The reason this video is annoying, apart from the fact that it's annoying, is that the file size is unnecessarily large and that there's a glitch in the middle of it. It is of course also deliberately provocative. I've uploaded it because the previous video on religious matters, "The Bible Is Not Pro-Life", was liked by various people (though not in the sense of people coming along and clicking on the thumbs-up sign).
I really do feel that people find two big things off-putting about Christianity. One is that we are perceived as being negative about sex, and the other is that we are seen as antiquated in our attitude to science. This needn't be so, and it's a barrier to evangelism. Of course, it can and has been said that if something is true, we shouldn't just cave in to how the world sees it and accept it for the sake of popularity, which of course is the case, but on the matter of Creationism, the problem arises because people think taking the Bible seriously is the same as taking it literally. In fact, Biblical literalism is a new idea, dating back only a couple of hundred years. I haven't covered that in the video, but might do in future.
By the way, YouTube went mad providing me with relevant tags on this video in a way i'd never seen it do before. I wonder what this means.
The next video will, I hope, be an interview with Holly about her bilingualism or the lack thereof.
One of the brilliant things you can do at home, which is also really colourful, is make your own pH indicator from red cabbage water. Here's a particular use for it which occurred to me the other day:
Making naturally blue soda bread.
The way this works is that so-called "red" cabbage (which i think of as purple) is very high in an anthocyanin. The word "anthocyanin" is from the Greek words anthos - flower, and kyanos - blue. Anthocyanins are in fact not necessarily blue but all sorts of colours. They are also useful in herbal medicine. For instance, the skins of Sambucus nigra (elder) berries are high in anthocyanins which soothe the throat and are useful in coughs and sore throats. They are almost entirely tasteless and occur in a wide range of flowering plants with the exception of the Caryophyllales, a large order containing such plants as beetroot and cacti, which instead contain betalains. These two types of compound are never found in the same species.
Anthocyanins are derived from other compounds called anthocyanidins, whose molecular structure can be drawn like this:
The red numbers show where variations occur in the structure.
The substances occur in petals, leaves and some other parts of the plant, in vacuoles, which are "bubbles" of unorganised liquid surrounded by membrane inside the cells. The acidity or alkalinity of the liquid determines the colour. They are also responsible for the colour of some fruit, such as the redness of ripe apples. They may also stop animals which are attracted to green plant parts, which they then eat, from consuming flower petals, and they also attract pollinating insects to flowers. Their precise shade of purple is complementary to the green of leaves, so they don't block any light which the plant could use for photosynthesis. This also means that the older photosynthetic organisms with which the plants had to complete billions of years ago would have been exactly that shade of purple too, so if we ever get to another planet where that quirk in the history of life didn't happen, we'd be quite likely to find that the plants were all the colour of anthocyanins, though only if the star the planet orbited was the same colour as the Sun.
Elderberries
Another aspect of anthocyanins is that they form the purple dye colour which is the easiest rich colour to use on cloth in natural dyeing. Cotton, for example, dyed with elderberries is initially such a strong colour that it looks completely artificial. Unfortunately, it also fades much faster in sunlight, probably for that reason. They are sadly quite unstable.
As you can see from the video, anthocyanins are also excellent indicators. They turn red in acid and blue-green in alkali. In a strong caustic soda solution, about which i will soon make a video, they become orange. The reaction between the sodium bicarbonate and lime juice, incidentally, produces a sodium citrate, of which there are three different types, and releases carbon dioxide, which occurs when any alkaline carbonate is combined with an acid. Disodium citrate can be used to reduce the discomfort of cystitis and urethritis, and is one of the approximately twenty compounds which can easily be made at home from common organic acids and alkali and alkali earth metal compounds. Compounds which are combinations of acids and bases are known as salts, so the sodium citrates are good examples of organic salts.
