Procrastinating the Centauri System

Another elephant in the room is the recent news of the discovery of a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B.  I keep meaning to make a video about it but am continually waylaid by various problems, such as losing my notes, being completely knackered or having my glorious offspring squatting the computer.  Or, in this case, installing Windows 8 and having to negotiate a slight learning gradient:

OK, so Windows 8 - why did i do it?  Why does someone who hates much proprietary software with a passion choose to install a new version of Microsoft Windows two days after its release?  You may well ask, and the main answer is that i like the fact, as i say in the video, that it doesn't use up system resources simply to look flash.  It hasn't got the glass feature that 7 had, it has a nice, low-maintenance Metro thing going on with two-colour icons and it doesn't do the glow thing when the cursor hovers over the buttons.  In other words, it isn't going to make as many people throw out their old devices so they can poison children in China and make them buy new ones which support the war in the Congo because of the tantalum just so they can run the new version of Windows, although of course they might do that anyway.  This is important to me because the main reason i dislike many software products is that they eat up resources and in doing so, exacerbate the current mass extinction.

The other reason is that the design has a visual appeal to it which is kind of classic and plain, which i like, though that's a superficial reason to like it in a way - pretty is not a top priority.  However, my son likes it for that reason and he's studying design, so i bow to his superior judgement.

There's another aspect to all this of course:  rationalisation.  I have in fact now got Windows 8, and having made that decision, my subconscious mind will now come up with all sorts of reasons why it might be a good idea.  This happens a lot, and the questions are:  how often does this kind of thing happen, how can it be avoided and is it even possible or desirable to do so?  I very often think that the mind works this way round:  one does something and later on comes up with reasons why one has done it.  The real reasons?  I don't know.

No regrets

...as my musical namesake once sang, but i think it was a cover.

Anyway, here's the latest vid:

A couple of things about this.  The children are currently taking a rather dim view of home education.  Since we sort of "did it for them", this might be thought to lead to some degree of distress on the part of Liz and myself, but no.  Not for me at least.  This may be because my rationalisation circuits are very advanced, or it may be because i have good reason for being fine about it.

The reason i think i'm fine about it is that there are several prominent examples of adults whose parents focussed on raising them full-time who later went on to say they wished they'd gone to school, but who are successful because they didn't.  One of them had a weekly column in a national newspaper at the age of sixteen and the other wrote a play which was put on in the West End, also while she was in her teens.  The second person is particularly remarkable because when she chose to go to school, quite late on in her adolescence, she was rather disappointed that the teachers weren't interested in what they talked and that the lessons came to an end abruptly with no opportunities to explore further.  My take on this is, well, what did she expect?  She chose to go to an institution where education is structured in that way.

So there's cognitive dissonance there as well.  In spite of the facts that school was not up to scratch in her own judgement, and that she was successful in an artistic and creative sense as well as in a worldly sense, that is, by a wide range of standards, as a result of being home educated, she still wished she'd been to school.   This strikes me as odd.  However, i think there's a healthy and honest explanation for this, which also applies to the children.  They are trying to feel good about their life choices and breaking away from their parents' lifestyle, and as such it's to be expected that they are positive about being at college.  They are also academically successful, engaged in college life and motivated to learn the explicit curriculum.  They were also given the choice at every point to go to school if they chose, and they never did so, unless you count the decision to go to college early.  As such, it makes perfect sense and I have no problem with it.

Here's the other video:

This is about comfrey, a herb banned for internal use in the UK.  I've basically said all i want to in the video, so i'll talk about making it.  This is in my father's front yard.  I felt somewhat self-conscious doing it due to people walking past, and i'd rather there'd been more comfrey cream in the tub when i filmed it.  You might also notice that the first video is slanted.

Just on the subject of YouTube videos, two things have just happened.  One is that i have a new camera, so if i can get the computer to work with it, the quality of the videos should improve from now on - Daniel's advice is that only HD videos get watched much, and since he's an avid YouTube viewer and a digital native, i trust him on that.  The other is that yesterday, someone only one degree of separation from a subscriber to the Other Channel commented on one of my videos.  This is slightly disconcerting, but might resolve the weird audience asymmetry problem between the two, where one is just slapdash and unpublicised but gets hundreds of thousands of views, and the other is meticulously planned and promoted and gets hardly any.