related to Lemnian, spoken on an island near Asia Minor, and Raetic, spoken in an area which is now part of Switzerland.  All of these may be related to Minoan as well.  Nonetheless, it is clearly unrelated to Indo-European languages and may not even be Nostratic (if Nostratic even exists).

On to today's callouts, at long last, and once again it can't be posted.  Suffice it to say, then, that i've made a callout video for danlacuna, jeremyhansen100, skateman70 and Tasarla Skaara.

4'33"

So i'm sitting here waiting for the latest video to upload, typing this because i can't post a link yet, and thinking, why do i bother with this blog?  I have a diary which is better because i don't have to think about what i want to keep private, and i know this isn't read, so why am i keeping it?  I suppose it's partly because i think it could become more popular if, for example, i put resources on here or added information in other ways, but the thing is, nobody would read it even then.

Actually, one thing which really annoys me is this.  I put very little effort into this blog, partly because i know people don't read it.  There are, though, many excellent blogs out there which are a lot more worthwhile and into which people do put a lot of effort.  Those are not the popular ones.  Well, they can be, but there's a lot of unfairness because i see a whole load of old rope put up by bloggers all the time which is basically dead simple stuff which either tells people how to do what i think everyone knows what to do or says very little that's of any value, and it gets read.  I don't actually care very much whether anyone reads this and probably can't manoeuvre it into a position where it will be, and i accept that it's a load of blah which nobody cares about, including me, but even from my fortress of total apathy i can feel the sting of the injustice.  I realise one issue is that everyone's shouting very loudly and of all people i recognise the value of prostituting oneself, but surely people can't want to read yet another entry about how to strike a match, cut your fingernails or the cyber-equivalent.  I mean, i can say this because i lack emotional investment in this, having a crappy blog i put no effort into and don't care about, but what about someone like Vanilla Rose?  I would be pretty peed off if i was her right now.  This is obviously another example of a good blog but then i'm obviously going to be biassed about that.

I'm not going to link to any crap blogs but oh dear oh dear.  What is wrong with people?

OK, is my video ready yet?

Well, it is, but apparently the thumbnail isn't.  Anyway:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/coaQM .  Following on from my previous video, 'Creationism Is Blasphemous', i wanted to address a few issues which arose from it, such as the claim that Darwinism leads to totalitarianism as with the Nazis and Stalin.  Adolf Hitler used whatever he thought would lead him to power, including the idea of white supremacy and therefore a ladder of evolution like the great chain of being, and organised religion, i.e. the Church, though to a lesser extent than Fascism.  Stalinism is another ideology linked with Darwinism, as is Social Darwinism, but in that case Stalinism uses Marxist rhetoric rather than being a continuation of rationalism, which is what Marxism could fairly claim to be, and in the Soviet Union Lamarck and Lysenko were more popular than Darwin for ideological reasons.

The E and J documents have different accounts of the Creation, so we can fairly conclude that, unlike many other parts of the collection of disparate texts which comprise the Bible, that is not meant to be taken literally.  Scripture is remarkably sparse in certain areas - for instance, it rarely refers to colour or attempts to describe how things are done.  This is because it's not a practical manual, but a means employed by God to draw us closer to him.  Judaism and Roman Catholicism both take the Bible very seriously but reject creationism.  Even Orthodox Jews also object to the inclusion of intelligent design in state school curricula because they see it as an erosion of the distinction between church and state.

A major concern i have with this, though, is the barrier it presents to evangelism.  If people are expected to accept Christianity with creationism or not at all, they will in all probability conclude that Christianity is irrational and those people will not benefit from God's love.  Even if you honestly believe creationism is true, forcing people to accept it as a sine qua non of the Christian faith goes against what Paul said about not eating meat sacrificed to idols - it can cause one's brother to stumble in faith.  We definitely shouldn't be doing that.

Yeah i know, a bit similar to 'Creationism Is Blasphemous' and a bit God-bothery, but i wanted to respond to some criticisms.

Star Wars

OK, stupid pun time of course:

Star Wars is a registered trademark and copyright belongs to Lucasfilm.  No infringement intended.  Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/Mfc6V .  May The IVth Be With You.  Star Wars is important to me mainly because it provoked me into defining science fiction as "fiction whose plot depends non-trivially upon the setting".  Star Wars expresses universals and timeless truths in a space opera, pulp-like context, partly illustrating that the archetypes and mythology it expresses can be transposed to any setting.  In terms of the story, it could equally well be set in mediaeval times, in Ancient Greece or a host of other situations.  This gives rise to the paradox that in a sense, that makes the plot of Star Wars depend on the setting, which is why i inserted the phrase "non-trivially".