The other thing about all this is that the soda bread, which to be honest i perceive as pale turquoise rather than green or blue, is an example of a blue food. Genuinely strong blue foods have long been an obsession of mine because there are so few of them, and the ones which are claimed to be blue or called blue usually aren't, such as blueberries, pasta coloured with squid ink or "blue corn". However, there are a few foods which are genuinely blue, and this is one of them, though being soda bread it's probably partly antinutritional. Another food which would be blue for the same reasons if it existed would be the Finnish salmiakki, which is high in sal ammoniac or ammonium chloride, mixed with liquorice:
Besides that, there are rather few, but they would include cornflower or borage petals and raw bruised Boletus fungi:
Cornflower
Borage - Borago officinalis - i actually use this quite a lot, partly for its fatty acids. There are pyrrolizidine alkaloids in it though, so i'm not incredibly keen, and it tends to go off very quickly which is also annoying.
Boletus - don't know which species, but they turn distinctively blue on cutting. Not all are edible though, either
Anyway, i don't seem to share the general aversion to blue food and was only fearful of the blue soda bread because i was expecting it to taste like a combination of cabbage and bicarbonate of soda, but surprisingly it turned out to taste absolutely fine and was really nice. I think i just got lucky with the quantity of soda though.
Unfortunately, this is the second time i've made something non-vegan for a YouTube video in a week, so i need to make amends in some way.
More splurging today i'm afraid, due to starting this post on the mini-tablet, which rather unhelpfully just saved this locally and i'm now copying. At least that means this had a first draft for once.
Yesterday i briefly mentioned my slight unease at continuing to see myself as part of the home ed community now that the children are both at college, because now i no longer home educate in the commonly understood sense, although of course i still home educate because everyone does and it isn't even home education and so on, blah blah, you know the spiel. One possible danger of course is that i could lose touch, to the extent that i was ever in touch in the first place, with approaches apt to appeal to children. There are, however, a couple of reasons why that might not be so.
One of these is that i may only ever have been in limited touch with the needs of children anyway, and in fact due to my moderate but not total commitment to autonomous education, this could be said to be unnecessary in any case, though a varied life wherein one is able and willing to include children is probably important. Against this might be set the fact that many children with this way of life spend so little time actually at home as opposed to hanging out or sleeping over at other children's homes or doing other stuff with them that their inclusion in the lives of other children and adults might make this less important. We have a village which raises children in this community, both physically and virtually present, and we are not just families doing things in isolation unless it either suits us to do so, we are unlucky or we have been artificially isolated by a hostile social climate as engendered by, for example, local authorities scaring people into hiding or insufficient publicity regarding the reality of this approach to parenting.
One of the failures of school is that it severs the connection between adults and children and segregates them. Part of that severance involves teachers being in loco parentis while being relatively unable to establish a natural rapport with the children, often through no fault of their own. Now, i of course do offer science, maths and other workshops for children who are not mine, and this is potentially questionable. It can lead to problems and is in danger of drifting towards schooling, something against which i strive. However, it differs in various ways from teaching. I am not waylaid by red tape and bureaucracy, by syllabi or curricula or by fear of bullying from the children. However, i see this as being part of the village. I must remain vigilant not to become "teachery", which is a risk in this situation.
One way in which i'm now trying to sidestep this issue is by attempting to participate in education in other ways. To this end, i am embarking on a concerted effort to make a series of educational YouTube videos. This project is still in its early stages and i am still learning how to put good videos together, and it is of course "no substitute for hands on" but they will improve and i also plan to link them, for people who are interested, to topic areas in the National Curriculum - it is a fact that some people do pay attention to that and i don't judge them for that although i had little interest in it myself. For those who are interested, here are the links to the two i've made so far which have not been deleted, both about soap making:
The other way in which i'm pursuing education, of course, is through writing books. I have plans for a number of these. So far, i've published one: 'You Could've Thought Of That', whose children's edition will soon be available from lulu.com (where the adult edition is already available here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-a-ure/you-couldve-thought-of-that-a-compendium-of-ideas-which-havent-been-thought-of-yet/paperback/product-20266026.html). The second one is of course 'Here Be Dragons', a bestiary and atlas which aims both to entertain and inform. Also, of course i plan to continue the science and maths sessions, and if possible start new ones on other subjects such as classical languages and philosophy if the interest is there, for as long as at least one child wants me to do so.
So what am i saying? I suppose that you can all rest assured that i will try to make sure i stay in touch with the needs of children, and that i hope you still see me as part of your village