This is a rather surprising definition of SF, i realise, as it doesn't refer to technology, science, the future, space, aliens or anything like that.  Star Wars is set "a long time ago in a galaxy far away", which i understand but that also frustrates me.  I dislike the sound in space, humanoid aliens, one-climate planets and faster-than-light aspects of Star Wars.  However, since it is pulp rather than SF, that makes it rather like Doctor Who in a way, which i do like.  Dr Who is a lot like Star Wars in that respect.

"You" may note various things about this video.  The thumbnail is rubbish and the doobley-do is short.  The reason for this is that i did it at 6:30 am.   It gave me a little cause for concern due to the love many people have for the series, particularly IV-VI.

I'm going to be frank here.  At the time, 'Star Wars' felt like the bane of my life.  I was seriously unimpressed, mainly due to my own devotion to hard SF (although i did also like Doctor Who, which is in a category of its own).  Asimov and Le Guin were both very critical of it.  My feeling now is that it's rather unreconstructed and good as a film, but as i have now harped on about on and off for three dozen years, it is not science fiction (and nor is Who, but in that case it doesn't detract from its quality).  The problem with Star Wars apart from that is of course that since it attempts to express mythic stuff, it's rather old-fashioned, even for the time it was written.  Having said that, it has a few saving graces.  I was too harsh about the single-climate planets for a start.  Single-climate planets do exist, for instance Venus and Jupiter.  Even Earth may have had a single climate at various times in the past.  So that's OK.  I haven't mentioned the droids either of course, and in fact i seriously feel there is no problem with the possibility of robots behaving like humans, although i can't understand the point of Artoo units because they surely don't need to communicate with a series of beeps, do they?  The FTL business is a common trope in science fiction which makes the stories possible, and as i may eventually get round to doing, there are a couple of ways this might happen, notably the rather disconcerting Alcubierre Drive:

Hmm.  High dubium.  Roll on the Yates-Leason device.

At the time, androids got on my wick a lot more than now, although R2s are not android so that's OK.  Sorry to jump about.

However, leaving aside the values there are two things which really bug me a lot, and they're connected.  Firstly, there's no way of placing the setting historically except that it is kind of in the past.  That's actually quite neat as such and of course 'Consider Phlebas' is in the past too and i regard that as neat, even though he says the reason for that is poignancy.  However, what bothers me about this is that it closes off aspiration and optimism for the future and makes it about something else.  We "know" (of course we know anyway, but that's another thing) that no matter what happens, Star Wars is not in our future.  It's in someone else's.  This brings up the second problem - humanoid aliens.  Even the "humans" in Star Wars are not in fact human at all - it's just convergent evolution.  The other humanoid species are as improbable, of course, unless convergent evolution makes a very large number of species humanoid.  Another saving grace here is that not all of them are humanoid after all.

On reflection, i seem to cut the Culture a lot more slack than the Empire.  I think this is to do with politics, but not entirely, particularly considering that at the time i was monarchist and "default Tory", and still disliked Star Wars.  Not sure what to make of that.  So, when i came across 'A Gift From The Culture' in Interzone almost a cycle later, i was blown away by the quality of the writing, the emotional realism, characterisation and most of all the political milieu implied.  So i'm afraid it's not the politics of Star Wars that bothers me but the quality.  I realise it's a difficult comparison because one's a film with no original written version which depends substantially on visuals and the other's an awesome written short story by Iain M Banks which is largely character-based.  My feelings about Wrobik were that he's a perverse idiot who doesn't know how good he's got it, rather similar to my feelings a couple of years later, despite my rejection of Stalinism, that the people of the DDR actually threw away their constitutional rights to food, clothes and shelter in favour of consumerism.  I didn't live there though, did i?  Anyway, the point is, that huge constellation of sympathetic feelings about 'A Gift From The Culture' is a testament to the giant of a man that is Menzies, and i don't feel like that about anyone else i don't know personally.  George Lucas, by contrast, is just warmed over Flash Gordon.  But then i believe in low-budget SF and also this.

The Beatles And The Stones

I did say i was going to put loads of extra information on here but as it happens i'm completely knackered.  I should probably explain stuff about this video:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/e2NAI . Blog entry with more info soon. Kidney stones are usually made of uric acid, calcium oxalate or calcium phosphate, also known as apatite, but there are also several genetic factors which end up producing unusual kidney stones such as cystinuria and another one which can even produce caffeine or other xanthine stones. If you think you might have them, please go to see a doctor or other healthcare professional. They're more painful than childbirth, according to a friend i know who has experienced both.

The risk factors include dehydration, alkaline or acid urine, infection, tumours, stasis, immobility, parathyroid dysfunction and trauma to the kidneys. If urine becomes more alkaline than it should be, alkaline stones can begin to form, i.e. calcium phosphate or apatite calculi; if more acidic, uric acid (urate) or oxalate may form. Oxalate stones can result from excess vitamin C, an inborn metabolic defect or ethylene glycol (antifreeze) poisoning (whose antidote is ethanol, or ordinary alcohol - however, there are many other problems this would be the least of your worries if you drank antifreeze). Uric acid calculi can form as a result of the breakdown of large amounts of purines, one of the classes of compound found in DNA and RNA, and uric acid itself is also responsible for gout. Such deposits can be due to diet but are sometimes also linked to leukaemia and some other serious illnesses. Please don't jump to conclusions - see someone if you're worried. Ileostomy can also cause urate kidney stones.

Alkaline stones - calcium phosphate - can result from infection, as bacteria often make urine more alkaline. This can result either from an ascending infection from the bladder or from a systemic infection such as . Alternatively, they may form due to excess release of phosphate or calcium into the urine by mineral loss from bones during immobility or as a result of hyperparathyroidism. Excess vitamin D can also cause them.

Kidney stones can sometimes form into "staghorn calculi", where a stone fills up the whole space inside the kidney, leading to purulence, hydronephrosis and sometimes metaplasia, where the specialised epithelium which reabsorbs water changes to a less specialised form and more urine is excreted. In some ways, it makes more sense to think of the kidneys as organs for reabsorbing urine rather than excreting it. This leads to excessive urination and permanently watery urine, meaning that the person suffering from this needs to drink a lot. Staghorn calculi (and others) can be broken down by lithotripsy, where ultrasound is used to break them up. Madder - Isatis tinctoria - and parsley piert are two of several herbal remedies which can be used to break them down. Other solutions include changing the pH of the urine to the opposite required for their formation and drinking lots of water.

Cystinuria is a genetic condition which reflects the fact that most of our body fluids constantly pass through our kidneys. Some people can't reabsorb all of the amino acids, resulting in cystine and other amino acids crystallising within the kidneys. This also happens sometimes with xanthine and caffeine, among other substances, depending on the precise metabolic issue.

An important process in this respect is stasis. If urine stands still in the renal system for whatever reason, for instance obstruction, it can begin to crystallise. This reflects the general principle that health depends crucially on flow.

 OK, the reason this is so unembellished is that i basically had no time whatever today and had to make three videos.  I was going to insert a load of diagrams but haven't.  However, i can do this:

which is the T-shirt design for invisible illnesses such as cystinuria.

Tomorrow's video will be on why reptiles don't exist.

The difficulty today, apart from lack of time, was the necessity of making the pregnancy vlog and also a third, very long video for the Other Channel, which will receive much attention before it's ready.  I was also quite tense when i made the pregnancy vlog, which caused problems.  I made the kidney stone video while "pregnant" too, as may be apparent.

School's Out Forever

Just typing that sends shivers down my spine.  Just imagine if it were true. Just imagine if we finally reached the stage of social evolution when schools no longer existed.  Wouldn't that be incredible?

Leaving that aside:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/t0GQ1 .  We all probably know our own children better than anyone else knows them, and our families have individual needs and values.  When we bring up our own children, we may come to believe that the style and content of education (parenting?) which works well for us will also work well for the majority of other people, but we may well be wrong.  This makes it very easy to develop dogmas about structure, autonomy or content - we may be into classical, technical, liberal arts, Steiner (anthroposophy), Montessori, child-centred or other approaches to content or style, and that should be dictated by our own beliefs as well as the character of the children.  It can even be that, in theory, a child is best off at school, though i am convinced that this is extremely rare.  Nonetheless my mind needs to be open to that possibility.

I was startled and fascinated to discover that one of our children seemed to lack curiosity completely.  Prior to that i wouldn't have believed that that was at all possible - that it was part of what makes us human and that it never happened.  If i'd encountered that in a child with different parents, i would've concluded, quite intolerantly and prejudicedly, that something had happened to crush that child's natural curiosity.  However, i can't for the life of me see that that was what happened with our daughter, though that could be down to self-deception.  Her needs were therefore very different than our son's.

We should listen to each other and recognise that because every child and family is unique, simply because something works for us doesn't mean it'll work for someone else, and that although i am probably most sympathetic to the efficacy of autonomous education, that won't work for everybody, and if we fail to tolerate that, we're being somewhat like people who are opposed to home ed entirely.

I've now established that nobody reads these.  This was my intention of course, but it makes me wonder what i should do instead.

Tomorrow should include a video for the Other Channel, though i won't upload it immediately, a pregnancy vlog (already planned, going to try to get to 107 cm - ouch!) and a video on kidney stones (also ouch, and more so!)

Loving The Alien

The Fermi Paradox:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/9ovK1 .  There are sextillions of stars in the Universe, quadrillions of which are like the Sun and around many of these orbit Earth-like planets.  Given all that, where the heck are all the aliens?  This thought is called the Fermi Paradox, first voiced by the physicist Enrico Fermi over half a century ago.  A number of answers have been given:

1. There is something like Star Trek's "Prime Directive" in force (Star Trek and the Prime Directive are copyright Paramount - no infringement intended).  This is the idea of an ethic preventing interference with our civilisation.  This is a somewhat elaborate idea which follows from a lot more assumptions than the others.

2. There are no aliens and we are alone in the Universe, possibly because Earth-like planets are rare.  I was planning to say a lot more about this, so i'll probably do a separate video on this.  The idea is basically that the conditions which enabled a technological species to evolve here are very rare for carious reasons.  This is known as the Rare Earth Hypothesis.

3. They are here, but in disguise.  That is, it's possible that aliens visit this planet all the time but given that their technology is capable of travelling interstellar distances, it is also clearly going to be capable of making itself invisible, or alternatively, that there are simulacra of human beings among us.  In fact, it has occasionally been suggested that I am an alien.  Heaven forfend!  UFOs ("flying saucers") are problematic for this reason, and therefore i believe most of them are either misidentifications of well-known phenomena or secret military aircraft.  If they wanted to be seen, they would be.

4. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Each civilisation notices the suspicious silence of the skies and acts accordingly out of caution.

5 (Am i keeping in step with the video numbers here?).  Civilisations are short-lived because they do something to wipe themselves out, like steer an asteroid into orbit and accidentally crash it into their planet, build technological systems so complex that they can't control them, wage nuclear war, suffer from the Grey Goo Scenario and so on.  Therefore we don't have long to spot them and will very shortly go the way of the dinosaurs ourselves.

6. They don't care, either because they're not like us, they're enlightened spiritually and have no interest in such worldly things or they spend all their time on an extraterrestrial equivalent of Facebook in cyberspace.

7. We're in a nature reserve and are being observed by aliens.  This is a kind of combination of (1) and (2).

8. We've not been looking long enough or our technology is incompatible with their signals.

9. It's too expensive to travel to other star systems - maybe we could hitch-hike?

Ten.  Sorry, i can't remember.  Clearly i'm going to have to come back to this.

All images licenced under Creative Commons version 3.0, sources Celestia, Wikipedia, Wikimedia and own work.

I forgot to mention the most important thing here, but i'll include it later on another one.

OK, so yesterday's experiment seemed to show that nobody reads this blog.  This is of course my intention.  The question is, what do i do now?  Should i try to put things on it that people will read?  Should it just become an adjunct to my internal musings?  The thing is, it could be made useful, but the problem with it becoming useful is that if it's not going to be read, which was of course deliberate, nobody will read any of the useful stuff either.  I should probably look at analytics and work out what appeals.

OK.  For some reason, 'Eye In The Sky' had five dozen and ten views.  This is the fifth most popular blog entry on here.  I think it's got traffic from YouTube.  One thing i never do with this blog is link to it in the descriptions on YT.  Sometimes i think i should.  However, they tend to repeat the description and do little else, so i would feel a bit shamefaced about that.  Did i link from the video on that one?

I don't know.  Right now i feel i would like people to read this occasionally but why invest any emotion in it?

Should i just give up on this or try to add value to the videos with it?  Or maybe split it off from the videos entirely?

You know, it would really help me if occasionally someone commented.  Right now i'm just floating in a void with this place.  What would you like to see on it?